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I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

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Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#101

Post by mainde »

kuschku wrote: post #90
mainde wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?) [1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)

You're right in that, if your server rejects inputs that are too fast, too precise, too robotic to be human, bots will emulate the top-playing humans ever more closely. But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem? If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm? Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

Uhm, yes, I think it is a problem because unfairly losing isn't as fun as fairly losing or fairly winning. Ignorance about the fairness of a game may work in a few instances but would not scale.

You don't have to reach pro levels, it often only takes small assists to turn a balanced game on its head, ruining someone's experience with a game. Repeat often enough and the userbase will leave, feeling cheated or at least demoralised for being unable to compete or improve.

And allowing machine-assists, thus leveling the playing field, turns the game into a completely different one that is (imho) drastically less fun whoever may not be interested in (or may be unable to) running/coding their bot.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#102

Post by serf »

daveidol wrote: post #11
Pannoniae wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those games with anti-cheats are anti-player garbage anyway. You don't lose much without them.

Do you mean the presence of anti-cheat software makes them anti-player? Because I’d disagree. It’s a lot of work and expense to combat cheats, but is very much appreciated by many players (when it works)

it's anti-player when it is security theatre, which in 95% of cases it is.

When I start a game and I see an Easy Anti-Cheat banner I think to myself "Great now I can be killed by an aimbot while simultaneously hosting a root-kit voluntarily."

Why do you think these systems are advertised like that, at the forefront of the game load? It's so that the developers create a false trust in the playerbase that they're doing their damnedest to prevent cheaters, when the reality is that they paid a small amount of cash to a third party to use a system that does a piss-poor job at everything aside from being a symbol of effort and adding incompatibilities where there shouldn't be.

eac bypassing is trivial to a laymen, that doesn't bode well as a defense against people that have made cheating their hobby.

and to be clear : I use EAC as the example because to me it symbolizes the 'security theatre' side of the effort. Real anti-cheat efforts exist, and those should be applauded. EAC ain't it, but it's the industry standard... worrisome.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#103

Post by Wytwwww »

diggan wrote: post #31
Wytwwww wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? There is a lot less anonymity in esports and if you get caught and blacklisted.. well you just wasted thousands or tens of thousands of hours. It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.

> I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? I mean, hard to call cheating in a multiplayer game the same as cheating in a singleplayer game. The former ruins the experience of others, the latter just affects your own session. Hard to be against cheating in a singleplayer context.

I was thinking about casual and professional online gamers (yet somehow managed to leave out a word in comment...). Of course "cheating" in single player games isn't even a real thing

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#104

Post by nindalf »

pjmlp wrote: post #95
coffeebeqn wrote: post #2

I was totally blown away by how good Proton is in the post Steam Deck world. I now play Steam games on my Linux laptop almost daily because they “just work” even when the only listed supported platform is Windows

Pity that it solidifies Windows as the top PC gaming OS, that all studios should care about. Let Valve do the needful for running them under GNU/Linux, if at all.

You’re missing the bigger picture. Yes, developers really appreciate that their games work seamlessly on the Steam Deck and Linux with no effort on their part. But there are a couple of knock on effects.

One is that developers now a specific hardware + software combo to test their games with. Even if it’s the same build they’re sending out, they’re still testing their game on the Deck and fixing issues, leading to a better (but not perfect) experience for Linux gamers. Here’s a video of Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian studios playing a game released by his studio on the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k. He’s very pleased and promises to test future games released by his studio on the Deck. And he stuck to that promise - Larian released several fixes specifically for the Steam Deck to make Baldur’s Gate III run better. Linux gamers benefit from that.

Second, this increases the % of gamers using Linux. After the Deck’s success in the last couple of years Linux is at 1.91% of the respondents of the Steam Hardware Survey for Nov 2023. Linux was at 1.15% 18 months ago. Doesn’t sound impressive, but if that growth continues and it reaches 3-4%, at that point developers will find shipping native Linux builds more attractive.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#105

Post by CamperBob2 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #66
jorvi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL. I’ve even looked into launching games into their own little Gamescope instance, but if you don’t run Gamescope as your main window manager, you lose most of its benefits. > For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input? Yes. The problem lies in the fact that only the Xone driver properly supports the Xbox wireless ada…

Honestly it's the reverse for me, but I guess that's down to personal preference. "Gnome" apps keep updating with the "new" GTK style, which means the title bar becomes a conglomeration of a bunch of weird controls, the familiar dropdown menus vanish, everything gets moved into a tiny little hamburger menu and, often , the layout breaks in subtle ways. The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type…

The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.

OT, but I recently started using a Python REPL as a calculator, leaving it open full time in a window. It's pretty great. Haven't touched an actual calculator, or a calculator app, in weeks.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#106

Post by sevagh »

quaffapint wrote: post #34

I actually just ordered a GPU for my unRaid NAS server just to be able to do Steam Headless via a nice docker image(1) and then use Moonlight (for example) as a client on my Windows laptop. If it works, it's much better than buying yet another piece of desktop hardware just to play games when my NAS is just sitting there idle most of the time. Just need to make sure I keep the power level setting on the Nvidia card t…

This looks great. I currently use Sunshine + Moonlight, I'll test Steam Headless performance soon.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#107

Post by aeonik »

IshKebab wrote: post #85
arendtio wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not, but both are symptoms of a consumer-disrespecting mindset. - DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer. - Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer. I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions…

> However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters. Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.

Back in the day we had admins and communities of people. You'd get to know people more and establish trust. You could have registered brackets and independent tournaments with manual administration and banning for cheaters.

It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#108

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

infecto wrote: post #22
ekianjo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM is not welcoming by default... sounds like you have double standards

You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different. What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the pro…

> What is productive is calling out hostile behavior

Okay; anti-cheat is user-hostile.

> “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”

Okay, the thing I want is to use a game that I paid for, play it on the machine I own, and run it without giving it any special privileges (certainly not modifying my kernel). I trust that you will support that and not be negative about the way I want to use it?

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#109

Post by freedomben »

developerDan wrote: post #83
hhh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to tweak stuff for a week to get a comparable experience playing games to a fresh W11 install.

Why don’t people like Linux? Because it takes 8 bloody commands to do something as simple as add a new drive whereas Windows you can just open disk utility and format. I bounced off Linux a few weeks ago over this. It’s for people who want to tinker more than actually use the system.

You bounced quickly then without trying very hard. Gnome comes with a GUI disk utility tool pre-installed that is easy enough for a Windows user ;-)

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#110

Post by delfinom »

pjmlp wrote: post #95
coffeebeqn wrote: post #2

I was totally blown away by how good Proton is in the post Steam Deck world. I now play Steam games on my Linux laptop almost daily because they “just work” even when the only listed supported platform is Windows

Pity that it solidifies Windows as the top PC gaming OS, that all studios should care about. Let Valve do the needful for running them under GNU/Linux, if at all.

Valve inventing a portable game runtime that just works on all Linux distros without game studios needing an entire department to handle the dependency hell of Linux NIHisn would solve that issue.
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