Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

Re:Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday July 15, 2019 @02:42PM (#20443798)

Probably not evil, just incompetent. Many internet multiplayer games today place trust in the client in order to grant a smoother experience on higher latency internet connections, which makes it easier to implement cheating mechanisms. The fight against this is all about verifying the client and the environment it is running in. WINE is quite hackable, so one can see why they'd want to blacklist the platform outright. Doing it in such a trivially bypassed way is pretty silly though.

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Re:Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M by tobias3 on Monday July 15, 2019 @03:31PM (#20444297)

They probably prevent it from starting and later do self checks (checksums), check for wine using other methods and then game-ban accounts in waves to hide how they detected cheating/wine.

There isn't a general way to prevent cheating on open platforms with this kind of game, so it ends up being a kind of cat and mouse game. Think of an aimbot (instantly moves your mouse cursor to an enemy as soon as the enemy is seen) or a wall hack that makes enemies visible behind obstacles. The only way to detect those is to check if your runtime environment is being modified by known methods. Opening a wine front (where you'd somehow have detect Linux processes/a modified wine or even a modified kernel etc.) is probably too costly compared to the number of non-cheating players on Linux.

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Re:Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M by blattimwind on Monday July 15, 2019 @03:04PM (#20444029)

CSGO (where leagues and MM use third-party anti-cheat) is an example where the community deems the vendor's AC insufficient. The most extreme example is Rockstar Games / GTA V, the multi-billion-dollar revenue AAA title where anyone with a free to download menu has far more power than all Rockstar administrators combined.

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Re:Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M by Konnstann on Monday July 15, 2019 @04:25PM (#20444859)

CSGO VAC is garbage though, and can't not be garbage without being granted extreme levels of access to the system. On Linux you can just run your cheats as root, and they will never get detected.

The slippery slope of giving companies higher access is also seen in CSGO where (Faceit/ESEA, dont remember who exactly) put a bitcoin miner in their anti-cheat. Capcom put a rootkit into Street Fighter V to check for cheaters. Is that acceptable?

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Re:Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M by ska on Monday July 15, 2019 @06:32PM (#20445909)

>Probably not evil, just incompetent.

Incompetent, or rational decision in terms of bang-for-buck to reduce cheats?

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Re:Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday July 15, 2019 @07:37PM (#20446294)

That's a fair distinction here I suppose. From my perspective as a hobbiest game developer, and of course player, any benefits of trusting the client are far outweighed by the problems, but that's a matter of opinion I suppose.

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