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Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

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Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#721

Post by stalfie »

enneff wrote: post #253
Draiken wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, people are dumb. Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct. Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spywa…

The marketing works because online games get destroyed by cheats. Losing in online games can be full of “feel bad” moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit. I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.” It would be great to see more of a…

To me the "web of trust" element frankly seems like the only viable solution. And in fact, its almost here already: https://playsafeid.com/

I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike using facial recognition technology to allow for permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95% of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres, and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially implement when you can guarantee that one account = one person.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#722

Post by palata »

safety1st wrote: post #668
palata wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when Capitalism has favoured monopolies for decades and is actually closer to Feodalism.

There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations. It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might…

Very insightful, thanks for that comment!

I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).

And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#723

Post by Telaneo »

account42 wrote: post #706
Telaneo wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never. Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux…

This is extremely shortsighted.

I fail to see why? It was pretty short sighted of developers to build Linux verions of their games back when they did, since most either perform poorly today, or just crash on more modern versions. I don't expect those games to get fixed any time soon. Far from it, I expect Linux versions to degrade as more and more of their dependencies change and Linux changes over time. I don't expect the situation to be different for native Linux ges made today.

Wine meanwhile works perfectly with 80+% of games, and those 20% that don't are all newer stuff or stuff that's never going to get a Linux version short of the Linux desktop actually getting of the ground.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#724

Post by hydroreadsstuff »

btdmaster wrote: post #619

> When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment. At which point does this pay off the emulation overhead? Fex has a lot of work to do to bridge two ISAs while going through the black box of compiler output of assembly, right?

afaia emulators like Fex are within 30 to 70% of native performance. On the fringes worse or better. But overall emulation seems totally fine. Plus emulator technology in general could be used for binary optimization rather than strict mappings, opening up space for more optimization.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#725

Post by Akronymus »

Xss3 wrote: post #652
dchftcs wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing in ML jargon and going straight to modelling before understanding the problem reduces your credibility as a data scientist in front of engineers and stakeholders. As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting good features and data. In this case one difficulty is measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with. In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if someone is around the corner an…

More like congrats, you just made every cheater far less effective by forcing them to play nearer to human limits. You arent eliminating cheaters, that's impossible, you are limiting their impact.

If cheaters play indistingushable from normal people, the seems like mission accomplished.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#726

Post by BirAdam »

sushibowl wrote: post #645
aperture147 wrote: post #630

I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-w…

You are absolutely correct. Valve's linux push was driven by developments in the windows platform, specifically around the release of windows 8. Microsoft was pushing a windows store similar to Apple's app store, and Valve was unequivocally stating that they were worried Microsoft would basically lock down the platform and only allow software sales through their own store, destroying their steam business. Gabe said i…

He didn't just "work on Windows."

GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX, GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.

I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#727

Post by reactordev »

raydev wrote: post #551
SeanAnderson wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that analogy holds because the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts. The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient, unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, t…

No. The same way piracy has been diminished in the mainstream by years of lawsuits and jailtime against the loudest most available sources, the strongest anti-cheats have suppressed the easiest and cheapest paths to cheating on AAA games. Piracy hasn't gone away, but the number of people doing it peaked last decade. Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating completely, they just need to capture enough chea…

Piracy didn’t go anywhere, it got corporate sponsorship.

Having some anti-cheat is better than no anti-cheat but my point is it’s not a shield. It’s a cheese grater.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#728

Post by jeroenhd »

bluescrn wrote: post #622
levocardia wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

It's an interesting case study. They're essentially another 'App Store middleman' raking in a huge 30% cut for selling games digitally. But they do enough really good stuff to keep both gamers and developers generally very happy.

The difference between Valve and the other app stores with an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.

To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.

With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.

So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#729

Post by LtWorf »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #684
LtWorf wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forced to have a phone and there's only 2 bad choices.

Technically 3. Not much different from the Desktop situation. Just replace Microsoft with Google because Microsoft had the grace to bow out early. Similar to desktop, I choose the middle ground between true freedom and walled garden. At least you Can de-googlefy 95% of Android. More than you can de-microsoft Windows.

3?

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#730

Post by Glemkloksdjf »

bee_rider wrote: post #232
tombert wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.

You complelty ignore the foxcon problem?

Google makes money with ads and at least takes this serious.

Apple just exploits.

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