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Thank You, Valve

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Re: Thank You, Valve

#181

Post by txdv »

I think they started using their proton layer for dota2. I am lately experiencing lags during their heavy animations when presenting Arcana and special game modes, other than that it works fine. I have a lot of games since I buy 3 year old games for 5 dollars and most of them work fine. The newest games with special anti cheat systems probably do not work.

But this is a huge step. They are ahead of the competition. If the competition wants to offer something better than Steam they now need to invest heavily in linux support which increases the costs of development significantly.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#182

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

thrower123 wrote: post #37

I still think it's a little odd that there is so much celebration of Linux as a semi-viable game platform, when no one makes native Linux ports anymore; they just target Windows, and then Proton provides a Windows API compatability layer.

Game (and other software) developers like to target stable APIs. Outside of the kernel, Linux has historically been incredibly unstable and fragmented. Vale shipped their own runtime libraries with Steam just to give native Linux game developers something consistent to target. If the Linux Desktop community solved that problem there might be more reason to make native ports.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#183

Post by deadbunny »

realusername wrote: post #137
gambiting wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. As someone who plays online shooters only casually once or twice a week, nothing sucks more than having a full session in Apex ruined by an obvious cheater. The fact that I don't spend 8 hours a day doing this makes it far worse for me, the time for gaming is very limited when you have a small child and having it ruined because of some script kiddies is incredibly demoralizing. Let me put it this way - I'…

A kernel anti-cheat isn't going to fix that, by far the best servers are community moderated and usually cheats aren't really complicated.

The problem is that community servers are a thing of the past for most games.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#184

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

R0flcopt3r wrote: post #177
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there are a lot of reasons not to use Linux still, just because Valve solved a few of them doesn't make any of the others illegitimate. I mean, christ, the desktop user experience is still pretty goddamned terrible, and the only reason I'm personally considering switching in the near future is that Microsoft is working hard to make Windows even worse.

The desktop user experience suck on all platforms. Macos is ridden with bugs and inflexibility, Windows is just confusing to me, and Linux depends on which of the hundreds of experiences you pick. I game on Windows, work on Mac. Used fedora daily through uni and before.

I don't disagree, especially nowadays, but for decades Windows and MacOS have had clearly superior desktop experiences. That's only changed relatively recently and it had a lot less to do with improvements on the Linux side than it did with the commercial OSs getting much worse.

I use Fedora Silverblue on two laptops right now. The experience is hardly what I would call "good"[0] and yet it's still the most reasonable I've had with Linux in a long time.

[0] GNOME sucks, Kinoite has a lot of issues so kinda stuck with GNOME. rpm-ostree can't handle groups and fails when given large numbers of packages to install. Restricted codecs and ffmpeg need to be installed using rpm-ostree. Stuff like that.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#185

Post by antoinealb »

charcircuit wrote: post #155
scrollaway wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect, there’s lots of cheats that are completely seamless and just improve your performance without being a completely binary “perfect headshot” vs “always miss” or something. I guess your last encounter with aimbots was in the early 00s…

If other players can't tell someone is cheating then it's not actually a problem since everyone will feel the game was fair.

In competitive gaming, having an actually fair game matters more than having a fair feeling game.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#186

Post by 0xedd »

rafale wrote: post #102
busterarm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The serious cheats in competitive games these days don't rely on hacking the game anymore. They use a separate computer connected taking your HDMI out as an input and then controls your mouse and keyboard inputs. They use ML models and OpenCV. You watch the second computer's monitor and it draws huge boxes around things you shoot and it assists your aim. It doesn't even have to be a PC game, you can do the same with…

The setup makes it impractical. You would need a very powerful computer to run it in real time. And it won't tell you about what u can't see. You would need to do the same for audio and game mechanics. Check what a top player can do: https://youtu.be/8Qf5Xlty1Cg I doubt an AI will be anywhere close in the next 10 years.

Too much ego, friend. You should've used the past tense.

Skill tunable AI, developed by a private poorly funded group, that plays the game for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=revk5r5vqxA

AlphaStar, developed by a large corp, mopping the floor with Battle.Net's Starcraft 2 players https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1zhmGPmAAM

OpenAI, developed by a large corp, beats top DotA2 team https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfb6aEUMC04

On one hand, it's exciting tech [old] news. On the other, people who play competitive games must hope for a solution against abuse. The rest of us must hope it isn't an invasive solution such as, what effectively is, kernel malware.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#187

Post by anamexis »

dagw wrote: post #164
charcircuit wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to trust the client to an extent. How can a server tell if a player clicked their mouse or if a triggerbot did?

The officially approved mouse timestamps and signs the click using a hardware embedded cryptographic key (only slightly joking).

That's when you just rig up a solenoid to click the real mouse :P

Re: Thank You, Valve

#189

Post by nulld3v »

sbarre wrote: post #74
dagw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I played competitive video games seriously I would absolutely want them to take cheating seriously and take any necessary measure to stop it. At the same time I think they should also make the most serious kernel/driver level anti-cheat software optional. If you don't to want to install it you can still play the game, just not on any of the 'pro' servers. Think of it a bit like doping tests in sports. As long as y…

The problem with this logic is that most multiplayer games have post-sale economies with cosmetics and other add-ons, and I would guess that most of those sales comes from casual players. So while anti-cheat helps protect the pro/serious players (who in some ways are community/marketing leaders in this world of Twitch and YouTube), it also creates a fair environment for all the casual and aspiring players who keep sp…

Then simply have the anti-cheat option be the default option? Most casual players will not bother opting out.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#190

Post by breakfastduck »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #135
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average cheater is most certainly not investing in thousands of dollars of hardware to run intense AI models on a second high power machine. These are mostly theoretical hacks. The average cheater is paying $10-50 for cheat software. You may not like the anti-cheat software, but it works against the most common cheats. I think they could have an opt-out league that doesn’t require anti-cheat but remains separate.…

You don't need thousands of dollars of hardware. You need one (1) Raspberry Pi 4, plus an HDMI capture card and a Raspberry Pi Zero to act as fake mouse/keyboard. You can totally do that for $50. (Probably less if you use an Arduino clone instead of a Raspberry Pi Zero.) Heuristic software works against the most common cheats. Standard anti-piracy tricks work against the most common cheats. Kernel-level anticheat is…

So you're arguing that all these attempts greatly raise the skill ceiling / investment cost to cheat.

Sounds like it works, then.

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