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Thank You, Valve

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Re: Thank You, Valve

#391

Post by noirbot »

stale2002 wrote: post #385
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Exactly. "It's all for the money" is a generally useless thing to point out. It's the table stakes of living in the modern world unless you want to join a commune somewhere. Most folks on here generally expect corporations to do things against our interest as consumers, and that's generally the state of things. That said, we would rather they do SOME positive things and not NO positive things.

I've got plenty of bad things to say about Valve, but that's for another thread, where the topic is a bad thing they're doing.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#392

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Bigpet wrote: post #372
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no wide support for gaming on Linux Desktop because historically there hasn't been anything one could call "The Linux Desktop" for them to target. The landscape is so ludicrously fragmented that you can't rely on any software to be installed other than the kernel. Valve got around this by just packing their own runtime libraries with Steam.

It was pretty obvious when Stadia "made" devs port to Linux. When the economic incentive was there, the technology wasn't much of an issue.

Staia presented a known system to target, not a fragmented mess of ever changing 'distributions' that don't even attempt to maintain binary compatibility for a single release.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#393

Post by foxfluff »

dijit wrote: post #386
foxfluff wrote: post #377

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. 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 wa…

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

I'm sharing my experience. I can say that I had very good experience with community moderation for many many years across numerous different games.

By the sound of it, you haven't even tried it, you're just explaining why you don't believe it works?

And the end result then is that you have no moderation. Cheaters can still cheat, griefers can still grief, and hosting your game for a better experience is impossible. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that puts me off a game entirely.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#394

Post by cinntaile »

skinkestek wrote: post #363
cinntaile wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means Steam on PC.

It is still wrong. Gog, Microsoft, probably Funcom and a number of others (I'm not into gaming, I'm just pointing out he was extremely wrong, so wrong even I could see it. Or there is some missing context that I failed to see despite trying twice now in which case a clarification might be needed.) Edit: Blizzard and Activision publishes outside of Steam (too)? (I don't know if the publish on Steam.)

Well they have all tried breaking Steam's dominance on PC. The ones that come closest are probably Microsoft (especially with their acquisition of Activision Blizzard) and Epic. Almost all of them still publish on Steam, because they basically have to.

Gog and Funcom are drops in the ocean in comparison.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#395

Post by ynx »

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…

If there is a native Vulkan backend there is little reason for an API emulation layer with an identical before-and-after to not just forward the calls on as much as possible - especially with an API which makes its state a lot more explicit and keeps less internal state.

With that said, as a game dev, Vulkan - along with DirectX and OpenGL - are second-class citizens already. The large bulk of gamedev is concerned with content, gameplay systems, and UI, with graphics being on the long tail of things that can make a title look truly unique and great, but the prevalence of Unity and Unreal make the actual rendering pipeline a thing of secondary - hugely important, but not primary - concern to most titles.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#396

Post by rirze »

donatj wrote: post #85

I hope Valve brings something like they have done for Linux to macOS. I opened Steam the other day, and by default it’s filtered to only show the games my system can play. I was curious how many games I’d lost to Apple dropping support for 32 bit, I’d never looked before. I can play 94 of my 345 Steam games. My heart literally sunk when I saw this.

I noticed this the other day too-- a couple friends and I were looking through our Steam library to see what we could play together and it turns out that I, the linux user, could play more games than the MacOS users.

What a timeline we're in.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#397

Post by dijit »

foxfluff wrote: post #393
dijit wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

> I understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive. I'm sharing my experience. I can say that I had very good experience with community moderation for many many years across numerous different games. By the sound of it, you haven't even tried it, you're just explaining why you don't believe it works? And the end result then is that you have no moderat…

Except we have tried it.

https://www.massgate.org/

Re: Thank You, Valve

#398

Post by jethack »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #332
SkyPuncher wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The serious cheats in competitive games these days don't rely on hacking the game anymore. This may be true for a class of cheats, but it isn't broadly true. That means these category of cheats can only enhance what is already visible. In FPS games, being able to see players position through walls is a super valuable cheat _and_ requires access to the underlying game engine (to extract player location).

Every time I hear about the seeing through walls hacks, I wonder why the developer just doesn't send the other users locations unless it should be visible. Maybe because doing the math to figure out if it should be visible is handled completely on the frontend to keep latency low? This is the equivalent of a bank API giving you everyone's information, and the frontend SPA filtering it to only the logged in user.

Here's a write-up about the subject, as implemented in Riot's Valorant, if you're interested:

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...

Re: Thank You, Valve

#399

Post by Rooster61 »

dijit wrote: post #373
pdimitar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't it make more sense for business-related products to do this, since the odds of being on a computer that has actual useful information to steal would be much, much higher? Not necessarily. That gaming machine has good odds of being in a local network with other, more important and interesting machines. It can also scan local Wi-Fi area and scoop up even more information that can be used later. Thought these…

If you’ll sign an NDA I can show you TC anticheat and EasyAnticheat. Tencent anticheat has a hard baked logger that prints out every network call it makes, which believe it or not was intended to create trust. You can see in the disassembled code that it can’t make outbound calls without that function that prints the payload. We can’t be open because it’s too risky. We can’t be closed because people think we’re scum.…

> This thread has me depressed.

Certainly was not my aim, and I sympathize. I've said many times I'd never move into game dev because of the workload and sheer work-to-flame ratio, and this thread isn't an exception. Likewise, thank you for providing some light from within the industry, it is appreciated.

I'd sign that NDA in a heartbeat if it didn't anonymize me, but I don't want my name floating around in databases I know nothing about. It's mighty tempting to see how the sausage is made, though.

I will ask this: Does the decision to include such an anti-cheat come from the studio usually, or the publisher?

Re: Thank You, Valve

#400

Post by user432678 »

ineedasername wrote: post #356
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…

If Valve makes it possible to play many/most games on Linux then an influx of Linux converts may incentivise more native development. Certainly the current market has not created those incentives, whereas a massive backcatalog w/ a (potentially) popular portable device may move that ball forward if it means there's a built in market for it going forward.

Recent release of the Windows 11 with requirements to have at least 8th gen CPU might help actually. My 6th gen is perfectly fine for a lot of games, and thanks to Valve I have quite a good library on Ubuntu.
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