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With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

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Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#461
post #441
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern anticheats are basically kernel rootkits which go even to the point of trying to checksum your drivers and inspect how they work. They're basically as invasive as they get. They obviously can't hook into Linux kernel so they react by just banning the player.

Something that I find interesting is that anti-cheats are needed when either 1) the input can be somehow enhanced (think fps aim hacks) or 2) more information than the player should have is being sent to client (think fog of war or wall hacks). That's hard to avoid in shooters, where you need that behind-the-scenes information to reduce perceived latency. But games that don't have that low-latency-hungry "twitch" ele…

While technically correct, first person shooters might be the most popular multiplayer genre. In practice it's more accurate to says special cases are the games which do no qualify to the categories you outlined above.

As for turn-based games, they work better as board games unless you have a pandemic going on. In theory simultaneous turn games are possible but rarely observed in practice. Dominions games, Laser Squad Nemesis, etc. Sequential turns (A/B/C/D) scale very badly and human face to face contact makes up for that.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#462

Those of you praising Proton, what distro and what gpu are you using? Are the days of nVidia bad, AMD good for driver support over?

I'm using ubuntu 20.04 and it's working great. I actually use it to play the game remotely from my linux desktop on my mbp via steam link. The desktop is currently using integrated graphic so I can only play indie games at the moment. I'm still waiting for my new gpu to arrive so I can't test any of the AAA game.

Funny thing is I sometimes use steam remote play to access my linux desktop since it's faster and has very little lag compared to VNC. I simply add nautilus to steam game library so I can launch it remotely via steam link, then press "super/⌘" key to access the desktop.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#463
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern anticheats are basically kernel rootkits which go even to the point of trying to checksum your drivers and inspect how they work. They're basically as invasive as they get. They obviously can't hook into Linux kernel so they react by just banning the player.

Now I'm biased because I'm an anti-cheat developer, but I really can't see how checking the integrity of your installed kernel device drivers is at all invasive.

You literally have rootkit privileges and exist by the grace of most people not realising you get installed. Most EULAs that concern "anti-cheat" have big explicit entries in them about transmitting personal information. Anti-cheat software is the condoned malware of the modern age, similar to browser toolbars a decade or so ago.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#464
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was seriously considering adding Linux support for my game, that already has turn-based multiplayer, and this thread was the last thing I needed to convince myself it could work. Performance may be an issue. I wonder if people would be ok with electron games sold on steam running on linux...

Normally electron apps bother me on linux because they don't use my carefully selected GTK/QT/Openbox theming like most native apps do (whereas on windows I don't care because I don't have the ability to make anything look how I want). But I expect games to be fullscreen and have their own bespoke UI look and feel anyway, so it's not really an issue with them.

Electron apps bother me because nobody bothers to make Linux builds for proprietary electron apps. Running windows builds of electron apps under wine doesn't always work. At this point windows applications using Microsoft APIs are more cross platform portable than electron apps.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for it. Others already do that use Electron. Shapez.io is one such title and it's open source too so you can get some pointers if needed from it.

Haven't heard of Shapez.io before, so went to try it out. Going to Shapez.io though gives a Cloudflare error: "Error 521: Web server is down". :( Trying the Wayback Machine, there's "something" on there but it doesn't seem to work. (?) eg: http://web.archive.org/web/20201120204614/https://shapez.io/

Just checked, https://shapez.io/ works fine here. There's the GitHub too: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.

> Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. So you have two choices here. You either ban the best players or the aim bots just behave with a success rate close to the best players.

If a player consistently has a sub 100ms response time, it is a bot. There are plenty such values to be found that have clear superhuman markers (100ms on average is already realistically too low, so I'm being mild), and you can use those to detect cheaters.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#467
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was seriously considering adding Linux support for my game, that already has turn-based multiplayer, and this thread was the last thing I needed to convince myself it could work. Performance may be an issue. I wonder if people would be ok with electron games sold on steam running on linux...

Normally electron apps bother me on linux because they don't use my carefully selected GTK/QT/Openbox theming like most native apps do (whereas on windows I don't care because I don't have the ability to make anything look how I want). But I expect games to be fullscreen and have their own bespoke UI look and feel anyway, so it's not really an issue with them.

Maybe I'm weird but I would rather use a wine app than a native electron app.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#468
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the less invasive things, but I also don't see why a game needs to know what drivers I have. Hence I just stay away from AAA games with anti cheat at this point.

Because the preferred deployment method of a lot of these cheats is via drivers so they look transparent to the game and are harder to detect from a userspace application.

The preferred deployment method of real cheats is outside of a virtualisation boundary. Driver-based is essentially entry level.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.

> Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. So you have two choices here. You either ban the best players or the aim bots just behave with a success rate close to the best players.

If you can't distinguish between cheaters and the best players statistically, can the regular players tell the difference? Does it matter at all then?

And when I'm talking about statistics here, I'm not referring to the kill/death ratio, but rather all input data received from a cheater.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're privileged enough you could buy another GPU, pass it through to a Windows VM, install looking-glass to pass display output over a shared memory buffer, barrier for mouse sharing and bam, you have Windows in a window in your Linux machine running close to bare metal performance. (It does eat memory bandwidth linearly with refresh rate though).

This won’t get passed anti cheats though.

It will if you configure it correctly.
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