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With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

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Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#351

Post by 0xy »

mhh__ wrote: post #303
mdoms wrote: post #200

I only play two games at the moment and neither of them are viable on Linux. Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is a non-starter even with Proton. Assetto Corsa Competizione will work, but not with my Thrustmaster wheel. Both of these are deal breakers on their own, but the real deal breaker is the uncertainty that comes with running Linux as a gamer. For example Cyberpunk 2077 comes out this week. Will it work? I have…

Both of the latest COD games have absolutely enormous stability issues on their supported platforms. Infinity Ward (and possibly Treyarch to a lesser extent) seem to be only just in control of their games - rampant size on disk, instability, etc. When the game works it's rather good, but it really seems like COD's time out of the spotlight hasn't kept its developers sharp. Cyberpunk is DRM free so it should be OK on…

BOCW was in development hell and the developer was switched very last minute (with only a year until release IIRC).

Of course it was going to be a mess. They had to recycle and hack-and-slash assets to pull something together to meet the ambitious release date.

According to rumor, Sledgehammer Games was essentially unable to produce the game and has been demoted to a second tier support studio as a result.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#352

Post by throw_a_say »

shuringai wrote: post #337
aaomidi wrote: post #22

Another Linux gamer. I seriously don't miss windows anymore. At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you the second they figure out you're playing on linux. This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2. I really wish companies stopped their draconian policies about Linux gaming. Or at the very least just…

While I do share your frustration on linux gaming I thought to give sound to the opposing side who simply had this coming oit of a risk analysis. TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into t…

I don't even know where the start with this.

First off, undocumented binaries, and inspecting kernel drivers from user-space is absolutely no barrier to RE/Cracking/Cheating on any platform. I'm pretty sure 50%+ of the people on this site can put arbitrary hooks on the windows kernel, given some motivation, and importantly, when they actually control the hardware they own.

From what I know (not an expert) the state of the art in DRM for games is Denuvo which uses undocumented idiosyncratic CPU instructions, that the activation server has a database of and sprinkles some magic patch to activate the game for that CPU, ie, nothing to do with OS. Anything else AAA is cracked pretty much immediately.

Whatever about the technical details, we can do risk analysis on a lot of things. We can do risk analysis on whether a kid is likely to commit serious violence to other people later in life and lock them up, or otherwise exclude them from society in anticipation of that, but we don't.

Some things are important, some things are not. Personally I rate open computing hardware a lot higher than some game company's 2% profit, and imo any company employing the tactics described in the GP should be rightly called out on it, and they should just make better solutions to the (very small) problem of people cheating in online games.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#353

Post by kortilla »

invokestatic wrote: post #256
google234123 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this address the fact that windows has 100s of badly written drivers that allow r/w to kernel? This seems to only stop the most advance cheats that actually execute at or before boot.

Secure boot addresses other specific security concerns that are unrelated to exploitable drivers. For instance, it eliminates a whole class of PatchGuard bypasses.

Sorry to derail, but how often does anti-cheat development involve buying access to a cheat just for the purpose of reverse engineering it? Is that pretty much most of the time or is there enough evidence collected from logs to be able to infer what was happening?

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#354

Post by boogies »

rospaya wrote: post #298
techelite wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit skeptical of all the positivity here. Heck if I can't edit mouse acceleration with ease, how hard is it going to be to watch Netflix? Do I need to downgrade chromium to 30.4 just to install some plugin incompatible with the v32 chromium? These are real issues that you'd expect Ubuntu to have working from defaults. I'm not asking for every porn website to work, but all FAANG websites to work.

This line is getting really boring, especially on HN, which should be at least a bit more tech savvy than the regular forum. I got a laptop. Removed it from the box. Installed Ubuntu, tweaked the dock drivers a bit. Everything works as it would on a Windows machine and no I don't need to downgrade Chrome to have Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, HBO or whatever work. Zero, zero compatibility issues and I can't be the only…

> Everything works as it would on a Windows machine

A fresh install came with ads, tracking, and forced updates?

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#355

Post by kortilla »

eptcyka wrote: post #300
Spivak wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. I get the sentiment here but we're specifically talking about a mechanism specifically designed to detect other software that is used for cheating. The alternative is a world where games will only run on machines with SecureBoot, a signed kernel with kernel security on, and only whitelisted signed modules. There isn't a good solution for h…

Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.

> Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing.

So you have two choices here. You either ban the best players or the aim bots just behave with a success rate close to the best players.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#356

Post by chc »

eptcyka wrote: post #300
Spivak wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. I get the sentiment here but we're specifically talking about a mechanism specifically designed to detect other software that is used for cheating. The alternative is a world where games will only run on machines with SecureBoot, a signed kernel with kernel security on, and only whitelisted signed modules. There isn't a good solution for h…

Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.

Game companies do take a similar approach to what you're describing, but still feel the need to run anticheat. If you ban aimbots based purely on statistics, you'll just encourage cheat developers to change the statistical properties of their aimbots. Cheats are a fairly big business — even detecting them with anticheat software in ring 0 doesn't seem to be a surefire guard against cheating.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#357

Post by 495636483 »

z3t4 wrote: post #340
shuringai wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do share your frustration on linux gaming I thought to give sound to the opposing side who simply had this coming oit of a risk analysis. TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into t…

In a competitive game don't let clients dictate what the server does. Although I understand there is a performance issue. But clients should not be trusted.

Would that work for lag? I assume there is some predictive aspects to a fluent gameplay these days. Also for the server to decide which e.g. player someone can see or not, seems quite intense.

This seems inadequate to prevent aim assistance too.

I mean it's a moot point anyway, since it's probably not too long until bots can play all games better, without additional information or help.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#359

Post by [deleted] »

eptcyka wrote: post #300
Spivak wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. I get the sentiment here but we're specifically talking about a mechanism specifically designed to detect other software that is used for cheating. The alternative is a world where games will only run on machines with SecureBoot, a signed kernel with kernel security on, and only whitelisted signed modules. There isn't a good solution for h…

Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.

[deleted]

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#360

Post by moondev »

tarruda wrote: post #309

Something else that works super nice for gaming on Linux: GPU passthrough (gaming on a VM that has direct access to the GPU). I've been doing this since 2017. Back then I had built my first desktop computer powered by ryzen 1700 + 2 GPUs. Creating this setup had some challenges, but after the initial hurdle everything has been working perfectly (I imagine things must be easier nowadays). Created a windows 10 VM, assi…

Do you run two gpus? Or can you handoff to the VM when it boots and back when you shut down? Mind sharing your libvirt xml or qemu script? I've been meaning to give this a try!
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