inb4 it’s a kernel module that only works with secureboot and signed kernel images, and kills the game if you have xpadneo loaded.
Sweeney has been known to manipulate public sentiment (read: impressionable children) to his advantage. Trust nothing until you have the source code.
Sweeney has been known to manipulate public sentiment (read: impressionable children) to his advantage
This is just standard behavior for game companies. Look at Valve’s strategy – actively work to get children addicted to gambling and then cry foul at any regulation.
We really love saying companies aren’t your friend until someone specifies that also applies to companies you’re a fan of and think are super cool
Valve may be much less anti consumer than other companies (and I appreciate their contributions to linux), but they are a company, and what are companies? Not your friend
They absolutely still have issues, they are not without skeletons in the closet 😅
Valve is a good company in that they make an enormous amount of money running steam and they use that money to fund generally positive things. That’s about as good as you can hope tbh
That’s pretty much definition of textbook capitalism: they benefit from doing something that benefits others too.
Too bad this is a rare case in the real world capitalism
It’s more common than you think, like Apple has done a great job integrating privacy and security features into their OS both because they don’t really stand to gain from user data collection the same way Google does, its a good selling point, it helps them protect their app store revenue streams etc. nd also because they actually care about it.
OTOH they are agreesively anti right to repair
Can you post us the definition of capitalism please?
Capitalism is an economic system where private individuals or businesses own capital goods, and the free market controls the production of goods and services.
Capitalism is a system of economic production
Private property promotes efficiency by giving the owner of resources an incentive to maximize the value of their property
A capitalist earns the highest profit by utilizing capital goods, such as machinery and tools, most efficiently while producing the highest-value goods or services.
Doesn’t mean they’re justified to cover for Epic by saying, in essence, “b-b-b-but Valve does bad stuff too!”.
Both CS and TF2 are rated M.
This is a stupid argument. First, the ESRB is not the dictator of who plays what games. They are a recommendation group. Parents may want to consider what they say, but it should not be left at that. For example, sexual content is much worse than violent content in their eyes, and I’m sure we all agree that’s stupid.
Second, kids play CS and TF2. We all know this, and Valve knows this. That’s not a bad thing, even if they’re rated M. I don’t think they do any harm, and CS at least probably does some good, with learning teamwork and stuff. Valve then uses their platform to push gambling, which is wrong (it’s psychologically manipulative, when they could just sell skins outright without manipulation) regardless of age, but particularly bad if they aren’t trying to prevent kids from participating, and they aren’t.
The only expection is AO rated games. That rating actually does carry legal requirements and restrictions. There’s a big reason it’s used so infrequently.
M rated games are only 17+ it’s for minors. There’s no legal restrictions. AO is 18+ and actually does carry legal requirements to sell.
Neat, and this supports what argument exactly?
Children should not be near those games. And it’s parents job to make sure of it.
Oh, so you agree; Valve generally and Gabe specifically are mortally repugnant actors and should be criminally liable for their premeditated and deliberate targeting of minors.
No, Valve made M-rated games, it’s the parents’ responsibility to not have kids playing them.
I know, they’re Parents, these unblamable entities, but here we are, sex has consequences.Valve bears a legal, ethical, and moral culpability for targeting minors specifically and with ill intent for decades.
I bet you think cigarette companies are blameless because there’s an age requirement for tobacco, too.
Look in the mirror, chud. Simping for billionaires is a bad look. It pollutes your soul.
I agree that they started a machine that was unnecessary and it is repugnant; I still blame parents for any children involved.
Never have I seen any minor targeting from Valve.
I love that you have nearly a 50% downvote rate because you had the gall to call Valve out for doing the thing we all know they’re doing.
Secureboot + a signed kernel module should be enough to be certain there’s nothing nefarious running in the kernel, and you don’t need to go in there to babysit.
If a userspace app can interfere with a game, a userspace app can detect it.
Tim Swiney spent decades being anti-linux until he realized how much of a bitch it is to work with microsoft.
Same reason GabeN switched.
Same reason GabeN switched.
Took him a while, though. Remember that he was originally employed by Microsoft and when he founded Valve and they licensed the Quake 1 engine, among the first things they did was to port the engine to Microsoft Direct3D (luckily they kept the OpenGL renderer because back then Direct3D ran worse).
It took them both quite a while but at least they seem to be coming around.
You’re not getting root access, plain and simple.
The server should be the authority. Never trust the clients. For fucks sake it isn’t this hard for game developers to build their shit right.
It is actually hard. For example, if you’d only send enemy data for visible enemies, you’d have pop-in when they come out of the corner. And how do you determine if they’re visible? Do you take into account shadows, transparent objects, tiny gaps? Even if you somehow solve that, you’d still have to fight stuff like aimbots, which can work on just the information that the player should have. Do you add maximum aim velocity? Check for movement that is “too good”? If you never trust the clients, then people with higher latency would be at an even bigger disadvantage and have even worse experience.
Part of that is perfectly possible. In counterstrike some 3rd party matchmaking services do the visibility check already on the server side. iirc it’s literally a variable that can be changed. But Valve has no intersest in wasting those extra CPU cycles on their servers. Same goes for all other BS anticheats. It’s much cheaper to have the clients do all the work.
Do they really? Doesn’t that really mess up client side prediction?
The real answer is you either make the game only playable between friends or you have to hire moderators and generate report logs. None of this kernel shit is necessary people just dont want to pay people to work anymore. This is supposed to be entertainment, its not worth the spy network they’re building inside of it to “stop cheaters”.
World of Tanks has had this since 2011.
People hate the spotting system. We always have, but one issue Wargaming does NOT have an issue with is most forms of cheating. Most standard forms of “knowing” where the enemy is do not work - to the stage that as the game dies due to other reasons, the organized botting problem to get rewards has become more and more apparent. People run dozens of clients and then have to drive to specific places and then also be the player scoring the hits on their own “unspotted” account.
You know who is at disadvantage when higher latency kicks in? The one who abuse the latency compensation mechanisms worse.
Ask Elden Ring players what they think about fighting in high latency and those who induce high latency on purpose running the builds that fare better in it.
For example, if you’d only send enemy data for visible enemies, you’d have pop-in when they come out of the corner
That is technically feasible, and only really needed for a specific genre of game, in which you are already set up to do the sort of ray tracing needed to make that happen.
And how do you determine if they’re visible? Do you take into account shadows, transparent objects, tiny gaps?
The answer to this is again ray tracing for the most part.
Even if you somehow solve that, you’d still have to fight stuff like aimbots
Not really. An ELO tracking method works just fine for a good chunk of that. If a 600 ELO player suddenly starts having stats of a 1400 ELO player overnight, they’re almost certainly cheating.
then people with higher latency would be at an even bigger disadvantage and have even worse experience.
How? This is for the server to handle, not the client. And for niche problems where it somehow would have a difference, artificial latency can be applied such as how the game Forts handles it.
Pretty much everything you’ve listed is from a FPS shooter perspective, which is not the only competitive game out there. These problems are solvable without kernel level anti-cheat that all these companies love to go for.
Looks like it’s easy after all. All these engine developers must be idiots, not thinking of such easy solutions
But seriously, it’s not that simple as you make it out to be. You can’t just raytrace your way into a reliable visibility check. Especially server side. and then also compensate for network lag
Doesn’t matter which genre you want to apply it to
Looks like it’s easy after all. All these engine developers must be idiots, not thinking of such easy solutions
I’ve been doing game development for over a decade. Game development isn’t easy, but doing server side control of the game isn’t any more hard than any other part of game development. If you have the skills to make a game, you have the skills to make cheating a non-issue.
And that especially applies for the AAA game studies putting out the majority of the FPS games which are most hard to do server side authority.
You can’t just raytrace your way into a reliable visibility check.
You can’t just expect that a visibility check/complicated visibility check is needed in every game. Not every game is an FPS.
Almost all RTS and 2D fighter games for instance would not need complicated visibility checks, as they tend to be played on a 2D plane, which makes it easy to figure out if something is in sight of another thing, if they need to do that at all.
I’ve played Speed Runners quite a bit. Zero visibility checking is needed for that game despite it being highly competitive. All the server needs is your inputs, and it handles all the movement, hits, speed ups, etc all on it’s own. Or at leas they could if they programmed it right.
Another example, Zomboid, an indie game, already has visibility built into the core of the game. It does everything I am talking about doing. They have zero need for any kind of anticheat.
Rocket league: No need for any visibility checks. Everyone already can see everyone.
League of legends: All visibility logic is already built into the core of the game.
Super Smash Brothers: No visibility mechanics at all
/u/Mika is talking about Elden Ring, and I’d guess that visibility is not a big part of that game if at all, given it’s all medieval combat. The server can consume player input and tell the clients what’s going on, no need for any complicated logic.
Not all games are FPS
Meanwhile on GTAOnline, cheaters can summon explosions on your position, teleport you around, spawn busses over your head, lock you in a prison cage, summon literal money bags, all because the server is for some stupid reason at a AAA production, not the authority.
Also server side raytracing is not that computationally expensive considering all you’re doing is comparing positions of players and maybe simulating a bounce or two in 2D space.the only time it’d be that bad would be in games like fortnite/pubg where they want the massive sightlines. So instead just do the rt check in a radius from the player that coincides with fog/draw distance
I agree with you, I think game dev isn’t easy but these solutions aren’t difficult either. It’s just, Why try and fix what ain’t broke and your company already likely has a contract with anti cheat providers like Denuvo.
Server side anti cheat is a viable and smarter solution, we have more than enough computational power to run it. So lets stop making artificial walls between platforms and enjoy playing the game
That doesn’t stop a client from rotating walls so they get culled and don’t appear, or modifying shaders to outline enemies, or using coordinate data to run a map/radar and auto aim bot.
Most of the time I think you can let the community self police, but for competitive play you probably can’t stop all forms of cheating. That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.
That doesn’t stop a client from rotating walls so they get culled and don’t appear,
You’re talking about FPS games, a subset of competitive games. This, and the other things you’ve brought up aren’t a problem for other types of games.
Most types of RTS and 2D fighting games will not have any of the problems you’ve listed.
But for FPS games specifically, the server should not report player location unless the player is visible. If people elsewhere in this thread are right, the server already does this with ray tracing. Not the fancy lighting stuff, just the basic “draw a line and see if X is hit” stuff.
And most FPS games will already have that logic built in, as they tend to use ray tracing for bullet hit detection, often referred to as ‘hitscan’.
So no amount of wall invisibility will have an effect.
or modifying shaders to outline enemies,
IMO the game should give all players the ability to turn on outlines for enemies/teammates anyways. People who have difficulties parsing colors should have that as an accessibility option.
Marvel Rivals already does this, and allows the player to choose the color that most stands out to them.
or using coordinate data to run a map/radar
Not a problem if the server doesn’t report player locations unless they’re visibly.
and auto aim bot.
This one is admittedly a little harder, but again not impossible to deal with. Chess sites already do this with ELO tracking and matching moves against the best possible move.
If on Wednesday you’re playing like an ELO 600, and Thursday you’re suddenly playing like an ELO 3200, you’re cheating. In an FPS that would look like going from an accuracy of 12% to an accuracy of 100%.
Most of the time I think you can let the community self police, but for competitive play you probably can’t stop all forms of cheating.
Sure, but instead of being passive and using kernel level spyware like most AAA studios like to do, doing the basic sever side authority checks are far more effective.
That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.
And he was caught. Do you think we should be checking every chess grandmasters butthole going forward?
To be clear, uh… the butt plug chess thing is a meme.
Like, it was never substantiated, it comes from one high level player basically insisting that the other guy who he had just rage quit a match with must have been getting outside signals and when asked how he said “a vibrating butt plug.”
And thus it became a joke because it was such an absurd suggestion.
That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.And he was caught. Do you think we should be checking every chess grandmasters butthole going forward?
He was accused (by his opponent Magnus Carlsen) of cheating, and it’s the internet that made a meme of using a buttplug as a means of cheating. There was never any legitimate accusation of using a buttplug to cheat, and there was never any consequences for him. In fact, he sued Magnus for defamation and they settled out of court.
But for FPS games specifically, the server should not report player location unless the player is visible.
It does so for performance.
It’s not a big performance hit.
It’s not lighting/rendering raytracing, it’s the same math that hitscan guns do. Draw a line between point A and point B, if the ray collides somewhere in-between, then that line is not a valid visibility line.
You can cut down on these checks considerably if the player’s camera isn’t even pointed at another player, or if they are out of range.
Most FPS games are typically run by big studios on big servers that have plenty of computational power for this.
It’s not the computational power it’s the lag.
That can be compensated for. Apply the difference in current latency to median latency to all clients.
No, I don’t think chess players need the butthole check. Just give them an MRI before a match (jk)
Those were just off the top of my head cheats. Even for non FPS games like civ they discovered a guy was using a bug to load the map seed and map out the goodie huts for an advantage while streaming.
People were able to figure out his play was suspicious with math and look closer.
Even if you remove non visible players, you still need to render footsteps and sounds through walls. I think it’s a fine idea, to quote the mathematician from Jurassic Park “life, uh, finds a way”
I actually do agree that cheat detection should be a mix of ML and algorithm based signals that result in review. For non competitive play the ratio of cheat votes or something probably works well enough.
I think kernel level anti cheat is too invasive, and it’s weak.
I don’t really know what the state of cheating in those types of games is, fighting games feel epically Wild West, with specialized controllers or grips and single frame hits. The creativity of fighting game players is amazing.
Those were just off the top of my head cheats. Even for non FPS games like civ they discovered a guy was using a bug to load the map seed and map out the goodie huts for an advantage while streaming.
that occurence is actually a guy cheating in a tournament/league
here is a explanation and how they caught him
deleted by creator
Making the server the authority means the client don’t really belong to you. Leave that shit to other OS with their ever growing abuse of their uses to the benefits of big tech.
Yes and no. This very much depends on how the game is implemented. In an open source game, the code is still yours to edit to your heart’s content, it’s just that if you’re a client you’d be bound to what the server says happens.
In a closed source game, if the server executable is released, there is at least a degree of ownership there.
I am not excited to have Linux-kernel anti cheat spyware on my machine, but I guess it’s good to free gamers from Microslop monopoly.
I hope we get a commen solution for it. So not every game company needs a Linux kernel module.
I hope we get absolutely no solution for it.
We don’t need kernel level anti-cheat.
We never have. We never will. We didnt need it on windows, and we dont need it on Linux
The fact that there are wildly popular games out there, that don’t use it, that successfully control cheating to a level that you barely experience/see it, is proof of that… its not only proof of it, it should be the absolute entropic death of the goddamn topic.
The only reason to want a kernel level anticheat is so they can poke around in everything you do and send it all home.They get to police their game… They don’t get to police and monitor my whole fucking life and everything I do on my computer.
If I wanted big brother monitoring everything I do and sending it all back home, I’d be using Windows 11.
Any company that says they need this for their game is lying, and deserves bankruptcy and death.
It also doesn’t even work. There are so many DMA cheats out there that make kernel AC systems a joke. Meanwhile, Basicallyhomeless built a physical aimbot mousepad that can’t be detected because it doesn’t even hook into the computer. It moves the mousepad to correct your aim. It’s extreme, I know, but the point is that motivated cheaters will always find ways to make AC systems completely useless. Kernel AC has already been defeated, and it’s too high of a cost for something that is already defeated.
Yeah, at the physical aimbot mousepad level, the only thing that can detect that would be utilizing something like machine learning techniques for detecting/flagging accounts.
I fail to see how ML would be able to distinguish between that and a really skilled player aiming normally.
You wouldn’t necessarily need machine learning, but you would need some sort of heuristics algorithm that checks a player’s inputs to ensure they look like real human inputs. I’m sure the auto-aim mouse pad makes microadjustments or sudden changes that aren’t feasible for a human to make, and that sort of stuff is readily detectable.
Not feasible for most humans to make, sure. I just wonder where the line gets drawn between ML and MLG, or even if it’s a bright line at all.
until you use machine learning to collect all the game footage of pros mouseflicks so you have data for a “human-like” flicks between any 2 mouse positions, which becomes how your aimbot moves your mouse. Now the aimbot can’t catch you without also getting false positives from those pros
I have always been a believer that the best anti-cheat is a proper way to measure player skill for your SBMM, with that cheaters will naturally only be matched against other cheaters.
It wouldn’t be difficult to randomize the bot with a noise filter to vary speed/accuracy and have it aim for center of mass, but slightly off center. Overshooting movement could help evade detection as well. Another tactic would be to let the player do most of the work, but correct it only when they would otherwise miss. Even letting them miss occasionally would throw off scrutiny. There are so many ways to hide it.
I do agree that best solution is that we don’t need it.
Sadly bassed on what i hear, users are willing do Things on kernel level to cheat. Ie read/Write memory from a different program.
Youtube: Core dumped: can a gamer company really sabotage your PC? made a good video summarizing the issue.
I hope that a solution in some sense does not need to send more than som checksums that failed if there is a debug enabled, sign kernel modules that not trusted (ie. self sign), notify the program that hi there is a other program trying read your program’s memory or provided some restrictions memory space that even with debug enable you can’t read that space.
Yes, this is because the average user is dumb and content with guzzling down whatever bullshit gets thrown at them. This is a big part of why we really do not want to see the masses shift to Linux - they’ll bring the cooperate interest and the enshitification they love.
What are those wildly popular games that don’t use it?
counter strike for example… ring0 AC is only available via other matchmaking platforms like faceit
Counter strike is literally one of the single most cheated in fps on earth. Only tarkov has more cheaters… Lol
You couldn’t have chosen a worse example even if you tried.
Edit: The downvotes just show how disconnected the userbase here is. I’ll bet none of you have touched cs in a decade.
So you’re just going to conveniently forget the giant wave of bans in CS2 a few months back when Valve updated VAC?
VAC doesnt immediately ban when a cheat is detected, It delays the ban to make it harder for cheat makers to figure out what, when, how, and why it was detected.
W ragebait. I’ll give that to you.
Iv never in my life seen a game that controls it with or with out kernel anti cheat. The only time I’ve ever seen gamers claim a game has cheating under control is because the avg gamer has no fucking idea what cheating actually looks like or how it works.
Functionally if it isn’t as obvious as a spin bot in a counter strike lobby or someone flying around with no clip. 99.99% of gamers are too ignorant to even make the claim if a game has a cheating problem or not.
Kernel anti cheat doesn’t work, never had and never will. You can’t beat cheaters full stop so long as they have access to the hardware the game is running in.
Especially when it comes to Epic. Tim Swiney can’t stand not being able to control everything
Waste of time. Drop the anti-cheat altogether. I do not want it. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter what platform it comes on.
They already have it running and functional. It must still need more work because it’s opt-in for developers, and they don’t have the confidence to enable it on Fortnite.
I suspect it’s getting attention now because Steam is showing decent numbers on Linux. Way better than when they first shelved the anti-cheat.
and they don’t have the confidence to enable it on Fortnite.
Tbh, I’m not convinced it’s that. I think it’s just Tim Swiney not being able to eat crow after bashing Linux for so long, especially after Valve has invested so much into Linux
Tim “steam is a monopoly and must be destroyed because of it”
Also Tim “windows being a monopoly is fine actually and we should do nothing to support alternatives”
Tim Sweeney’s opinions end where his financial interests begin, and Microsoft pays him a lot every month for Fortnite on Game Pass.
If it’s not a technical problem, Epic is taking cash under the table from NinMicroSony to keep their platforms relevant. That wouldn’t surprise me either.
They’ve supported Linux for years through Unreal Engine, and the first thing they did when they bought EAC was give it Linux compatibility.
The first thing they did when they bought Rocket League was to remove Linux support, though
They are trialing it with Rocket League which they updated to use EAC without dropping linux support.
I just hope the Linux growth doesn’t stagnate due to the insane PC market right now and the potentially DoA steam machine, otherwise alot of this development could go to waste.
Iirc, they have 2 versions of epic anti cheat and the one used in fortnite doesn’t have the Linux support.
The kernal one doesn’t support Linux but you imagine a Linux build would include the other one just like any other non-Windows build.
You’re looking for people passionate about both reverse engineering and also anti-debugging? Okay then.
Know thy enemy
Fingers crossed they aren’t trying to develop a linux kernel module anticheat because I will never load that crap on anyone’s machine.
Even right now, the last standing proprietary blob in my way is Nvidia, which they finally open sourced their kernel driver so if the userspace blob bothers you, you can switch to the upcoming Nova driver from RedHat.
The kernel needs to stay clean. They can do whatever they’d like in userspace.
Good to see possible Linux support in the future. Even if Epic burned the bridge between them and me, its good to have them on board for everyone else who wants to play their games.
I’m happy for anything that makes it easier for people to abandon MS.
this is nice not because its kernel level anti-cheet but having access to games that utilize it on linux is a huge step in it being adopted as the default computer gaming platform
Fuck Epic Games.
This recent video talks about some related topics.
Also, fuck Epic and KLA.If it’s epic store I don’t want it. If I wanted DRM I already have Steam and it’s better.
It would be funny if they added kernel level anticheat for Linux and it used DKMS.
