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...

One of the games I run the infrastructure from had an issue with Proton. It caused issues with the multiplayer parts of the game.

We were forced to disable support for Proton a few months ago. We posted a bug in the Proton GitHub repo and got a great response from the Devs. The issue was resolved in the very next patch and we were able to enable Proton support again.

Other than that issue our players very rarely come to us with Proton specific issues.

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.

Do you have consistency between GTK/Qt, or only within each? I've never really bothered to set it up (just installed some theme I pulled a name from Arch wiki for, so buttons look like they're from this century) because I assumed I could go to a load of effort and still notice which is used for each program I use.

And then find myself caring which I install if I have the option, or not wanting to if it's only available in the wrong one.. whereas I'm presently free of that.

With a bit of effort it’s a solved problem, however as soon as that was sorted, developers started using snaps and flatpaks that just Do Not Care about your system settings... and we’re back at square -1, because now you won’t even get consistency between Gtk apps and Gtk apps.

The Linux desktop sometimes is like a bad comedy sketch.

Well now I've gone from not caring about snap/flatpak (only selling point seemed to be ease of install; I've never had a problem with arch & the AUR) to making mental note to steer well clear if the temptation ever began to set in.

Yes snap is bad. Compared to the AUR qhere you can read the build script, snap is compiled by someone else and the build script isnt available to perform yourself, at least as far as I looked.

The advantage here is that malware can't be shipped as part of the build process.

I tried Ubuntu for a couple of weeks because I felt that the installation procedure for Arch would take some time for me to set up and I wanted to be up and running a bit faster.

After 4 weeks and every app having so many hoops to jump through because of snaps to get them working together I jumped ship and went back to Arch and the AUR. It's just such a difference in user experience. I feel that Ubuntu is doing a big disservice with snaps (haven't used flatpack that much) to the Linux Desktop community. If it's impossible for me to understand how to use it efficiently, then there is no way in hell I will point my father towards Ubuntu.

Out of curiosity, which apps do you use that come packaged in a snap? My Ubuntu 20.04 tells me this:

  $ snap list
  Name                 Version                     Rev    Tracking         Publisher   Notes
  canonical-livepatch  9.5.5                       95     latest/stable    canonical  -
  core                 16-2.48                     10444  latest/stable    canonical  core
  core18               20200929                    1932   latest/stable    canonical  base
  gnome-3-28-1804      3.28.0-19-g98f9e67.98f9e67  145    latest/stable    canonical  -
  gnome-3-34-1804      0+git.3556cb3               60     latest/stable    canonical  -
  gtk-common-themes    0.1-50-gf7627e4             1514   latest/stable/…  canonical  -
  snap-store           3.38.0-55-geb45541          498    latest/stable/…  canonical  -

I think it's the bare minimum before utterly removing all support for snaps [1].

I installed everything I need either as .deb or docker. BTW, slack has a deb on its download page.

I installed another 20.04 on my old laptop from 2006 yesterday because I read that its kernel would finally support again the old ATI X1600 graphic card. It does. When I run emacs and thunderbird from terminal it told me "command not found" and something along the lines of do you want to install as a snap or with apt? I run the apt commands.

[1] https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-...

Thunderbird, Kdenlive, Darktable, Gimp, KeePassXC, VLC, Minecraft

Those are the ones I remember. I needed to install them via snap because the deb packages were too old to be able to open my files which I copied over from my Arch installation.

This prompted my to investigate. I'm on Thunderbird 68 and the latest release seems to be 78. I think I only need the features of Thunderbird from 15 years ago, so that's ok.

VLC is 3.0.9.2 and GIMP is 2.10.18. No Kdeenlive, Darktable and Minecraft. I'm using KeePassX (not XC) version 2.0.3.

Of course I would install snaps if I absolutely needed an app distributed only as snap but I'd rather use debs.

> I'm using KeePassX (not XC) version 2.0.3.

Note that KeePassXC is the continuation of KeePassX, which is defunct (last release in 2016, only two commits since for new Qt versions)

I mean, it's just back to the state of windows where even most of Microsoft's apps aren't consistent with each other

Windows actually used to be decent and fairly consistent, but I agree that it's gone to shit in the last decade. They botched scaling to HiDpi and fragmented their UIs in the sad attempt to chase convergence with touch UIs.

did it ? except win 3.1 (but then I was a small kid) I remember a huge majority of apps having their own little fancy skins in 98, XP, etc

Majority? Not as I recall it. Some, yeah - famously winamp, which made it compulsory for music players (hence generating a river of tacky UIs). But in my world the majority of apps had the good old “top-bar-menu-icons, File menu, Edit menu, etc” format.

They are my last hope to get a decent UI now.

Do snaps/flatpaks really not look at your local configs? Thats... terrible. I've avoided them already anyway because they seem like wholly unnecessary (and quite significant) bloat.

Flatpak does respect your GTK+ Theme - but you have to either have it installed in ~/.local/share/themes or youbhave to download your theme as flatpak package aswell. But that implies that someone has to maintain the flatpak packge.

While the most popular themes are available, more "niece" themes are missing. Do a `flatpak remote-ls flathub | grep --color "org.gtk.Gtk3theme"` to see all available themes.

Note: I'm maintaining a theme on flathub.

Maybe it's just me, but distro repo usually has only esoteric and metro themes, so if I want something usable, it ends up in .local.

No, probably because that's outside their scope and so they're not allowed to read them.

Surely the sane thing to do security wise would be to mark each flatpak as needing config files foo and bar, and sticking those into the sandbox as well on launch. The app itself doesn't need filesystem access at runtime. Linux apps suddenly not reading standard config files on my system would be a pretty big downside.

I think part of the issue is that technically you cannot guarantee that config files written by the system-installed toolkit can be safely used by the flatpak-shipped toolkit. This said, I think flatpak actually makes an effort to use the ones available in the user’s home folder, whereas snap just does its own thing and screw everyone else.

They do by the way of an xsettingsdaemon (so not accessing directly) for security reasons. The obstacle instead is that they are self-contained, so they should not depend on the theme files outside their system. Hence, they will read what theme you are using and then inside their system look for a matching one.

You can set up QT to use GTK themes (seems like this is the default in KDE Plasma): https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uniform_look_for_Qt_and...

I currently just don't have any QT based apps on my Arch system though I don't think.

I came at it the other way - make GTK apps look like Qt ones. Everything on my system uses Breeze Dark. The only way I can tell GTK programs from Qt ones is the "About" dialog, or the file picker. (Oh, how I wish I could use the Qt file picker in GTK programs)

(edit: QT -> Qt. Seasons greetings to the flagkilled throwaway who informed me of my mistake.)

It's not actually translating GTK themes to QT, its special themes with both QT and GTK versions.

The linked wiki page lists both.

It lists both for Qt 4, but afaiu for Qt5 you need to use special combined themes.

Ah, thanks, I think it's adwaita (mentioned there) that I picked at (pseudo)random, so maybe I already have it.

Not sure if I have any either to be honest, but that's what I mean, I like not worrying about it.

I'm a big fan of the Arc theme.

Yes: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uniform_look_for_Qt_and...

(Distros that are not Arch usually set up one of these solutions out of the box).

It works very well for traditional QWidget/GTK style desktop apps. However, with both QtQuick/QML apps and modern Gnome apps, they have more divergent paradigms and particularly the QML apps tend to be less consistent with each other, never mind other UI toolkits, for much of the same reason webapps also are.

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

I've never thought that Linux Desktop provides unified desktop experience.

It does out of the box on a lot of distros, and you absolutely can DIY it to the point where you have a consistent look and feel with even totally custom theming. Check out /r/unixporn for some examples. (Although they often lean towards a very specific aesthetic - bitmap fonts and anime girls are a bit of a meme there)

It's spelled Qt, not QT.

QT means QuickTime.

I feel such persistence in the face of adversity should be rewarded :)

Not sure if you've seen crosscode, but they released on steam and other platforms with impactjs and they're doing very well. (Not quite electron, but still html tech) If it runs well, who cares about the tech :-) People seem to complain about electron in tools and background apps. If it's the main/fullscreen app, it shouldn't be a problem.

Never in my life would I have expected crosscode to be anything like HTML/JS based. That’s one of the most fluent games I’ve played.

It took a lot of work to make it performant on something like a switch. In the end I'm not sure if it's quite HTML/JS based anymore. I can't find the tech talk video where the porting guy goes into all his work to make it work on a switch.

Save yourself some hassle, just make your game with gamemaker, UE4 or unity if you have any ambitions of going cross platform in the vague future unless it's really simple point and click slow paced strategy games, a dating sim / story game or similar.

It runs on top of a multimedia library called Kha while running on consoles (https://github.com/Kode/Kha).

Here's the talk you're (probably) talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBzlzvt8RU

Eh, I loved it but for a 2D game I had an awful lot of slowdowns on my gaming laptop (https://www.newegg.com/matte-black-with-gold-diamond-cut-msi...)

Don't know if that's the best analogy. Most Electron application's performances are "good enough"; there's still room for improvement, but it's not as important as performance in video games.

Crosscode ran badly when I tried it.

There's some issue with the build of nodejs they're using on macs, but otherwise it should be quite good. No issues across multiple machines I've played on. May be something specific to yours?

Linux gamer here. I spend a lot of money on the steam store.

Now you have to tell us how much money so we have an idea what unixhero boldly confesses on a forum where the A+ players hangout.

Get ready for 2% of your player base to make 50% of the support requests.

Plan B worth it, Valve invest his resources not just for fun.

you will have the same bad performance of electron on Windows, Linux and OSX.

Thank you! At the very least please try to make it work with proton :)

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

very weird to have this as my most upvoted post, but eh. If there is a time to shill out, it's now:

A game inspired by Nuzlocke Challenges + Slay the Spire

discord: http://discord.gg/u64Mg4X

twitter: https://twitter.com/_ldd

mailing list: tiny.cc/dxx5tz

If it can run in Electron, why not just make it a PWA?

Discord and spotify are both electron on Linux, so I would imagine it would work.

Spotify used to be Qt, has it changed?

Yes, yes it has. The UI is still quite good, and doesn't seem to have the downsides that many Electron apps have, except for the amount of memory used by it (still much less than Slack or Skype)

One of the selling points of Electron was making easy to port apps between platforms.

Performance is not an issue.

Some games seem to report measurably better performance on Linux, even. I imagine outside the steady-state, loading times could be a boon for Linux given that Linux filesystems are "faster"

Almost all games use their own VFS layer which heavily lean toward "few huge files with a lookup table" to work around NTFS' deficiencies. They used to be often chunked into 2 GB files, but since a few years developers stopped doing that. Some games even ship all their assets in a single file.

Historically they do that because of consoles, not NTFS.

We always appreciate the effort.

Forgive my ignorance, but why do game servers ban Linux players in pvp games? Fear of some sort of modding only available on Linux?

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.

This is why I have a separate Windows PC for gaming, that I do not ever put personal information into, or use even to sign into my personal, non-gaming accounts (e.g. Gmail). Perhaps not a good solution for everyone, but I think that's what the world has come to.

This is why I settled with a PS4 last year. Even on a Linux PC, I would feel "dirty" with games and steam installed, and I can't afford a PC exclusively for gaming. A PS4 costs 300€ and runs Skyrim, so I am quite happy. I am also speculating that the PS4 will become completely owned by the community and ultimately runs Linux without anything missing.

At one point I built a "Steam Box" that ran Windows (because, at the time anyway, lots of things didn't run on Linux), and hooked it up to the TV. The only problem I ran into was that lots of games don't do controllers well, either.

I have the same setup and controllers aren't really issue on modern games anymore - they're all released for consoles as well so they usually feature good controller support.

I did the same thing. It ended up being used mostly for watching streaming services instead of gaming for social reasons (the TV is in a shared area). I ended up buying an even bigger more powerful gaming PC with dedicated gaming keyboard and mouse and no controller. Linux for work, Windows for streaming TV, Windows for gaming.

I have installed Windows in a dual boot configuration with Linux. I now have a better time separating work and play, win-win!

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" element, like strategy games, turn-based, etc., can make do without information that would enable hacking (and they usually don't benefit from input hacking either). I'm currently working on a pvp strategy game that uses an exaggerated input delay as a game mechanic, which also gets rid of the need to send information that the player shouldn't have: ground-truth is computed server-side and after pruning and transforming according to each player's perception, streamed to the clients. That's unhackable in the game hacking sense.

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.

Also, if you're going to automate bots on a large scale (for resource farming or just interfering with other players), Linux makes more sense for the same reasons it makes sense for other server based software. Combined with a lower player count, devs decide actual Linux gamers are acceptable collateral damage sometimes.

Or anti-cheats looking for unusual factors of the execution environment that might indicate cheats using DLL hooking, or just something wine does differently to windows.

This would be an interesting use case for eBPF.

Given that the JIT may or may not have to be turned off for security reasons, you'd have to be very careful i.e. eBPF-ing userspace code is quite slow

Capitalism at its finest. Harmful measures to ensure profits, and mostly getting a pass because.. shiny things.

What are you talking about? Game makers are trying to make fun games for people to spend time on and enjoy

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.

I use a generic xbox 360 wireless receiver for my PC. The device drivers are an unsigned version of microsoft's drivers. Should I really have to buy the identical dongle for double the price, so that developers can dig into the depths of my OS to confirm that I'm not using a clone receiver?

I honestly see both sides of it, but at the end of the day, I am always hesitant to trust software with black-box functionality deep access to my computer. When I see a sudo command

We are already at the point of computers being able to balance a ping pong ball on a flat surface using just cameras. I can't imagine we are far from cheaters using entirely decoupled computers to physically control devices.

We're already there! See hardware like the EvilController or the ConsoleTuner Titan

It doesn't seem those take the game output into account, maybe I missed something but they just seems to be controllers with scripting capabilities.

The idea of a decoupled cheat would be to acquire the game state from outside the computer running it, either by filming the screen or taping into the video output or the network input, then analyze it and run some aimbot (or any other kind of cheat) on it and finally send the cheat commands as if it came from a legitimate controller, through usb.

I have a similar generic receiver, with some "not genuine" hardware ID. I just force select & install the signed microsoft drivers. The trick works in all versions of windows that I tried.

It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running.

These checks have in the past been notoriously buggy, and can interfere with other operations.

This kind of crud is what remote attestation is for, and Microsoft should be responsible for developing it, not every different gaming company competing with each other for kernel access.

I agree, but at some point you have to decide if the tradeoff between the freedom to run whatever you want is worth the invasiveness of having an anticheat software analysing your system in-depth for cheating softwares is worth it.

In a way, it's true that it's none of their business which softwares you use, but it's also their business to make sure the multiplayer experience is fair for the entire userbase.

I guess that's the beauty of games consoles, where the execution of softwares is tightly controlled to minimize piracy and cheaters.

Maybe that trade-off should be more flexible and dependent on the "league" a given player wants to play in. The criteria could be more strict for the "pros" where cheating can lead to significant gains, like professional athletes who have to pass regular anti-doping tests, but you wouldn't expect the same invasive checks from (for example) people participating in a charity run.

The problem with your idea is that nobody wants to play with cheaters.

Everything that makes the game fun is defeated by a single cheater.

So people are just going to choose between playing with 0 cheaters or go play a different game.

Years ago I read about some game service that detected cheating and put cheaters into games with other cheaters. The author said it was pretty effective.

Reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon's clever anti-piracy trick, where they released a "cracked" version of the game on file sharing sites shortly after launch. The "crack" disabled the copy protection but also changed the gameplay so that NPCs would pirate your products in-game and drive you out of (virtual) business.

Good point, I haven't played games much since the late 90s and I'm returning to gaming only now (partially thanks to Proton), so my experience with multi-player is based mostly on modem or LAN parties with friends, where the social aspect helped to prevent cheating. I guess it's very different now when you can play with random people on the other side of the world.

Historically this is what game developers did, and the servers without anti-cheat enabled were rife with cheating.

When games switched from server browsers to matchmaking, they just defaulted to using the anti-cheat system.

Fwiw, my solution does actually take advantage of remote attestation, and if that is validated, a large part of kernel integrity checks are skipped. The problem is that many “gaming” consumer motherboards don’t ship with TPMv2 or secure boot, and we still have to support those computers.

I understand that, fundamentally, anti-cheat involves taking some form of control away from the player. But when the solution involves deeply embedded hardware modules that take that control away globally, introducing their own host of problems, I think that goes too far, and the cure might be worse than the disease. As a player, I wish there was a way to make sure that the anti-cheat only runs when the game runs, and only checks stuff related to the game and nothing else.

How does tpm or secureboot assist in anti cheat?

When you can remotely prove that the entire boot chain has not been tampered with, it’s much harder to load cheat software in the kernel layer. Of course, still possible, just harder and easier to detect.

How does this address the fact that windows has 100s of badly written drivers that allow r/w to kernel? This seems to only stop the most advance cheats that actually execute at or before boot.

Secure boot addresses other specific security concerns that are unrelated to exploitable drivers. For instance, it eliminates a whole class of PatchGuard bypasses.

Sorry to derail, but how often does anti-cheat development involve buying access to a cheat just for the purpose of reverse engineering it? Is that pretty much most of the time or is there enough evidence collected from logs to be able to infer what was happening?

This is largely dependent on the passive collection capabilities of a particular anti-cheat. Sometimes getting a copy is useful to just to make 100% sure the detection you wrote works as intended. Sometimes it's because the techniques used are novel. Most anti-cheat vendors do this.

Not parent, but have seen this before, or some competitor/pissed off outed person/partner in crime/etc hands it to anticheat team.

Private cheats usually require being vouched in, sometimes with ID scans, sometimes physically shipping you hardware.

> It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running.

I get the sentiment here but we're specifically talking about a mechanism specifically designed to detect other software that is used for cheating.

The alternative is a world where games will only run on machines with SecureBoot, a signed kernel with kernel security on, and only whitelisted signed modules.

There isn't a good solution for how to run games where the clients have to be semi-trusted on a hardware and software stack controlled by the user. If you give me total control over the environment in which a program runs I can make it do and believe anything.

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.

Game companies do take a similar approach to what you're describing, but still feel the need to run anticheat. If you ban aimbots based purely on statistics, you'll just encourage cheat developers to change the statistical properties of their aimbots. Cheats are a fairly big business — even detecting them with anticheat software in ring 0 doesn't seem to be a surefire guard against cheating.

Well, if an aimbot is only statistically as good as a good human player, does it matter anymore whether the player actually plays or a good bot?

If it is only as good as a real player than it won’t be invincible and will be equivalent to playing with a few AIs in a multiplayer game - which already happens.

Also, I believe the exact mouse movement will not be the same for a human and an aimbot - so not only statistics can be used to ban players

> 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.

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.

So, if you allow bots that behave exactly like humans, then what's so bad about that?

I remember playing a first person shooter called Red Faction on PC maybe 15 years ago. Through some poking around I (and many others) discovered that when a client joined a multiplayer game, the server would instruct each client to load a large .dat file local to the client containing presumably a bunch of global assets. Within that were numerous object, physics and game state variables in plain text ripe for the picking. The server would proceed to accept any .dat file that contained the necessary declarations regardless of their value.

I recall seeing players hovering in the air and spinning while shooting rockets out at hundreds of rounds a second. There was also a way to modify your files such that you could crash a game just by joining it. The experience was as interesting and fun as it was awful.

What if they gave you the ability to disable anti-cheat checks but put you up against others who do the same?

I play various games where they developers try hard to prevent cheaters and they still get through and ruin a small but significant percentage of the games. I can't imagine how crappy an experience it would be if there was no cheat protection at all.

It's the game'd business what you are running if you are ruining the game for other players.

I'm going to point out that if you want to go down this route, it is insufficient to just check that the base drivers are untampered with and signed by Microsoft or whatever vendor still.

You now maintain a list of potentially vulnerable drivers that can be used as a jumping off point (such as virtually every motherboard RGB or fan control system), and ban users that have these or hard-disable them at boot. There are some games that have caused machines to overheat by disabling cheat-jumpoffable fan controllers.

On top of that, you effectively have to maintain a whitelist of acceptable drivers, because cheat vendors are registering limited companies by the thousands (only $20 in the UK), getting an EV/codesigning cert, and signing their own drivers. Higher end cheats cost enough to offset this, and there might be less than 5-6 people using a particular certificate. Some of the people behind these also release vaguely-useful legal tools signed with the same certificates to get a large install base for them so they don't stick out.

That being said, IMO as a player, this is invasive as hell, and you should not be crawling through my flash drives, identifying my mouse, killing LogitechMacroSoftware.exe, etc. I'd rather you just collect snap/targetting/click timings server-side and run anomaly analysis on those rather than digging an asshole into my computer.

Also, now I have 5 different "kernel anticheats" running 24/7 simultaneously, half of them are horrifically written and known-insecure, and the other half need to figure out how to not explode spectacularly when the broken half tries to probe and kill it.

Korean MMOs are particularly bad for this and when forcefully uninstalled might permanently destroy disk access, make Windows non-genuine and deactivate it, and send all their data over plaintext (no TLS) with a bizarre, homegrown "encryption" method that is trivially breakable to a bare IP somewhere.

With KMMOs as an example (many of these reward you for staying logged in, have daily rewards, and similar; the game itself is fairly low resource when minimised), GameGuard and HackShield and XIGNCODE constantly have slap-fights where they bluescreen or flop over or die if you try to run multiple of them simultaneously and they try probing and killing each others' services for trying to tamper with themselves. It's like that ridiculous "what happens if three programs all try to demand Always On Top for their window", except give all of them heavy weaponry. These also have severe NIH syndrome for things like homemade shitty crypto and plaintext everything.

Before I “switched sides” to anti-cheat, I used to write and sell cheat software for CS:GO. I had a registered company and purchased an EV code signing certificate just as your post suggests, even getting my cheat drivers signed by Microsoft. I am very familiar with the process given than I’ve seen both sides now.

While other anti-cheats maintain white lists or blacklists of vulnerable drivers, I’ve chosen a different route that doesn’t have the same pitfalls you suggest. Our anti-cheat also doesn’t run 24/7, only when the game is running.

I'm guessing this is a mix of attestation and inspecting what they actually do instead of just blindly checking the certificate and that the signature is verified? I'm curious how well executed that works when it comes to less well behaved anticheats (like Riot's Vanguard generally stays hands off, but GameGuard will immediately heartbeat a "ban me" and intentionally cause a bluescreen to cause you to "lose any data collected by your debugger" when it notices it's being looked at).

This type of BS is super common in Asian countries/published MMOs and a bit less acceptable in the west (you still have EAC and battleye, but at least they make an attempt to use TLS?)

Another insane example: xigncode has long since advertised a feature that the game developers can remote control into your PC like VNC. I don't know whether any developer has chosen to actually enable it, but the fact that they push it as a feature is some serious clown-egg-face.

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of what we do besides what I’ve already said. I will say that I’m really pushing to change the perception that all anti-cheats are bad and are user-hostile. I’m trying to build a product that shows that anti-cheats can actually respect user privacy and provide a positive player experience. And I’m trying to do it by better engineering.

Vanguard I believe would intentionally bluescreen you if it detected you’ve disabled PatchGuard. They had very good reasoning to do so, but I wouldn’t do something like that since I believe it’s user-hostile. Battleye I believe actually doesn’t use TLS last time I checked, using some sort of home brewed XOR cipher which is a bit scary. And of course remoting into computers is unacceptable under any circumstance.

I appreciate that you are trying to do this with respect and hope you succeed.

I've done both sides (largely MMO-stuff as a kid), and for me, I'm done dealing with all this invasive garbage, and just spin up a fresh EC2 GPU instance when I want to play something, and simply don't play the games that choose to disrespect and abuse players to the point of not even allowing GPU passthrough (I can somewhat understand banning emulated GPUs; have dealt with people farming referral accounts a hundred at a time each queuing for games at <5 FPS).

Without details, could you easily bypass your own anti-cheat with your past experience?

As a guy who plays games that have a lot of cheaters, it is incredibly frustrating. Riot's rootkit shit is a small price to play enjoyably with friends. I care more about the experience than I do about the risk of Riot fucking up my Windows install.

Keep doing what you're doing. Just, if you'd leave the anti-cheat off friend-to-friend-PvP games, that would be cool. I don't care if my younger brother 'cheats' against me. He's not going to and if he is 'cheating' it's probably some mod or something.

The problem with Riots anti-cheat (at least to me) was that it runs all the time not just when you're playing the game. This is completely unnecessary and a pretty huge security issue.

They've sort of fixed this now by letting you disable it, but it requires a reboot so I'm still avoiding Valorant for now.

It’s usually down to the game developer to implement features like that.

Ah, you're a vendor of the product, not an in-house shop. Makes sense makes sense.

I've not had issues with cheaters on Dots 2.

Assuming you mean Dota 2 I haven't played for some time but it used to be somewhat common 3 or 4 years ago for people to run scripts to instantly cast hex as soon as opponent appeared on their screen this effectively gave people inhuman reflex times.

You could tell they were cheating because if you watched replay from the cheaters point of view their mouse cursor would jump from current position to hovering over the target instantly and then immediately jump back to cursors original position all within a frame or two.

It is still a problem, although admittedly I haven't seen cheaters myself. Valve will soon™ take Overwatch's replay analysis aproach[1] for anti-cheating, though.

[1] https://blog.dota2.com/2020/11/upcoming-updates/

Because anti-cheat software is buggy, triggering a kernel crash which makes the whole machine unusable is a real possibility, additionally by running in kernel mode, the software bypasses all the OS protections, this can end up terribly if there's an exploit.

Most drivers suffer from this. There's nothing special about anti cheat drivers. It's probably much better tested than the random driver that a hardware manufacture might provide to control some random fan LEDs.

The difference being that a graphic driver is essential to make the hardware work whereas anti-cheat software isn't.

Anti cheat is essential to keep multiplayer games fun

What if I use open source drivers? How are you going to do that? What business is it of yours that I might write my own? Or (more likely) patch my own? What about my HID drivers? Sensitive keystrokes?

Yeah, I just don't see games needing access to such kernel level items.

There’s nothing stopping you from using open source drivers, actually. Plenty of open-source projects like Dokan will typically run fine with an anti-cheat (ours will, certainly). What stops you from running a patched version is actually Windows itself, since Windows requires drivers to be signed with an authenticode codesigning certificate. Plenty of open-source projects and people have one, though. So it’s not an anti-cheat blocking you, it’s Windows itself. Of course, if you go out of your way to disable driver signature enforcement, most anti-cheats will prevent you from playing, but this is a mode strongly discouraged from Microsoft and does weaken your computer’s security.

If anti-cheat is the thing that cares about whether windows is running without driver signature enforcement then anti-cheat is the thing that's blocking me.

My own example: I have an xbox 360 dancemat, which is unusable with the official drivers (they map the arrows as axes, so treat left + right as nothing). So I have to use the open-source XBCD, which frankly I'd treat as more reputable and better code quality than most signed drivers. But since no-one's paying the $100+/year to sign it, it's not signed. And while I understand why Microsoft wants someone to have skin in the game before they issue a driver signing certificate, they really need to find a way to ensure that reputable, established open-source driver projects get signed if they want users to accept driver signing; I wouldn't even mind being stuck on an old "certified" version or something.

I sympathize with you and wish it was possible to support your situation and those similar situations like yours. It’s just disabling signature enforcement effectively removes a key security boundary between kernel and user space, something that that would just be too easy for cheats to exploit.

> What business is it of yours that I might write my own?

If they're providing online servers for you to play on with other people, under the condition that you aren't cheating and they are responsible for stopping cheating for everyone, they very much do care and it is their business, if you want to use their servers.

Having custom drivers is how you get wallhacks or custom mouse control macros that eliminates some of the challenges imposed by the game (e.g. automatic recoil control).

For a single player game, I agree, who cares, but for online games that live and die by competitive play and stopping cheaters so people can enjoy it, there's only so many options of how to find cheaters and so much resources to put towards it, so you get stuff like this.

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.

Unfortunately, your model is just fundamentally broken. Non-system software should never have that level of access to the whole system, and a good operating system should block it for stability, security and privacy reasons, just like any other malware.

No doubt there will continue to be intrusive anti-cheat software in use with some games for a while because some people are disturbingly desperate to play those games and they use operating systems that are junk. Some people still pre-order games too, even though it's illogical to extend that old physical world idea to downloads.

But in the long run, this kind of software is a liability. Better operating systems and more gamers moving to them will eventually kill it for that reason if nothing else does first.

Given that cheating only matters if it actually affects gameplay unfairly, it has always made far more sense to look for cheating through its effects on gameplay anyway, which is something you can observe server-side in an online PvP game. Trusted client-side security checks make no more sense in this context than any other. So it's not even as if killing off the intrusive client-side anti-cheats will lose anything of value in the long run.

I think the reason why anticheat gets a very unsympathetic hearing is because it's frequently buggy or unpermissive, and people fundamentally don't like being locked out of their games. As a Linux gamer who's just unable to play some titles that run fine on my PC because the anticheat doesn't, any perceived flaw in anticheat immediately winds me up.

On Linux, you can check to see if the kernel is operating in lockdown mode to verify the integrity of the system. Lockdown mode forces all modules to be digitally signed and trusted by the kernel keyring before they can be loaded. This would functionally be equivalent to what you do on Windows.

Don't you mean tainted?

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/118117/14305

No, that's something completely different. The kernel is tainted when you load out of tree modules and only means they won't look at your bug reports. Lockdown mode is something similar to the Windows driver signing https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....

https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/g3yqxd/comment/fn... when the anti-cheat developers dictate what you can install and run on your computer, i would argue thats invasive. Running kernel level rootkit for this purpose is also insane. These things are very easy for cheaters to bypass anyways, and only cause problems to the honest players ironically , in addition to blocking out players using wine.

The best way to handle cheating is to give the players moderation powers.

Players have a hard time telling if someone is cheating or not. Especially in game when you're not spectating. Did they see you through a wall, or is it just good game sense? Did they use an aimbot, or is their aim that good, or they did they get lucky?

Has worked well ages for games that had replay and spectating capabilities. MMOs are usually slower paced than fps games so in those server-side checks alone are enough. (Most asian mmos are lazy though and just trust the client and hope their shitty anti-cheat keeps cheaters away, of course it doesnt)

Games for some reason today want single central server, instead of dedicated servers with user maintained communities is part of the problem. (E.g. cs:go vs older cs)

User maintained communities are not friendly to new users. CS:GO has user maintained communities, but most players do not use it. You can't build a community without new users, and new users want to play the game, not build a community.

Especially with team gameplay, players want proper skill based matchmaking. So that they don't have someone on the other team who destroys them. Or someone on their own team that is dead weight.

CSGO relatively heavily suppresses "user maintained" community servers, the entire experience from onboarding to client launch prioritses the Valve-run official matchmade servers for casual/competitive/etc and any special game modes.

Server browser is a hidden afterthought behind a dropdown.

I was active player during CS 1.6 era. I really didnt see the issues you mention and rarely actually met cheaters. When i did they were quickly vote kicked or banned out.

And times have changed. The spread of skill levels has increased with better players getting better, and more and more new players.

As well as more structured games that are not 10v10, but rather smaller 5v5 or 6v6 games, where each player can make a difference.

Cheaters are better at hiding too. Toggling aimbot for a quick kill or two isn't enough to arouse suspicion, and can be passed off as a lucky headshot. Just because you think you've never run into a cheater doesn't mean you haven't.

On the other hand, a really skilled player might be good enough to make you believe he is cheating. Getting vote kicked or banned out for that is not good either.

And anti-cheat doesn't really help the problem either at all. They are easy for cheaters to get around, and it's possible to even have cheat that the anti-cheat can't detect at all as it would use the same inputs normal player would use. Anti-cheat is same as DRM, the only people that suffer are the actual players, not the cheaters or pirates.

It's another social problem that engineers try to solve with technology.

No, 100000s of cheaters get banned every year, it works. Normal players actually enjoy not playing with tons of cheaters.

I would like to ask you to present some proof for those numbers. There's also tons of legitimate players that can't play at all since the anti-cheat system thinks their install is not good. At which point is it okay for anti-cheat developers to tell customers to get a new PC (with their approved hardware and drivers) and install nothing but clean copy of windows and their game on it?

Consider game like Dark Souls 3, it has very simple anti-cheat system and trusts the client completely. Yet you rarely see actually cheaters online, this is purely a social problem.

You can search any rootkit based anti-cheat software and find just how many people have issues with them. Just some examples from the infamous riot vanguard which developers boast it being "user-friendly" rootkit.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/gead0n/riot_vangu...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/geqc73/have_you_d...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/gbebt0/if_riot_is...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/g5aem3/vanguard_a...

Here is 200k bans in one game: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/over-200000-modern-...

Anyway, it seems to me that most of those people just need to update their fan control programs. One example I saw was CPU-z which had a CVE in their driver a few years ago. They are using drivewrs with known vulnerabilities. You also need to consider that some cheaters will also spread mis-information.

"Anti-cheat" making their AIOs or fans stop seems more like virus like behavior instead of telling the user maybe they should update or buy different hardware (which even then is shitty behavior just for some damn game).

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.

Does anyone know a PC gaming website that regularly reviews anti-cheat software? I know review websites get free sample copies and stuff from game publishers... are there any review websites which serve gamers first??

Modern anti-cheat platforms can be pretty invasive and tie very closely into the operating system - ie, if designed for Windows, they often simply won't work at all through some other layer like Proton/Wine.

This is interpreted by many game companies as an attempt to cheat, rather than simply an unsupported use case.

It’s basically an anti-cheat “feature”. The assumption is that if you’re running a windows game on Linux you’re probably cheating.

I'd say there's some basis there. Discussed here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445748

Not just about anti-cheat software.

Typically people who write bots will host them on linux servers, so it's easy to blanket ban linux as a whole, that will catch most bots.

Also, some multiplayer games's servers trust their game client's inputs - if that game client suddenly runs on a system that has full control over the game (like linux and the kind of tech savvy people that knows how to use linux to it's fullest), it makes it harder for them to trust that the 1000 players online are not exploiting the game by manipulating network requests right before it goes over the wire.

This is a compromise that devs have to make when integrating network code with their game: if you click the mouse, does it immediately update the server in a synchronous fashion and introduce latency but having guaranteed consistency of your world (while the game state lives on the server and the client is "dumb") OR do you make the game client smart and hold some portion (or whole) of the game world on the client and just send small updates to the server. In the last case there will be less latency but you have an occasional glitch when packets drop and it is more susceptible to attack, since more work is done locally (Path of Exile have/use to have this setting and you could choose which way you want the game to talk to the server - depending on your connection - I think it's automatic now, haven't played in a while). Why do I mention this? I'd argue it's easier to attack this compromise from a linux box or a compromised linux game client - so again, game devs just outright ban linux since that is the path of least resistance.

Another thing with multiplayer: some games, esp older ones, have to have some minimum fps to keep the game world consistent for all connected players. So between fps and network latency and the mitigations/compromises that the devs have to make here, the code becomes realllly messy/complex and can easily turn into a blackbox - a blackbox that maybe only work on Windows, or a windows specific gfx stack or network stack to guarantee the minimum conditions to make multiplayer playable. I mention this because there are quite a few differences in the network and gfx stacks between Windows and linux, add on top of that different windowing systems and compositors (X11, Wayland etc).. the devs will spend triple the amount of work to get their game stable on both platforms. And again, easiest path is to just ban linux since it is harder to guarantee that the game client behaves in a specific way. This is a hard pill to swallow but its true.

And this is why something like Proton exists: it is better in this case to emulate a Windows environment than it is for each game dev to write 2 implementations for their network/gfx stack in their game, and then hope that the two game clients have similar performance/behaviour traits that keeps the game stable (never mind safe against exploits).

Luckily for us things are getting better, esp in the indie space and in some single player games. Some game engines has also made it waaay easier to build to linux so that has become a non-issue at this point. I'd argue the main stumbling block is in the game clients as described above - the compromise between a stable game world in multiplayer games and possible exploits that can originate from linux hosts.

Anyone else have thoughts on this or want to correct me, please raise it. These are just off the top of my head, I'm not a game dev.

edit: another silly thing that differs between Windows & Linux: font rendering. Your gfx might work fine and when you start rendering text you realize you need to rebuild some portion of your gfx stack, which then maybe breaks on linux... so easier to skip linux then you know your text renders correctly.

I think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more technical issues with Linux. People who have low tolerance for glitches and problem solving to get their games working would be up in arms. The last example is Hyper Light Drifter. No matter which forum, the latest threads include several about Linux specific problems. And that's a game with native support.

Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.

Seems to me like there should be something like a "Docker for games" which uses container tech to create a lightweight, predictable execution environment for video games.

I suppose that's kind of what Proton does, although it focuses on emulating a Windows environment in particular.

Sounds like something that AppImage is perfectly suited for, given that each application is a one-click executable with automatic updating built-in and can optionally provide a predictable execution environment although it's not a container.

In one particular case, I packaged up Mirrors Edge into an AppImage with the AppRun script taking care to setup the environment and WINE. It worked surprisingly well.

That's awesome!

If anyone at Valve is reading, I think this would be an excellent feature for Proton or the Steam client.

They already have something like that. The steam runtime has been in development since at least 2013 now.

In all honesty, I ran Riven through wine, and Proton is a wrapper around wine and some other tools to cover the rough edges.

I went the opposite way and got rid of Linux for windows wsl2. I have the random issue but otherwise things run pretty well.

Did the same. Was just not worth the risk of waiting until an issue gets fixed. Or if it even gets fixed. I mean even in GTA 5 working perfectly, the overlay always had an issue of a missing mouse pointer.

Also Microsoft Store bought games do not work on Linux.

Well and in the end i just want to play my games. And if i want to start modding, don't get me started on the hoops you have to jump through just to get a modded Skyrim with everything installed how you like it.

I have mixed feelings about wsl because support requests from wsl users are usually due to issues in wsl itself. I guess that's how windows developers feel about linux.

How does Stadia strike you as an alternative? It works on anything (AFAIK) that runs Chrome.

Not op, but I think the biggest miss in cloud gaming is no one developing cloud first multiplayer games.

Currently in any kind of client-server multiplayer game out there you face n+1 game states (n is the number of players) and a lot of the art is in how to reconcile these. The n+1 is due to most games implementing some degree of client autonomy (e.g. in movement), and the reality of network round trips from each client causing everyone to be slightly out of sync. A concrete example of how this affects players is the experience of being shot after narrowly escaping behind cover in an FPS.

Cloud gaming substitutes reconciling these n+1 simulations with some input latency for each player. I think this could produce some qualitatively better experiences for certain games. In particular, Fall Guys is a recent game that I think would play better as a cloud first experience.

The interaction between players in Fall Guys is grabbing other players who are near to you. Due to the network latency many players have the experience of being grabbed by folks nowhere near them. A cloud first version of the game would eliminate this problem that simply can’t be solved otherwise.

The thing you're missing is that the point of client-side simulation and lag compensation is simply one of UX. It makes the game playable.

> Cloud gaming substitutes reconciling these n+1 simulations with some input latency for each player.

You're just pitching the naive networking model that every developer starts with (because it's trivial) until they realize how horrendous it is to wait 100ms on every single input.

Also, it's not "some input latency", it's the full latency of the entire round trip. From input to server (40ms) and then video to client (40ms) just to see how an action you did 80ms ago panned out.

You've eliminated none of the trade-offs, just exchanged one frustration (dying even though you shot someone before they shot you) with another (watching a delayed video feed of them shooting you while you wait for your input to cross the network).

There's a reason why client simulation is ubiquitous. Btw, lag compensation is really hard and nobody would want to do it if they could get away with the naive networking model.

A lot of people have a much better latency than 40ms.

There is more to latency than just the ping to the server.

The raw controller input latency / controller polling rate.

The time it takes for your packet to get to the server.

The number of packets per second you're sending to the serve (e.g. 100pps).

The server processing time per frame.

The server frame rate.

The time it takes for the packet to get back.

The frame rate of the client machine.

Whether Vsync is enabled (more latency).

The time it takes to transfer a frame of rgb data to the monitor.

The monitor frame rate and processing time per frame.

The pixel response time of the pixels on the monitor.

If we're doing cloud gaming. we also need to add latency stages for encoding and decoding video and how long it takes to download each frame of video.

By simulating everything client side you remove a ton of stages in this latency pipeline.

This is actually one of the selling points Google brought up at the original Stadia announcement: you can't pirate or cheat in Stadia games since it's just an interactive video feed.

Of course, most people who play games don't like that - including myself.

You definitely can cheat with Stadia, the earliest public Overwatch aimbots were just AutoHotKey scripts that detected pixels on screen and would adjust your aim so as to not make you look like an obvious cheater.

The MMO programmer in me fantasizes about making yet another MAG-like (ps3-era shooter with upto 128 players) game. That kind of thing would be so much cleaner to do on a completely server-side platform.

However, a large game like that would need a large budget to back it. Without Stadia being more popular I don't see anyone throwing all their eggs in that basket. Because it could only run on Stadia and nowhere else.

One way to mitigate risk would have been to build for both Luna (Amazon) and Stadia. But neither are very popular, and one is Windows-only while the other is Linux-only. So my risk would actually double, not mitigate since I have to develop for two platforms.

I'm ignoring xCloud since it's just a bunch of Xboxes and no thanks.

For smaller, mid-size/indie studios which are not building a massively multiplayer game, I just don't see the up side of making a Stadia-only game. They wouldn't be trivially portable to other platforms and players have learnt to live with network latencies.

So, unless a Google-owned studio does it, I don't see truly cloud-first multiplayer game happening. Assuming that's what you meant by "cloud first".

OTOH Ubisoft does ship their games on Stadia and I'd be curious to know if the experience in, for example, The Division 2 is any better. Even if the game doesn't scale the number of players in an instance, they should still get some benefit of being on Stadia. It doesn't seem to be a very popular mode in the game's subreddit though.

You know that PlanetSide still exist right? It's has it's flaws, but it quite playable even while being heavily client-sided. Also hardest issue for FPS games are aimbots and not even Stadia can solve this.

The recently released 'Outcasters' is the closest thing we've got to what you describe so far. I read an interview [0] recently by the devs describing their experience making the game on Stadia.

[0] https://www.thegamer.com/outcasters-interview/

How is this functionally different than any other game server dealing with player game states? Players would get even more warping and inexplicable behaviour as their state differed from the server state. You would just as likely get the same warping in Among Us as the game arbitrates the various players' states.

The conceit here is that rendering happens server-side, so visible game-state latency is replaced by input latency.

Many RTS games have already done this in a traditional client rendered setup with deterministic lockstep (e.g. [1]). The basic idea is to have an input at time t which has a fixed delay until t + x. During [t, t+x] everyone syncs what actions they will take, and so everyone renders the exact same state. Of course, if this sync fails then the game will stutter for everyone, unlike in the stadia case, and it has pros and cons for various types of game. It was largely rejected for action games in the past. The trick is you need to specify the minimum latency that everyone must get under for it to run smooth. In the server-rendering case you would be locked to the renderer's region and would have people with better internet having a strong advantage.

If you're interesting in this sort of thing, check out [2] which goes into depth on how to synchronise game simulations in a bunch of different ways.

[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_o...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9X4lysFr64

PC gaming is like the last bastion of quasi-mainstream general compute at home, so I seriously hope it doesn't go away.

I never bought another game on my girlfriend's console after considering the fact that I have games in my Steam library that I bought 10+ years ago while the $60 game I buy on her console just lasts until the hardware breaks and they shut down the eShop.

That's such a bad deal I'm surprised that I ever made it.

Aside, I wonder how much the jumbo-sized ATX / tower PC case market has sold consoles by making people think they have to pick between a stupidly big server-sized PC tower vs. a cute little console that fits under the TV. I think the ATX/tower form-factor has played a nontrivial hand in preventing culture of having a small but powerful PC at the center of the home entertainment system.

The small-form factor trend is finally picking up steam (https://old.reddit.com/r/sffpc/) and it amazes me that this isn't yet the standard.

SFFPC is still too much hassle for an average builder, plus "ITX tax" is not very attractive too. I have built my first SFF last winter and I had to read that sub for a long time to find out all compatibility issues, and even then I ran into incompatible cooler mount and MB, I had to use a bit of force to set CPU cooler on a crooked mount. And latest trend of AIB GPU manufacturers to abandon 2-slot format is also not good for SFF.

Another issue are thermals. I can find out that my SSD is overheating to 105* in the nice looking ITX case and mitigate that a little (I have to hope now that 82-83* on a working SSD won't kill it too fast). Average user will see this by a blue smoke coming out of the case :)

I wish there was more initiative from big manufacturers in that area.

Not OP but anything that mentions Chrome is an instant loud no for me these days if I can avoid it somehow.

Just like MS 15 years ago.

It's not Chrome specific though.

afaik Stadia is chrome specific. try visiting http://stadia.google.com/ on another browser. I can't even login and view my previous screenshots, let alone play a game.

Most every cloud gaming is Chrome specific. Heck the Amazon cloud gaming doesn't even work on Chrome on Linux....

You're right, I only checked with Edge forgetting that is just Chrome too.

For what little it's worth, Stadia is opening to play through Safari (on iOS) soon.

Cloud gaming is just not really good enough for me for fast paced games.

I've tried GeForce Now, Stadia, and Shadow. So far GFN is my favorite and Shadow is my least favorite but tbf I'm not in the proper region for Shadow.

Haven't tried Stadia, but I can certainly vouch for GFN. The lag is comparable to consoles on TV (and in some games, better), so while it would be a handicap in PC-centric fast-paced games, I was damn impressed with it. If I had a reason to pay the $5/month premium for unlimited gameplay away from home, I certainly would.

Stadia is really sensitive to lag. In my urban home, with a reliable high-speed broadband connection, it works pretty well when physically connected by Ethernet, but the stuttering is intolerable on wifi.

I tried GeForce Now with a high speed internet connection (Comcast) with Counter-Strike and I found the game to be unplayable from the lag. I double checked my speed test and router settings, it should’ve been fine.

Ultimately I believe these services represent the future of gaming, but without net neutrality or alternative ISPs it’s going to be awhile before that future is realized.

My experience with GFN has been MUCH better than I expected. I've also come across similar sentiments as yours, which leads me to think it's a proximity to the DC issue.

E.g., my RTT to my ISP's gateway, on average, fluctuates between 8-11 ms (currently ~14 according to pfSense) and a ping to google's closest response is usually about the same. I'm sure others have it better, but I am quite impressed, given a little bit of this latency would probably be eliminated by not having a virtualized router as is the case with my setup.

Twitchy MP shooters and twitchy platformers are the 2 subgenres that aren't suited for this arrangement. Most everything else is perfectly fine (under the aforementioned ideal conditions).

Did you use wifi or wired ethernet?

I have a super stable 1 Gb/s fiber connection with like 5-7 ms to a close by AWS data center where I ran Parsec on a VM. I got ≈ 400 Mb/s to the VM, with < 10 ms ping over my 5 Ghz wifi. But I could still never get a stable setup. As soon as I went wired everything worked great. I think jitter is a big problem.

With a wired setup I could also move to further away DC's (like 20 ms) without any issue.

It was wifi, my connection speed with speedtest over wifi was 100Mb down and 30Mb up.

I should probably note I was also sitting next to my wifi router, so I’m not sure that a wired connection would’ve made a noticeable difference.

Even right next to the antenna, wires will have less latency and packet loss than wireless.

Sure but it shouldn’t be noticeable. For example, I can play Counter-Strike on my computer itself just fine over wireless without the latency issues.

From my experience, I think it is. A non-small part of multiplayer game engineering is to handle latency. With streaming you have none of that, and even if the connection just stutters for a few 10's of ms you will get a horrible playback experience.

Game streaming is most comparable to live video streaming with a frighteningly small buffer (< 10 ms).

The GeForce Now client itself told me my connection was good enough for gaming... I’m not arguing that wired cables aren’t faster, but these streaming services aren’t advertising based off of that and their own clients aren’t requiring that level of performance either.

I've tried GeForce Now also, the client told me everything was fine over Wifi (but it wasn't). Switched to wired, and again everything worked perfectly. I'm in the same room as my router.

I'm just saying that my guess is that this probably has nothing to do with your ISP or net neutrality, and more with technical limits of wireless connections. But I could of course be wrong... Try it with ethernet and see how it goes, I just have a long cable I temporarily run through the room when I wanna play :-)

(And yeah, I think it's kinda fishy that they don't make it clearer if/that wired connections can make big improvements. Look around the subreddits about these services, or their support pages and you'll see that people recommend ethernet, and the vendors first recommendation when having trouble is to use wired ethernet [0], [1])

[0]: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9595943?hl=en&ref_t... [1]: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4504/

I have Ubiquiti home networking, and sometimes play GFN or Steamlink over wifi a few feet from an AP, but just trust me that wired is always better than wifi, regardless of what a rudimentary connection test tells you. If you have the option of trying wired, just do it and see for yourself.

Not OP.

I can't wait to see Google dump Stadia.

Curious why you care about this?

I don't like the concept of not owning anything anymore. I don't like paying subscriptions for everything to big companies.

It's detrimental to consumers.

So why aren't you complaining about Steam then? At least that's somewhat tangentially related to this article.

If a game dev team thinks they can stop people from gaining an unfair advantage from just preventing people from running Linux they are morons. Even if you were in Windows you have to do is setup an inverse Linux VM to operate on the local host network in which case it would essentially be a daemon. Even with cigwin and a few other tools, you can use strace to inject system calls and override values right into the PID of the game

I'm kind of worried we've peaked on Linux compatibility however. We've seen some of the big franchises that supported it in Valve's initial push (Hitman, Football Manager being the two I'm aware of) back away from it in future iterations and Valve themselves now have Epic as a more immediate threat than the Windows store.

It doesn't even matter whether someone is cheating. All that matters is whether they're ruining the game. You don't need a rootkit to determine that.

Would you ban tower rushers in starcraft/warcraft2/warcraft3?

Maybe! The real problem is to help people avoid people they want to avoid, not banning clients on technical grounds. A genuine attempt at solving the problem wouldn't be based on universal bans. There could be groups who have their own blacklists. Find the groups you agree with and tick boxes to subscribe to their ideas of who should be banned.

> restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected

WTF? Why?

What distro do you use?

PopOS

While I do share your frustration on linux gaming I thought to give sound to the opposing side who simply had this coming oit of a risk analysis.

TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux

After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into the system which you cannot inspect from userspace.

With linux coming into the party, even if with the amazing work by Wine you do manage to get the desired anti-debug behaviour on the emulated userspace app, linux people can make arbitrary hooks on their kernels.

So instead of risking major reddit shitstorms over that 1% players that can cause 3% profit loss, it's better to ditch that 1%

I don't even know where the start with this.

First off, undocumented binaries, and inspecting kernel drivers from user-space is absolutely no barrier to RE/Cracking/Cheating on any platform. I'm pretty sure 50%+ of the people on this site can put arbitrary hooks on the windows kernel, given some motivation, and importantly, when they actually control the hardware they own.

From what I know (not an expert) the state of the art in DRM for games is Denuvo which uses undocumented idiosyncratic CPU instructions, that the activation server has a database of and sprinkles some magic patch to activate the game for that CPU, ie, nothing to do with OS. Anything else AAA is cracked pretty much immediately.

Whatever about the technical details, we can do risk analysis on a lot of things. We can do risk analysis on whether a kid is likely to commit serious violence to other people later in life and lock them up, or otherwise exclude them from society in anticipation of that, but we don't.

Some things are important, some things are not. Personally I rate open computing hardware a lot higher than some game company's 2% profit, and imo any company employing the tactics described in the GP should be rightly called out on it, and they should just make better solutions to the (very small) problem of people cheating in online games.

I agree with you. But there is another aspect to this, it's not just about profits. Online multiplayer games can truly be ruined by cheaters. That hurts a lot of innocent people who paid good money for the game and just want to have an honest shot to test their skills against others.

in which case, server authoritative state is the only way to prevent cheating.

In a competitive game don't let clients dictate what the server does. Although I understand there is a performance issue. But clients should not be trusted.

Would that work for lag? I assume there is some predictive aspects to a fluent gameplay these days. Also for the server to decide which e.g. player someone can see or not, seems quite intense.

This seems inadequate to prevent aim assistance too.

I mean it's a moot point anyway, since it's probably not too long until bots can play all games better, without additional information or help.

Prediction in online multiplayer games has been around since real-time multiplayer games existed. From my own first experience the first versions of counter-strike 1.x had it, but I'm pretty sure it started quite a while before that.

And yes its a classic arms race, in the simple example I can connect my bot to the display output and to input as keyboard and mouse / gamepad and you could probably pretty easily get an aimbot that's superhuman.

The solution is not a technical one, just like DRM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

Just to follow this up a bit

Who the fk cares if people cheat in online games? Funnily enough, a hell of a lot of people, but they are generally not talking about online video games, instead they are talking about protocols like DNS, HTTPS, amplication DoS attacks, cryptocurrencies, elections, any number of other things, and it turns out these really hard to impossible to solve, and they definitely don't lend themselves to real time multiplayer games easily.

For games it much easier, you just let people host their own servers, you let them own the compute, you let them manage and mod the servers, you let them build communities of people they want to play with. See Minecraft. Pretty sure that made a bit of money without worrying about losing revenue to some inventive kids who priate/mod/whatever the game. -_oo_-

Would aimbots be impossible to make if there was no anti-lag / network prediction code? As a thought experiment, imagine a game which has only single player and LAN multiplayer (Local Area Network), where you have to physically connect computers to each other. Games used to be played like that decades ago, and today we have PCs that are much more mobile - notebooks and laptops. As far as I know, LAN has super good network latency and it could work without lag compensation code. Didn't DooM work like that? Also Quake before QuakeWorld.

You don't have to lecture me about the practicality of releasing a game that has LAN only multiplayer, or that people have jobs, kids and responsibilities. I get that.

Aimbots are simple, you reskin the other players head, then detect where on the canvas that color is. As others have mentioned you could probably use external tools like a video camera aim system. You can't do much about aimbots. But you can make it so that the game takes more skill then "point and click". I used to play a lot of Unreal Tournament (the classic) in instagib mode which meant one shot instant kill, but even then I was able to win over players with auto aim. You just waited for them to shoot someone else, then you killed them while their weapon was cooling down. You couldn't shoot them in the back as they used 360 field of view, so you had to know the map well. Players/athletes that cheat usually do it because they want a shortcut, and thus can not become very good. Or there is a financial incentive, where you cheat just a little bit in order to make a living doing what you love, and those cheats are the most problematic as they are hard to catch.

> This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2.

About half of Destiny’s active playerbase PvPs. In content drought times, it’s pretty much what keeps the game alive. So yeah, simply false.

I don't know why you're up in arms about this, but it's clearly not false. Almost all of the games content is PvE based. The PvP mode is very small in scope compared to everything else that's available.

Again, because I can't just play the PvE content on linux. I get banned upon a few minutes of just launching the game.

I think GP is defending your initial statement, not arguing against it. They're responding to the person who disagreed with you about the game being mostly PvE.

Ah yeah I misread. Thank you!

Right. But I don't care for PvP. I've never wanted to play PvP.

I enjoy the raids and the cooperative strikes with friends.

Even if it's what keeps the game alive, they have one less active player because I don't have the ability to play with my friends.

But you could play destiny as PvE game if you want

I could, but I would still get banned because of the anti cheat.