171–180 of 485 posts
I actually really liked Crysis for its open maps where you can approach a goal using different tactics. It had a lot of flaws and I hated the alien ship along with everything after as it was way too linear. Though I really want to play it again but alas, no more Windows for me.
I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot... I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.…
I honestly don't understand why any game is even checking if secure boot is enabled. If anything it's for the OS to care about that, not individual programs. Afaik, secure boot doesn't (on it's own) prevent the running of arbitrary software, so how is it actually preventing cheating?
It also demonstrates further levels of driver signing robustness.
I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot... I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.…
Lots of games don't need invasive anti-cheat. You can just play those. There are literally too many awesome games on the market to ever be without something great to play.
It's funny that game makers make a fuss about anti-cheat not working on Linux but then publish Switch versions of their games. That platform has almost zero security and is commonly emulated with cheats even in multiplayer these days.
Any Switch game using an anti-cheat solution that can't trivially detect that it's being emulated is... not using a very good anti-cheat solution.
Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers. It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% s…
> caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere ne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are looking completely wrong at this. There is no anti-cheat that cannot be bypassed. Period. You can always run things in a VM, you can always replace your keyboard and mouse with a different device, you can always have your a camera instead of human eyes and have something that recognizes enemies. Even cheat detection in the real physical world (sports, chess, etc.) is not a completely solved topic. You can con…
> The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly. The idea that anti-cheats don't make sense because they don't catch 100% of the cheaters is what's silly, who believes that? Not even the people writing these anti-cheats believe catching 100% of them are possible, why are you under the assumption that others think that's possible? If it removes 80% of the cheaters from the game, the…
Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers. It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% s…
By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.
It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measures because your website's users can just report the bots: by the time it's your users' problem, you've ruined the experience for everyone except the bots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The server also doesen't need to tell you they are behind it if they're sneaking This requires the server to calculate line of sight checks for every player, which is costly, requires loading the entire geometry into the server and would be horribly prone to latency. Then you're looking at potential performance problems on the client due to only knowing about a player the second its in view and having to stream the…
I don't think those performance concerns are really much of an issue with any sensible implementation. You'd do line of sight checks against simplified geometry first to handle the vast majority of cases, and you'd load character models/textures in advance (game/match startup) rather than only when they first appear on screen. One non-trivial part seems to me that if you walk around a corner you don't want to wait 50…
This is unworkable for fast paced games.
I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot... I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.…
Just to be clear, the anti-cheat systems that support Linux run at the user level and don't require secure boot. Those kernel-level and secure boot restrictions only apply to a handful of games, and they all explicitly block Linux users anyway. For example, I've been playing Arc Raiders a lot recently in Linux, and the user-level EAC works just fine.
As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their intelligence apparatus.