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Thank You, Valve

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Re: Thank You, Valve

#381

Post by enragedcacti »

dijit wrote: post #371
steadyready wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of cheat development and always read the related forums. Let me tell you that kernel anti-cheats are the funniest and ugliest pieces of software out there. Almost ALL exhibit rootkit behaviour. Capture all OS events, dig through system and user directories, list all processes, fetch DNS and browser histories, block certain system calls, and more just to name a few. But hey! Their software (including drive…

As a person in the industry: Everything this person is saying is true. We need a real solution to this honestly, it’s not enough to just kick up a fuss about game devs including anti-cheat and ever-more-invasive anti-cheat, but actually providing solutions people can use. The economic incentives do not exist on consoles to cheat, so publishers are convinced that control of the platform is the problem.

As someone in the industry, would you mind weighing in on Vanguard, the kernel level anti-cheat used for Valorant?

On release they made a big deal about how small the kernel level portion is and how most of the complexity of the anti-cheat was still in user space. I'd be interested to hear how true that is and if that makes much of a difference in your mind how trustworthy it is.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#382

Post by howinteresting »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #294
Karsteski wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? Would you prefer the Linux ecosystem to remain less user-friendly, to maintain whatever principles you have in mind? Also, what principles are you referring to?

I think the biggest one is this: "Each Program Does One Thing Well." followed by: "Store Data in Flat Text Files." I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned. I enjoy PopOS and I still have Vietnam flashback to my very first linux install way back when ( I installed it next to Win95 and results were not fun since it was my dad's PC ), but…

It isn't clear to me why either of those should be dogmatically stuck to. They're useful for a certain class of software, and actively harmful to others. For games, which are meant to be an integrated experience, they're mostly non-sequiturs.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#383

Post by wizzwizz4 »

breakfastduck wrote: post #190
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Did you do it?”

“Yes.”

“What did it cost?”

Re: Thank You, Valve

#384

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ikurei wrote: post #368
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…

And aren't the existing anti-cheat technologies the reason that cheats take that form? You see no cheap aimbots and conclude the anti-cheat is not relevant anymore. May be the right conclusion is that they're working. Not saying this justifies the kernel drivers. I don't trust my gaming computer precisely for this reason. I wonder if some form of containerization/virtual machine could make it possible to both allow f…

> I wonder if some form of containerization/virtual machine could make it possible to both allow for this kind of kernel-level anti-cheat without exposing my whole system to untrusted code.

No. Because then you could write an aim-bot that runs in the host machine…

Re: Thank You, Valve

#385

Post by stale2002 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #109
noirbot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is implying they did it for any other reason. Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. Yes, they're clearly doing this to help the Steam Deck and other projects. I'm sure that will make them money and I'm sure someone at the company will do something with that money that people object to. That's just the nature of living in anything beyon…

>Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. That's 100% the reaction here every time Microsoft launches something benefiting devs and consumers. Everything is scrutinized with skepticism. Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards? How do you think Valve would be towards consumers if they were to become a monopoly in…

> Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards?

The issue is that you aren't pointing to anything actually wrong with what they are doing, you are just vague saying "They are doing it for the money", and implying that there is some bad thing that is happening, without saying what the bad thing is.

If Valve is doing some bad, then say so. But just because they are a for-profit company, it does not mean that every good thing they do, has some hidden negative side-effect that is unnoticed.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#386

Post by dijit »

foxfluff wrote: post #377
dijit wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise. Cheaters also do things like buy CD codes/stolen accounts which are sold cheaply on various websites. It also doesn’t help when there…

> We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise. So you didn't check the demo corresponding to the reporter's account and timestamp? Why not? Why don't you have IDs in logs? My exp…

I understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive.

Logs are great, but people are not great at reporting cheaters. Some resort to recording their screen or cheaters bypass the “report” button by acting in a way that prevents that button from popping up.

We must have lost thousands of man hours on people falsely hitting the report button when someone was being better than them. Everything in it’s time.

Community moderation is a very comforting idea, but the reality is actually not conducive to a good online experience except for a very small minority; the kinds of problems that crop up are obviously exclusion but also go into the area of power abusing operators.

I know you’re going to say “go to another server” but honestly, that’s naive. Oper abuse is even more deeply unpleasant than cheating. It is enough to put you off a game entirely.

So the gatekeeping, politics aspect are obviously not good but what is also true is that there is a large contingent of people who desire good matchmaking, good matchmaking depends heavily on:

A) regionality

B) a large population to pull from

C) consistency of the platform and administration.

If you get into a “random” game and someone cheats, that’s no different than if you joined a “random” game and the admin of the server did something within their power.

Having a small population for a game like apex legends means that the outcome is nearly always the same.

Having low regionality of hosted servers means people in South America have extremely bad experiences; as severs there are expensive and finding a population to fund it amongst themselves is difficult.

Also, obviously, a 40 core 256G windows PC costs in the region of €300/mo (not including the windows server license). Given people are already very cost conscious when it comes to games; getting people to shell out the price of a game each every month to run a server seems unlikely.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#388

Post by dijit »

enragedcacti wrote: post #381
dijit wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person in the industry: Everything this person is saying is true. We need a real solution to this honestly, it’s not enough to just kick up a fuss about game devs including anti-cheat and ever-more-invasive anti-cheat, but actually providing solutions people can use. The economic incentives do not exist on consoles to cheat, so publishers are convinced that control of the platform is the problem.

As someone in the industry, would you mind weighing in on Vanguard, the kernel level anti-cheat used for Valorant? On release they made a big deal about how small the kernel level portion is and how most of the complexity of the anti-cheat was still in user space. I'd be interested to hear how true that is and if that makes much of a difference in your mind how trustworthy it is.

I don’t have the code for that and it might require my studio to open a deal with vanguard to get access to the source.

Generally speaking though; the size of the components that run in the kernel is not important. The kernel mode software can act as a window to the rest of the system.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#389

Post by zamalek »

ribit wrote: post #344
neogodless wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone better educated than me can probably help me out here, but I think you're either misunderstanding what some things are, or mixing up your terminology. Proton is the emulation layer created by Valve. Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics API. Your point might still stand, but it's worth debating. Without Proton, gaming on Linux is limited to native Linux games. With it, the story changes. Someone who likes PC ga…

I was not mentioning Proton explicitly. But the core of my point is that Proton de-facto delegates Vulkan to be a second class citizen whose purpose it is to serve as a backend of implementing a Microsoft-compatible technology stack. With Proton working well, the incentive to develop native Linux applications and games goes to wards zero — why would you even bother if you can just develop and test for Windows and let…

This comment is loaded with some pretty unrealistic conclusions. Firstly, Vulkan support is becoming extremely common even on Windows-exclusive titles.

> Apple has their own Metal, so Vulkan is dead in the water there anyway.

How is Apple at all relevant in a thread about games? Apple has proactively shut out gaming in the past few years. Metal is almost exclusively used to draw fancy GUIs.

Furthermore, DXVK is an open source (strictly) project. Who honestly cares who came up with the API? People even run DXVK on Windows because it often offers superior performance.

There are some very big studios getting behind Vulkan: Embark, id.

As to the root comment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...

Re: Thank You, Valve

#390

Post by rpdillon »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #330
ribit wrote: post #313

I vehemently disagree with sentiment expressed in the article. Sure, on the surface the work done Valve does significantly improve the state of Linux gaming. But this is not Linux gaming. This is Windows gaming under Linux. We need to think about the long-term effects, about maintaining a healthy ecosystem. I cannot imagine how delegating Linux and Vulkan to be a long-term emulator of DX12 and Win is supposed to be h…

The Linux Desktop community has had 20 years to make Linux Desktop a reasonable, if not attractive, platform for gaming and game development and they have consistently and utterly failed at it. Valve did the only thing that was going to work.

I have reluctantly reached this exact conclusion. Sure, I wish Linux were a growing target for developers, but after living through Loki/Icculus ports and Wine/Crossover/Transgaming/Proton, the only practical approach is the latter, it seems. I've made my peace with it.
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