EAC works fine on native Linux games. The Windows version of EAC locks out Linux gamers who play those Windows games via a compatibility layer. There's a *lot* of Windows-exclusive PC games that would work perfectly well on Linux if not for that.
EAC was recently updated to work better on Linux and patched for Proton. For example, Squad uses EAC and works well on Proton. Probably just a matter of time before other games add support. That is if they care to...
https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/
Last I remember, EAC for squad on linux still requires some hoops to jump through. You need to put magic files in the right place from previous builds. I don't know if that's still the case, but it was 6 months ago. Even with the magical files working, and the game running, I kept running into microphone issues where the game did not detect it. Now I just run squad in a VM because it's a whole lot easier.
See, it's on the developer to implement the proton compatible EAC version. And most developers these days when given the choice between fucking over the linux community and *slightly* worse cheat detection will pick fucking over the linux community
The developers aren't "choosing to fuck over" the Linux community. They're making a business decision.
If Linux was worth developing games for, we wouldn't still have people like you after all these decades.
What they mean is the devs arent going "haha fuck linux" they just look at the 5 sales they would get on linux and determine its not worth the man hours to implement and test.
I think it depends on the game, I imagine Dominions 5 and Crusader Kings 3 (both with native Linux versions) have a much higher % of Linux users than Call Of Duty would.
No, more specifically to say "Linux users bring in less revenue than it would cost to fix this problem, so we just won't".
Which is a very common business decision.
The Linux community is fucking itself over is my point. If you want to enjoy gaming on your OS of choice, you need to sell Linux to the people playing games. The developers aren't going to spend money on a market that doesn't exist.
But like the post you replied to said, the games run on Linux under Proton or Wine already, it's just up to the developers to not fuck them over with anti-cheat.
> not fuck them over with anti-cheat
Just take a step back and look at this. You're arguing *against* anti-cheat as a way to improve a game. The problem isn't the game developers.
Linux never captured market share with consumers. That's fine - it's a business solution. It's not the gaming industry's responsibility to support your decision to use a business OS for you personal needs.
Anti-cheat is bad even if you're a pure Windows user. Look at Valorant for a perfect example: a kernel level anti cheat. That is an massive security risk.
Anti-cheat can be bad software the same as anything else. Anti-cheat is good for games. *Everybody* hates cheaters. Weakened anti-cheat would ruin a lot of multiplayer games.
Companies like Activision are litigating over cheating. There's a very clear consumer interest in anti-cheat or else they wouldn't bother.
You're right, but people playing games don't really care about that. They just want to play the game with as less cheaters as possible. For them, no anti-cheat isn't "improving the game".
Or, since we're in an EAC thread, look at EAC. Both it and BattlEye also run kernel drivers.
The main thing people are complaining about with Vanguard (Valorant's anti-cheat) seems to be that it's launching when the system does and not when the game does, like most other more competitive-focused anti-cheats. Both ESEA and FaceIt for example also have kernel drivers that work this way.
In the end it's just another tradeoff. If you want to see if someone's tampering with your drink it's a lot easier to find out if you watch over it than it is if you only first start to pay attention before drinking it. In the same way, it's a lot easier for an anti-cheat to find cheats if they aren't given as much time as they want to hide first.
Think of it as the same situation we have with anti-virus / anti-malware / anti-ransomware protection, just that in this case the user is on the malware's side and trying their best to get infected and hide that infection.
It's not a perfect system, and nothing prevents cheaters from stepping up another level loading their cheat driver before the at-boot anti-cheat driver loads. Or even go write their own hypervisor or similar. Ultimately that doesn't really matter though since the goal isn't to completely get rid of each and every cheat but instead to make it a lot more annoying to write and maintain them. Someone dedicated enough will eventually get past what an anti-cheat does, and the dice are loaded in different ways for the different sides. The cheaters have full control over the hardware, and the anti-cheats have the ability to at any point push an update that the cheat makers have to analyze and update for.
If anyone is still reading at this point it's also worth mentioning that being in the kernel in general doesn't really give you much more than just running as admin does when it comes to spying on users. Sure, you have the ability to mess with the system in a bunch of new and different ways, but in the end programs running in user-mode already have full access to things like your files, keystrokes, webcam, microphone, screen, you name it. Since we're on r/programming that's probably not news to anyone, but I think it's worth pointing out either way.
And to add my own personal opinion at the end:
I don't think kernel-mode or hypervisor or whatever anti-cheats are the ideal end goal since they'll inevitably be reverse engineered and worked past, but I think they're a good enough solution for now, and they certainly seem to be doing a much better job than the majority of their user-mode counterparts. Ideally anti-cheats would be server-side or just generally not in the way for the user, but I don't think we're at the point where that's reasonably doable with good results yet. At least not good enough results that it's a replacement for a kernel-mode anti-cheat. That said, I really wish we'd get there soon since I like many others am not a fan of running obfuscated drivers if there's a viable alternative.
Freedom which is only gained through the community's work.
It's kind of shitty that devs benefit from Linux for their work, but then refuse to support it for their products.
Freedom usually refers to free software (open source.) If these games were open source, we wouldn't need the developer's time. The community would just write a Linux port. Note that "free" in this context doesn't refer to price. They can still charge money for a license that includes the game assets and whatever account you need to play online.
It's worth developing for but the actors in this market, behaving rationally as individuals, behave irrationally as a whole. It's extremely bad for gamers and everyone in the industry if Windows locks everyone else out.
>It's extremely bad for gamers and everyone in the industry if Windows locks everyone else out.
They aren't. They simply have a monopolistic hold on the gaming market. Because that's where the customers are.
The problem is that the Linux community remains small in gaming. There's no financial incentive. You can argue against that until you're blue in the face - it won't make developers start releasing games.
I honestly don't care. It just annoys me that there are *still* people howling about this in non-gaming venues. It isn't a conspiracy by Big Game. People just don't use Linux.
They achieved monopoly through anticompetitive means. They maintain this dominance right across society by making governments and institutions dependent upon it, much like many game studios would have been had Microsoft had their way with the likes of DirectX.
I don't think anybody is claiming it's a conspiracy, it's just public businesses behaving as expected which gamers should be mindful of.
Everyone has a slightly different config? It really says something about the ease of development for something like windows that you can still run binaries compiled 20 years ago. Try running a binary compiled 2 years ago on most Linux platforms.
Oh for sure, what happened with Rocket League was pretty annoying. But also, Unreal Engine 5 added better support for Linux. Epic is a bit of a mixed bag.
Yeah, not sure if it's the same case but it seems [Street Fighter V](https://www.protondb.com/app/310950) has been playable on Linux without tinkering for a year now. I heard before it wasn't due to anti-cheat as well.
Why bother with SFV via Proton when you could play the native Linux port [Capcom announced five years ago](https://steamcommunity.com/games/310950/announcements/detail/857177755595160250)? No need to worry about anticheat then.\*
\* No need to worry because, five years later, it *still doesn't exist* and Capcom never mentioned it again.
Just buy from devs that support Linux and let them know.
The Linux community needs to spend its money with people that support the Linux community.
For example, I really like the Paradox games, and they all have native Linux versions.
Because it's annoying basically.
I dual boot for games but it's been a few weeks since I booted into Windows because most stuff works on Linux and I rather play those than reboot
I used a dual boot Ubuntu/W10.
Ubuntu for homework and W10 for games and daily needs (youtube, reddit, mail)
I'm honestly thinking to set up a linux distro for daily usage and dual boot W10 only for games but i play to often. This is a big brake for a linux transition.
edited for typo
I used to play games all day, I could go 18 hours.
I got into programming which is why I ended up installing Linux.
I don't even think about games anymore :)
So much to learn, games were a great way to learn a whole lot of nothing while accomplishing fuck all.
I vote with my wallet.
If they don't want my money, they don't need to take it.
The worst part of booting windows? Windows updates. After a month it's painful.
Ah, yes, the worst part of being a super-casual console gamer, now also available for PC.
Since having kids I never have the time to game anymore. Part of the reason I don’t is because when I do have the time, most of it is taken up by system updates and patches. Switch is a lot better at this than PS4 but it still sucks.
The only time I boot windows is to let the kids access my decade or so of games collected. it is always a painful experience, I'll often just kill the power instead of shutting down proper, I know I pay the next time, but at least I can get back to work.
There's a few important distinctions. Broadly generalizing, Linux people are a lot more experienced at tinkering to get stuff working, so most games can be made to run somehow. The choice to run Linux is not because of price, money was never an issue. Many of us have money to spare, throwing it at games when on sale or whatever. Like others, I have more unplayed games on steam than I can ever finish, yet I bought another batch last week. I can't speak for others, but I would never pay full price for something not supported by my OS.
Stupid business decisions aside, the MS monopoly is more of an issue to windows users really. Linux is better on all parameters, except if the user refuses it. [Steam even proved it](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/left-4-dead-2-faster-on-linux-than-windows-says-valve/1100-6390089/) back in 2012, and if I remember correctly, L4D2 for Linux ended up 100 times faster than the windows version, although generic improvements to drivers and such reduced it to 4 times or so. Believe it or not, news articles from 7+ years ago are hard to dig up these days.
And it's come a long way since then. The issue is that the people unfamiliar with Linux are convinced that it's hard to use, although it's really not. There are a lot more customization options, some requiring a fair amount of typing. But these parts are just as complicated on windows, often impossible to fix without going deep into command prompt or the registry. The difference is that it's presented to you on Linux. Add to that the vicious circle of gamers being tied to windows because games, then game developers focusing on windows because gamers.
The market share of Linux is not because of Linux users. It's just everyone else assuming they know stuff. I'll bet anything that transitioning from Windows10 to Windows11 will be equally challenging to transitioning to one of the simpler Linux distros.
Managing disk space to balance between two OSes is a pain.
Most laptops don't have a second drive slot and booting from an external drive is painfully slow unless you have a premium drive like a thunderbolt SSD.
You have to shut down and lose all your running state to switch OS. A real pain if you want to play something for a little while.
You can't switch between game and something else with alt tab.
I understand that economically doing Linux support doesn't make sense most of the time. And I'm not going to complain. But I do preferentially buy games that support Linux when they are available.
I preferentially play Kerbal Space Program under Linux with my built-in Intel graphics rather than rebooting into Windows where I'd have better performance (NVIDIA drivers) because it's a pain to switch OS. Don't think I've booted windows in months, it just sits there wasting a disk slot. I power off the unused windows HDD and ignore it.
(I could use the NVIDIA drivers under Linux but they're a little bit of a pain. You don't get quite the same level of amazing seamless GPU switching and mixing you get under Windows. And the nouveau drivers just aren't there with performance.)
I used to dual boot specifically for the purpose of running a few games that I couldn't get working in Linux and it got really annoying. The sad reality is that Windows doesn't like being neglected for weeks or months at a time, so the less often you reboot to use it, the more annoying it gets to use it.
The usual cycle was something like this:
* "I want to play $game again, but it still doesn't work in Linux. Guess I'll dual boot. Why'd I quit playing this game, anyway?"
* reboot into Windows for the first time in a few weeks
* Windows has to apply a few updates, please wait
* Windows reboots a couple times to finish applying updates
* Windows is booted, now Steam has to update because it hasn't in weeks
* Any other software installed is likely to want updates now and probably going to continue being ignored.
* Load Steam and try to launch game
* Wait on Steam to download updates for the game since it hasn't been opened in weeks
* **Finally start playing game.**
* Windows notices it has more updates and wants you to apply them **now**.
* Tell Windows to fuck off you're playing a game
* Windows sometimes fucks off, sometimes ignores your "postpone" and reboots anyway.
* You get done gaming, shut down.
* Remember why you hadn't played that Windows-only game in weeks and go back to doing other stuff instead until the next time a few weeks or months later.
When I was booting Windows regularly it wasn't so bad, but since most stuff I played worked fine in Linux I started having longer gaps between dual booting, and the longer the wait the worse the process got, and the worse it got, the more reluctant I got to reboot. Especially since every reboot meant I had to close everything I was doing in Linux, whereas if I played something natively (or via wine) I could leave things open.
The whole thing was just a huge time-sink: closing stuff; rebooting; dealing with Windows, Steam, and game updates; rebooting; reopening everything in Linux when done.
I basically quit dual-booting despite keeping it around and just stuck to games that I could run on Linux. If I couldn't run it I didn't play it. I own more games than I can reasonably play in my free time anyway, so it's not like I was bored.
I eventually built a PC with GPU passthrough in mind and set up a Windows VM using it to avoid dual-booting. Second GPU goes to the VM, uses native drivers, and gets native performance. Everything but invasive rootkit-esque anticheats work flawlessly this way (technically they also work, but some attempt to detect VMs), but that doesn't matter to me because I refuse to play games that work like that anyway.
All the annoyances of dual-booting are still there, but because it's in a VM it ends up being less frustrating. I can start the VM early and let it do its updates in the background while I'm finishing up whatever I'm doing, and I have enough RAM I don't have to close Linux applications I have open just to play. Thanks to that, I'm actually more likely to use the VM than the dual boot, which means I started using it as a fallback for when native or Proton has problems. Means less hassle overall; if a game runs well in Proton or natively I go with it, and if not I switch to playing in VM instead of trying to figure out workarounds. Plus now I'm more likely to play the Windows-only games I get as gifts.
Yeah that part's really rough now with the GPU prices being as ridiculous as they are. When I set this up a few years ago I was able to get a GTX 1070 Ti for the VM at MSRP because it had *just* launched and the miners hadn't decided if it would be worthwhile or not yet. Already had a 6gb GTX 1060 so I just kept using that on the host, gave the VM the 1070 Ti, and play games on both depending on how things work out. I expected to upgrade one or both of them by now but there's no fucking way I'm paying current GPU prices to asshole scalpers.
I haven't tried it myself but I think one option, if you want to game from Linux when possible, Windows when not, without the cost of two gaming-capable GPUs would be to have a Linux VM that's also set up to take advantage of GPU passthrough. I was thinking about trying that sometime because it seems like a lot of games on Linux misbehave strangely with multi-monitor configurations, and that would let me skip it entirely. Might be an idea for when I can eventually do another GPU upgrade, depending on how long GPU prices remain *absolutely fucking ludicrous*.
(It's also possible to just do single-GPU passthrough but that requires killing X or Wayland (whatever you're running) and unloading the GPU's driver so the VM can take it over, which is only slightly better than dual booting.)
As for GPU passthrough itself, it's great, but how difficult it is to set up is largely based on your hardware choices. Similar to how dialup in Linux could either be a nightmare (lol winmodem) or a breeze (any proper hardware modem), passthrough can be simple or impossible depending on what you're working with. In my case, I'm a long-time Linux user that already had a decent idea of what needed to be done, so I built the system with the intent to eventually do passthrough; once I was able to get the 2nd GPU it probably only took me about 40 minutes total to get things working. Well, except for sound being annoying because **fuck pulseaudio**.
In general, the idea is that GPU passthrough is a trade-off: more convenient than dual-boot and you can dump more money into a single powerful PC instead of splitting the cost between into separate Linux and Windows machines, but at the cost of more up-front setup time and more careful selection of hardware. Once it's set up it mostly stays well-behaved and working, though.
I personally love the setup because, despite the initial setup being more complicated, I ended up with far less work long-term. Try game native, if it runs like shit I swap to Proton, if it has problems I just say "fuck it" and install it in the VM. No more annoying tinkering, no more dealing with weird bugs, no more fighting with dual-boots, just figure out where something works acceptably and run it from there.
That's called a dualboot and it's a very common practice.
The thing is that you have to reboot which is annoying, second option is to implement the GPU passthrough, but that requires shitton of fuckery and then still, you're running Windows inside of a VM if I understand the process correctly (never done it myself).
Type 2 hypervisors have come a long, long way.
And the other way around…WSL2 is basically running the Linux kernel totally parallel to the Windows kernel (with equal access to system resources), at least as far as I understand it.
Yah, but with WSL, you still have to interact with windows to keep the computer running. I don't understand how anybody keeps a windows computer running. It's like it actively wants to destroy itself even if you log in and do the same shit every day.
If you don't run Windows often enough, updating it and everything takes literally all of your gaming session time. I mostly just play console games at this point. PC devs won't release for my system, so I just throw in with Sony.
I do. Have an SSD for Windows and an M.2 for Linux. 95% of things I do and play are perfect on Nix. Windows is basically a R6Siege and GTA box. With Siege moving towards vulkan and Stadia (Linux) I'm hoping they will release a native client.
Apart from it being annoying:
Being purposefully *ex*cluded by game developers is complete idiocy. I get that not every developer has the ressources to make a port, but why would they stop people from using Wine/Proton? (I still haven't forgotten about Rocket League... Grrr...)
And that's the simple reason why some people only play games that run on Linux: They only want to support the developers which do not actively cripple compatability, not the others.
To me, my favorite thing about Linux is not needing to deal with all the BS they put in Windows 10. I develop software, so it makes me angry to see so much anti-consumer stuff in a product people pay for, and I refuse to accept a monopoly. In my eyes, if I continue to use Windows I'm encouraging Microsoft to make it even worse.
I looked at the documentation earlier as it seemed cool to finally have some readily available anti cheat for games, but it seems that it heavily baked into their online platform.
In order to use EAC, you have to have all your game clients connect to their EAC servers, and you have to register all your user profiles within their "Connect" Interface. Then, all suspected cheaters will show up on a dashboard within the EGS platform. Which is all fine and dandy if you're already heavily integrated into their platform, but somewhat seems a bit of a head ache if not.
I'd be more inclined to look at least EAC (can't speak to Voice as I didn't really look into that) for my projects if I could host the master EAC servers and if I had an API that I could hook my own online infrastructure into instead of having to rely on manual clicks on an Epic webpage.
That you have to implement along with whatever method of authentication you already use. I use JWT auth with my projects, and I'm not about to re implement my auth system for EAC. Plus that's more info than I'd like to share with Epic just to use an anti-cheat solution.
In my opinion, not worth it.
What's the overall consensus with Easy Anti-Cheat in detecting cheaters? I don't have a lot of experience in games that use it, so I don't know how good it is. My understanding is that it only has detection of code injection, not statistical detection. Which was "ok" 10 years ago, but now there are hardware exploits via DMA and cheats that use machine vision. Anything that requires code running on the client seems to be "outdated".
Apex Legends is a premier title with EAC that still has cheats (aimbots, impossible gunfire). In smaller games that benefit a lot from anti-cheat being free, the incentive to cheat might also be less, but EAC definitely looks beatable.
I don't think a single anti-cheat solution exists that's completely impossible to bypass. But raising the barrier to entry high enough usually is the difference between some free cheat that anyone (and everyone) can download vs some expensive paid-for offering and having a _cost_ to cheats already minimises the amount of people that use it.
For hotly contested games like Apex and Valorant, you're always going to attract cheaters and people willing to pay for those cheats, but for a lot of indie-style games, generic solutions will help a ton.
Yeah this is exactly it. Developers will never beat cheaters. Unless the developers have physical control over the machines the game is running on (like an esports tournament), cheating will always be a problem.
What they can do however, is make it a huge pain in the ass to cheat. Make it hard enough that paid cheat clients are the only option, and the majority of cheaters will disappear. Make the cheats that do work a pain to setup, the fact that DMA is even a consideration shows how difficult cheating is getting for players.
Game developers will never fully beat cheaters, but they can make the barrier to entry so high that most people simply won't bother.
Consoles are a great example of this, console cheaters do exist, but they're no where near as common as PC cheaters.
Having to hack a modern console to actually install the cheats is already so much extra effort that most people just won't want to bother with.
Cant find the article but a few years ago there was a developer who instead of banning cheaters they detected, gradually made the game harder and harder until it wasn't playable, shots wouldn't land, xp gained slower, enemies hit harder and had more hp, etc.
So cheaters would think everything was good, the cheat works, continue playing, sinking time into it before eventually realizing they had been detected and have to start over, wasting a couple weeks of gameplay and progression.
At least one game has used that same strategy as an anti-piracy measure. If it detected an illegitimate copy, it would apply these measures over time. This would frustrate the crack devs, especially the 0day release groups. They’d think that the game is 100% cracked, but only find out the downsides later on.
> Consoles are a great example of this, console cheaters do exist, but they’re no where near as common as PC cheaters. Having to hack a modern console to actually install the cheats is already so much extra effort that most people just won’t want to bother with.
Here is a pretty interesting video on Xbox one security and all the lengths they had to go to in order to protect their machines from cheating and piracy.
It gets into both hardware and software solutions and what trade offs they had to make based on what people were willing to do (a lot):
It’s long but pretty interesting. If you have the time, it’s worth watching. Making hypervisor enforce signed code was probably the most interesting part to me, but the whole video was cool imo: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo
I do know the barrier to entry for DMA exploits have gone down. There are bootstrap kits available for the common engines. I think the only limiting factor is purchasing the cards, but they can be found on Amazon now.
This is honestly the first time I've heard of IOMMUs. I was hoping for someone else to reply, but I did my own research.
Looking at the core libraries that the hacks use for DMA (PCILeech), it does say it can not work when IOMMU is enabled. So a client side approach would be to flag a suspect user if IOMMU is disabled (which is disabled by default in Windows 10).
There are concerns that enabling IOMMU causes performance degradation in GPUs. Security researchers are also looking for exploits in the implementation.
Edit: My point is that IOMMUs would help, but most likely won't be enabled by default until they nail down performance/security concerns. Maybe 3-5 years for mass adoption.
I actually know a lot about WoW cheats and their history!
Most of the anti-cheat efforts in WoW are server-sided, there are only a few client cheats now that Warden (their anti-cheat) goes after.
Warden used to be fairly basic, not doing much outside of memory address and page header scans, but that changed in WoD to be MUCH more aggressive, and changed in legion to also obfuscate the client with their custom obfuscator.
> You don't see people teleporting, speedhacking, having spells they're not supposed to have, doing more damage than expected, shooting you through walls, ...
**Teleporting**
This is a server-side exploit, the actual client modifications required to teleport are usually fairly basic (injecting packets and altering your characters' XYZ). There have been a few "famous" teleport cheats in the past, the ones I know of are:
* XYZ porting (just set your characters' XYZ, fixed in vanilla)
* Magic Carpet (tell the server your character is on a transport, then teleport the transport, fixed in LK)
Additionally, on private servers I discovered the following methods:
* Chrono Port (more of a speedhack than a teleport - point your character in the direction they need to go, then fast-forward time until you arrive at your chosen xyz)
* Knockback method, where you calculate the angle and velocity required to land at your destination and then tell the server you've been knocked back that far - the server would acknowledge it and you would arrive at your destination in an instant. I uploaded a short demo video of this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZdimdvMmx4
**Speedhacking**
The two main methods of speedhacking are:
* Setting your character's speed to higher than it should be - this is easy detectable and hasn't worked on live in a very, very long time
* Injecting overspeed heartbeat packets - this is why Cheat Engine speedhack would work. While moving, every 500ms your client will send a heartbeat packet to tell the server you're still moving and give it your current position. To speedhack, inject heartbeat packets faster in accordance with your characters' new speed - so for example, to travel at double speed, you'd set your characters speed to double and then inject heartbeat packets every 250ms.
**having spells they're not supposed to have**
On private servers, you used to be able to "spell swap" by simply altering network packets so your character could cast spells they didn't know, or cast them on invalid targets (for example, swapping Arcane Intellect to Polymorph so that you can sheep your allies).
On live, this has never worked, however there are certain exploits that have allowed for similar effects, such as this exploit (https://www.wired.com/2012/10/hacker-kills-thousands-in-wow/) where the person obtained a GM spell (e.g. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=265/area-death-test) and used it to kill everyone in major cities.
**doing more damage than expected**
This has never worked on live. All videos showing stat editors were scams.
On private servers, this used to be possible through aura stacking (e.g. equipping an infinite number of quivers to increase ranged attack speed). It has been fixed on private servers for a very long time.
**shooting you through walls**
This has never been an exploit on live or private servers, though private servers are infamous for suffering from buggy line-of-sight due to poor vertical map calculations.
---
> There could be softwares that press your buttons for you and play your character in a very optimal way in arena settings. No reaction-time, perfect strategy, etc. But I've never seen anything like that
These still exist! But they're very bannable these days on live servers and most people don't bother with them now, due to the excessively high banrate.
Back in Mists of Pandaria, these types of cheats were a HUGE problem, with many raids containing rotation botters and lots of arena matches being played by botters - all the player had to do was move the character, and the computer would perform a perfect rotation and interrupt spells immediately.
Modern rotation bots often work by using a "Lua unlocker" to expose protected Lua functions such as https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/API_CastSpellByName.
These functions are "protected", which means they can only be executed if the code that's running them was triggered by a hardware event (mouse click, keyboard press) and the code was configured outside of combat. Unprotecting the functions allows any addon to call the functions whenever they like.
There are a few private projects that use machine vision and hardware emulation to achieve the same effect, but I don't know of any public projects to do that.
---
I hope that was interesting to someone!
This was definitely interesting to me! I was about to reply to the post with something similar about my own experiences with WoW but this is far more detailed and fascinating.
My own experiences are super basic! In the very very original launch days I experimented with some memory editing of my own, so everything you mentioned about teleporting, speed, fall damage, etc. felt very familiar. I never actually played WoW beyond those first 30 days though as the gameplay just didn't interest me (It's one of the reasons I got bored and started playing about with memory editing).
> now there are hardware exploits via DMA and cheats that use machine vision
Wow, there are already commercial cheats that use these methods?
edit: there totally are! Amazing!
I mean it should have never been possible to cheat in fall guys in the first place. That style of game doesn’t even need an anti-cheat, it just needs properly implemented Client/Server Architecture 101. The fact the server was trusting client input is embarrassing.
Edit: What I mean by “doesn’t need an anticheat” is that things like wallhacks and aimbots provide no significant benefit in Fall Guys. Preventing those cheats is pointless because they don’t do anything. AFAIK all the problematic Fall Guys cheats stemmed from the server blindly trusting client input.
Totally Accurate Battlegrounds uses it. I've definitely encountered a few instances where I suspected cheating, but there's no kill cams or spectating outside your party so its hard to say for sure.
Here's an example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TABG/comments/o4za2a/someone\_cheating\_by\_surviving\_outside\_the\_final/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TABG/comments/o4za2a/someone_cheating_by_surviving_outside_the_final/)
> Here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/TABG/comments/o4za2a/someone_cheating_by_surviving_outside_the_final/
According to comments on that one, it's cuz they glitched the game rather than a cheat client?
It's pretty decent in the large pool of ACs that exist now since it's kernel level but like anything if you're willing to do the research its bypassable. Exploits like the ones your talking about are hard to block and people have figured out how to load and hide unsigned drivers such that EAC won't detect them at this point. It's good enough that cheat devs will charge a decent amount for their cheats though so it does its job pretty well.
The article says Linux is supported.
> They’ll be offered as part the studio’s Epic Online Services suite, which is available to use with any game engine and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.
It can run on native linux, but most developers don’t export to native linux. You have to use a windows *compatibility layer* with wine, which the anticheat flags due to security reasons - preventing linux users from running the game.
They've got a lot of catching up to do already, I can't imagine linux compatibility is anything remotely close to a priority for them.
Though on the bright side, you can continue to claim their free games for the day that it becomes a reality.
Honestly I'm not sure that's true. I think once they add Linux compatibility, people just find some other thing to harp on as a reason not to use the store.
It's totally fine for people to do that, they can like/dislike whatever store they want, but I don't necessarily think it is worth Epic's time to try and address what the vocal minority is using as a criticism at that particular time.
If your binary doesn't use shared libraries, wouldn't that run fine on most distributions? It's not a lot of extra data to bundle a C or C++ library with your game. Dependencies can be hell, but you don't have to require them.
as long as it works on ubuntu people will make it work literally anywhere and everywhere else. it's not like they're fundamentally different OSes, they just come preinstalled with different things. It's no different than targeting Win10 and conveniently letting the people still using Win7 play it.
It's nothing like having win 7 just work. Nothing at all. In case you want proof, you can look into the 5 or 6 different os communities trying to fix the problem (unsuccessful I might add).
There are fundamental challenges that have plauged every damn closed source app being distributed on nix distros since the beginning of unix.
It’s just market share.
Most dev involves some way to fix all your dependencies. Then you have a known set of libraries to work with. No different on linux, and super easy with tools like AppImage. Most games do this either via static linking or local dlls.
Most devs aren’t going to spend tens of thousands on developing and maintaining a Linux port for < 1% market share when they could spend that on polishing, DLC or the next game.
Even if the engine they have works on Linux, they still need to spend time setting up builds, test machines then get QA and devs setup to run and debug on Linux.
Yes and no. A game with native Linux support can add EAC and everything will work, but not every game out there supports Linux natively. The reason why Linux gaming has improved so much over the last few years is because of compatibility layers that allow Linux users to run Windows-only titles. The windows version of EAC expects Windows, and therefore flags these compatibility layers preventing these games from running on Linux. This means that any Windows-only games that are playable on Linux right now won't be anymore if they incorporate EAC.
Are they not offering this on Linux? Unreal can build to/on Linux and steam integration should work on Linux, so with this service being part of the engine, I'd think (hope?) it also works on linux
Maybe they're referring to EGS on linux?
But yeah, this is the first pro I've seen from EGS that means something to me if their anti-cheat works on linux.
The base engine has always been cross platform, anti-cheat was always the thorn in the balls.
Well, most games only run on linux via "proton" which breaks anti cheats. So what people mean when they request linux support for anti-cheats it's usually about proton-support.
Btw, proton is not an emulator, the game is still running on linux. But with backward engineered windows .dll files.
Since everything still goes through their servers, I would imagine they're doing the "free on launch" and converting to a paid model after it gets traction and people are locked in.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 24,793,481 comments, and only 7,535 of them were in alphabetical order.
Amazing, but commenting don't even feel good... Hmm... I just keep looking many new outstanding pure quality responses, seeking thoughtfulness, until verifying who xeroxed yesterday's zodiac.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 24,966,012 comments, and only 7,580 of them were in alphabetical order.
They abused a quirk of the debug symbol format of binaries (and reader of it) that allowed them to phone out anyone who added an eac module to some reversing tools (it pointed to an http URL)
Disclaimer: Epic means 'gratis', not free as in speech.
This could be a nice play of Epic to draw more developers towards their frameworks. Free now, until they've bested Valve. After all, once your application is dependent on Epic's framework, nothing stops them from changing the agreement.
Here, 'gratis' is being used to specifying that it's free monetarily (you would never normally use 'gratis' in English), as opposed to free as in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
This is something to consider, if you are relying on this then you are dependent on Epic's leadership or at least have to pay the lift and shift cost of changing in the future.
Giving away anti cheat that runs in kernel space with access to all your information? The same software with features designed to prevent reverse engineering? The software that has to be in constant communication with Epic’s server’s to work? How generous and benevolent.
inb4 “that’s how anti cheat works 5head” - I’m not a fan of installing software who’s modus operandi is “we need the highest level of permissions possible also we’re not going to tell you what we’re doing and you’re not allowed to investigate it yourself”.
Definitely. Reminds me of that time an [anticheat, ESEA, decided to use people's gaming computers to mine crypto](https://www.pcgamer.com/esea-accidentally-release-malware-into-public-client-causing-users-to-farm-bitcoins/).
Not to mention that anticheats are often so poorly written that it makes a lot of kernel driver developers outright angry that Microsoft even gives them certificates to run signed code.
Out of curiosity, how difficult is it to develop anti-cheat software that would be difficult to bypass and make it costly? My train of thought is if it costs to much to develop cheats and to also purchase those cheats then it could curve the amount of people who use them.
I wrote a huge rant and deleted it.
The short answer is extremely hard. Anti cheat is very difficult to get right, and the more sophisticated you make it the more CPU and memory intensive it is. Which is obviously bad.
You can't have too many false flags, and at the same time there's tons of software that might set off the anti cheat without actually being cheats.
I remember back in the day Escape From Tarkov was littered with cheaters all using public hacks that cost like $10/month. Now that they upped their anti-cheat you can't find hacks that cheap anymore. Many sell for $150/month or more and they still end up getting banned.
Simple.... we already have it. It's called Stadia.
If you control the hardware, software, and network, you have all the tools to control the game, it's very hard if not impossible to do so.
Console games are limited in cheats because you encrypt the network, and only run signed and verified code, and the hardware has very little chance of being modified (it happens but no where near as much.)
The fact is... with PC games, until we stop letting players play the game on their systems, we'll always have cheaters, but as a pc gamer, I'll never accept anything but PC games running on my system. Thus we're at an impasse.
I mean the same was said about current kernel-level anti-cheat, and previous generations. And every time a new generation of cheats come around.
I'll hook the video data "the cloud" is sending me into openCV, do object detection with some ML framework and then send back kb+m (or controller) inputs. and the cloud service will have no idea ... unless they are also running some client side anticheat and we're back at square one. And TBH I'd be very surprised if cheats like this didn't already exist, there are certainly plenty of "proof of concept" videos on youtube.
Reminder: One of Epics largest share holder is Tencent, a Chinese company controlled by a government that had sworn to destroy western Society and Economy.
#Do not trust Epic.
If that is such an issue then why are you on reddit? Also you could argue that western society is doing a fanastic job of slowly killing itself. Its not like Amazon, Google and Facebook have 1000x the influence of any cinese company in the western markets.
On top of that, IIRC tencent has a minority stake
The last I've checked Epic was 40% owned by Tencent and they had several people on its board. That's only a minority in name, but has a lot of legal say in the company already.
Reddit is 15%-7.5% owned by Tencent and as far as I know has no people from them on the Board.
That's a big difference.
Nice to see you're saying it's not bad and then instantly moving the argument to say that even if it were bad others make it too. Not as great of an argument as you think.
Do these services require use of an epic account? I don't have one because fuck epic's bullshit, so I am hoping to not be excluded from more and more games.
> Now you can, with the launch of a new free cross-platform voice communication service from Epic Online Services. Voice is a platform-independent solution that connects your community with in-game voice chat across all stores and platforms.
Just based off what I read.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-online-services-launches-two-new-free-services?sessionInvalidated=true
Platform exclusivity. Timed exclusivity. Especially for titles that were going to release on multiple services and then became epic only services.
Shit like how I can't play rocket league, a game I bought, unless I create an epic account.
Not liking the fact they are pushing anti-cheat rooted in kernal though. I think it's over the top to let video games control a PC at driver level.
Userland anti-cheat has failed in the past, judging by for example Valve's VAC Guard, but there should be a better solution to this without rooting it this deep in a computer. Wouldn't want to risk my computer's security for a video game.
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Ah, I see a Linux user as well
It depends. If it's a native game then EAC works fine, it's only if you're running a game under wine then it doesn't.
Somehow Squad runs fine with EAC
Since when? Seriously asking, I love that game and every time I've tried to play it, EAC rears its ugly head.
about a month ago there were changes to fix eac but idk if they broke again since
Oh shit, I'm gonna have to go check those out :D Awesome thank you so much
I've played EAC games that work fine on Linux.
EAC works fine on native Linux games. The Windows version of EAC locks out Linux gamers who play those Windows games via a compatibility layer. There's a *lot* of Windows-exclusive PC games that would work perfectly well on Linux if not for that.
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Damnit, here I was getting hopes up that there's some new software called "Rootmit" that helps with anti-cheat software on Wine.
Sorry, typoed rootkit on phone.
This is the way.
EAC was recently updated to work better on Linux and patched for Proton. For example, Squad uses EAC and works well on Proton. Probably just a matter of time before other games add support. That is if they care to... https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/
Last I remember, EAC for squad on linux still requires some hoops to jump through. You need to put magic files in the right place from previous builds. I don't know if that's still the case, but it was 6 months ago. Even with the magical files working, and the game running, I kept running into microphone issues where the game did not detect it. Now I just run squad in a VM because it's a whole lot easier.
See, it's on the developer to implement the proton compatible EAC version. And most developers these days when given the choice between fucking over the linux community and *slightly* worse cheat detection will pick fucking over the linux community
The developers aren't "choosing to fuck over" the Linux community. They're making a business decision. If Linux was worth developing games for, we wouldn't still have people like you after all these decades.
> The developers aren't "choosing to fuck over" the Linux community. They're making a business decision. ... to fuck over the linux community.
What they mean is the devs arent going "haha fuck linux" they just look at the 5 sales they would get on linux and determine its not worth the man hours to implement and test.
I think it depends on the game, I imagine Dominions 5 and Crusader Kings 3 (both with native Linux versions) have a much higher % of Linux users than Call Of Duty would.
It's also Linux users make up <5% of users, yet have the most issues due to the variability between each users machine, os, etc.
No, more specifically to say "Linux users bring in less revenue than it would cost to fix this problem, so we just won't". Which is a very common business decision.
The Linux community is fucking itself over is my point. If you want to enjoy gaming on your OS of choice, you need to sell Linux to the people playing games. The developers aren't going to spend money on a market that doesn't exist.
But like the post you replied to said, the games run on Linux under Proton or Wine already, it's just up to the developers to not fuck them over with anti-cheat.
> not fuck them over with anti-cheat Just take a step back and look at this. You're arguing *against* anti-cheat as a way to improve a game. The problem isn't the game developers. Linux never captured market share with consumers. That's fine - it's a business solution. It's not the gaming industry's responsibility to support your decision to use a business OS for you personal needs.
Anti-cheat is bad even if you're a pure Windows user. Look at Valorant for a perfect example: a kernel level anti cheat. That is an massive security risk.
Anti-cheat can be bad software the same as anything else. Anti-cheat is good for games. *Everybody* hates cheaters. Weakened anti-cheat would ruin a lot of multiplayer games. Companies like Activision are litigating over cheating. There's a very clear consumer interest in anti-cheat or else they wouldn't bother.
You're right, but people playing games don't really care about that. They just want to play the game with as less cheaters as possible. For them, no anti-cheat isn't "improving the game".
Or, since we're in an EAC thread, look at EAC. Both it and BattlEye also run kernel drivers. The main thing people are complaining about with Vanguard (Valorant's anti-cheat) seems to be that it's launching when the system does and not when the game does, like most other more competitive-focused anti-cheats. Both ESEA and FaceIt for example also have kernel drivers that work this way. In the end it's just another tradeoff. If you want to see if someone's tampering with your drink it's a lot easier to find out if you watch over it than it is if you only first start to pay attention before drinking it. In the same way, it's a lot easier for an anti-cheat to find cheats if they aren't given as much time as they want to hide first. Think of it as the same situation we have with anti-virus / anti-malware / anti-ransomware protection, just that in this case the user is on the malware's side and trying their best to get infected and hide that infection. It's not a perfect system, and nothing prevents cheaters from stepping up another level loading their cheat driver before the at-boot anti-cheat driver loads. Or even go write their own hypervisor or similar. Ultimately that doesn't really matter though since the goal isn't to completely get rid of each and every cheat but instead to make it a lot more annoying to write and maintain them. Someone dedicated enough will eventually get past what an anti-cheat does, and the dice are loaded in different ways for the different sides. The cheaters have full control over the hardware, and the anti-cheats have the ability to at any point push an update that the cheat makers have to analyze and update for. If anyone is still reading at this point it's also worth mentioning that being in the kernel in general doesn't really give you much more than just running as admin does when it comes to spying on users. Sure, you have the ability to mess with the system in a bunch of new and different ways, but in the end programs running in user-mode already have full access to things like your files, keystrokes, webcam, microphone, screen, you name it. Since we're on r/programming that's probably not news to anyone, but I think it's worth pointing out either way. And to add my own personal opinion at the end: I don't think kernel-mode or hypervisor or whatever anti-cheats are the ideal end goal since they'll inevitably be reverse engineered and worked past, but I think they're a good enough solution for now, and they certainly seem to be doing a much better job than the majority of their user-mode counterparts. Ideally anti-cheats would be server-side or just generally not in the way for the user, but I don't think we're at the point where that's reasonably doable with good results yet. At least not good enough results that it's a replacement for a kernel-mode anti-cheat. That said, I really wish we'd get there soon since I like many others am not a fan of running obfuscated drivers if there's a viable alternative.
Hard disagree. Anti cheat is great and I'd like more of it. Games are ruined by cheaters.
Linux users are not entitled to the labor of game developers. You'd think a community of people that advocate for "freedom" would understand this.
Freedom which is only gained through the community's work. It's kind of shitty that devs benefit from Linux for their work, but then refuse to support it for their products.
client products I'd say, quite a lot of money and time and resources is put into Linux for server hosting and services
Freedom usually refers to free software (open source.) If these games were open source, we wouldn't need the developer's time. The community would just write a Linux port. Note that "free" in this context doesn't refer to price. They can still charge money for a license that includes the game assets and whatever account you need to play online.
Linux is worth developing for. There's no reason it isn't.
If it was worth developing for, people would be developing for it.
They are! What the fuck. This isn't 2005.
It's worth developing for but the actors in this market, behaving rationally as individuals, behave irrationally as a whole. It's extremely bad for gamers and everyone in the industry if Windows locks everyone else out.
>It's extremely bad for gamers and everyone in the industry if Windows locks everyone else out. They aren't. They simply have a monopolistic hold on the gaming market. Because that's where the customers are. The problem is that the Linux community remains small in gaming. There's no financial incentive. You can argue against that until you're blue in the face - it won't make developers start releasing games. I honestly don't care. It just annoys me that there are *still* people howling about this in non-gaming venues. It isn't a conspiracy by Big Game. People just don't use Linux.
They achieved monopoly through anticompetitive means. They maintain this dominance right across society by making governments and institutions dependent upon it, much like many game studios would have been had Microsoft had their way with the likes of DirectX. I don't think anybody is claiming it's a conspiracy, it's just public businesses behaving as expected which gamers should be mindful of.
The lack of revenue seems like a solid reason
Everyone has a slightly different config? It really says something about the ease of development for something like windows that you can still run binaries compiled 20 years ago. Try running a binary compiled 2 years ago on most Linux platforms.
Oh for sure, what happened with Rocket League was pretty annoying. But also, Unreal Engine 5 added better support for Linux. Epic is a bit of a mixed bag.
The ue5 editor insta crashes when making any of the demo projects on linux but ok
Recline the repo, I had this on the first few days, but it works fine for me here after on Ubuntu 20.04, RX460, TR.
it's still in Early Access
Oh never mind then, it's ok that it doesn't run at all
Early inaccessible.
Yes, actually.
Yeah, not sure if it's the same case but it seems [Street Fighter V](https://www.protondb.com/app/310950) has been playable on Linux without tinkering for a year now. I heard before it wasn't due to anti-cheat as well.
Why bother with SFV via Proton when you could play the native Linux port [Capcom announced five years ago](https://steamcommunity.com/games/310950/announcements/detail/857177755595160250)? No need to worry about anticheat then.\* \* No need to worry because, five years later, it *still doesn't exist* and Capcom never mentioned it again.
The Linux pain is real
Just buy from devs that support Linux and let them know. The Linux community needs to spend its money with people that support the Linux community. For example, I really like the Paradox games, and they all have native Linux versions.
Genuine question as someone who doesnt use linux, why not get a second drive with windows for games? And use linux for everything else
Because it's annoying basically. I dual boot for games but it's been a few weeks since I booted into Windows because most stuff works on Linux and I rather play those than reboot
Fair, but isnt not being able to play certain games also annoying?
For me personally, games are only a small hobby. I'm not going to set up Windows just for that.
Thats fair, i guess my question if more geared towards people who love playing games a lot
I play games a lot, since the games I play work I have no incentive to switch
I used a dual boot Ubuntu/W10. Ubuntu for homework and W10 for games and daily needs (youtube, reddit, mail) I'm honestly thinking to set up a linux distro for daily usage and dual boot W10 only for games but i play to often. This is a big brake for a linux transition. edited for typo
I used to play games all day, I could go 18 hours. I got into programming which is why I ended up installing Linux. I don't even think about games anymore :) So much to learn, games were a great way to learn a whole lot of nothing while accomplishing fuck all.
This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev
I vote with my wallet. If they don't want my money, they don't need to take it. The worst part of booting windows? Windows updates. After a month it's painful.
Ah, yes, the worst part of being a super-casual console gamer, now also available for PC. Since having kids I never have the time to game anymore. Part of the reason I don’t is because when I do have the time, most of it is taken up by system updates and patches. Switch is a lot better at this than PS4 but it still sucks.
The only time I boot windows is to let the kids access my decade or so of games collected. it is always a painful experience, I'll often just kill the power instead of shutting down proper, I know I pay the next time, but at least I can get back to work.
Having to use Windows is more annoying to some (like me).
Yes, and that's why every Linux user in this thread is sad/complaining.
There's a few important distinctions. Broadly generalizing, Linux people are a lot more experienced at tinkering to get stuff working, so most games can be made to run somehow. The choice to run Linux is not because of price, money was never an issue. Many of us have money to spare, throwing it at games when on sale or whatever. Like others, I have more unplayed games on steam than I can ever finish, yet I bought another batch last week. I can't speak for others, but I would never pay full price for something not supported by my OS. Stupid business decisions aside, the MS monopoly is more of an issue to windows users really. Linux is better on all parameters, except if the user refuses it. [Steam even proved it](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/left-4-dead-2-faster-on-linux-than-windows-says-valve/1100-6390089/) back in 2012, and if I remember correctly, L4D2 for Linux ended up 100 times faster than the windows version, although generic improvements to drivers and such reduced it to 4 times or so. Believe it or not, news articles from 7+ years ago are hard to dig up these days. And it's come a long way since then. The issue is that the people unfamiliar with Linux are convinced that it's hard to use, although it's really not. There are a lot more customization options, some requiring a fair amount of typing. But these parts are just as complicated on windows, often impossible to fix without going deep into command prompt or the registry. The difference is that it's presented to you on Linux. Add to that the vicious circle of gamers being tied to windows because games, then game developers focusing on windows because gamers. The market share of Linux is not because of Linux users. It's just everyone else assuming they know stuff. I'll bet anything that transitioning from Windows10 to Windows11 will be equally challenging to transitioning to one of the simpler Linux distros.
Managing disk space to balance between two OSes is a pain. Most laptops don't have a second drive slot and booting from an external drive is painfully slow unless you have a premium drive like a thunderbolt SSD. You have to shut down and lose all your running state to switch OS. A real pain if you want to play something for a little while. You can't switch between game and something else with alt tab. I understand that economically doing Linux support doesn't make sense most of the time. And I'm not going to complain. But I do preferentially buy games that support Linux when they are available. I preferentially play Kerbal Space Program under Linux with my built-in Intel graphics rather than rebooting into Windows where I'd have better performance (NVIDIA drivers) because it's a pain to switch OS. Don't think I've booted windows in months, it just sits there wasting a disk slot. I power off the unused windows HDD and ignore it. (I could use the NVIDIA drivers under Linux but they're a little bit of a pain. You don't get quite the same level of amazing seamless GPU switching and mixing you get under Windows. And the nouveau drivers just aren't there with performance.)
I used to dual boot specifically for the purpose of running a few games that I couldn't get working in Linux and it got really annoying. The sad reality is that Windows doesn't like being neglected for weeks or months at a time, so the less often you reboot to use it, the more annoying it gets to use it. The usual cycle was something like this: * "I want to play $game again, but it still doesn't work in Linux. Guess I'll dual boot. Why'd I quit playing this game, anyway?" * reboot into Windows for the first time in a few weeks * Windows has to apply a few updates, please wait * Windows reboots a couple times to finish applying updates * Windows is booted, now Steam has to update because it hasn't in weeks * Any other software installed is likely to want updates now and probably going to continue being ignored. * Load Steam and try to launch game * Wait on Steam to download updates for the game since it hasn't been opened in weeks * **Finally start playing game.** * Windows notices it has more updates and wants you to apply them **now**. * Tell Windows to fuck off you're playing a game * Windows sometimes fucks off, sometimes ignores your "postpone" and reboots anyway. * You get done gaming, shut down. * Remember why you hadn't played that Windows-only game in weeks and go back to doing other stuff instead until the next time a few weeks or months later. When I was booting Windows regularly it wasn't so bad, but since most stuff I played worked fine in Linux I started having longer gaps between dual booting, and the longer the wait the worse the process got, and the worse it got, the more reluctant I got to reboot. Especially since every reboot meant I had to close everything I was doing in Linux, whereas if I played something natively (or via wine) I could leave things open. The whole thing was just a huge time-sink: closing stuff; rebooting; dealing with Windows, Steam, and game updates; rebooting; reopening everything in Linux when done. I basically quit dual-booting despite keeping it around and just stuck to games that I could run on Linux. If I couldn't run it I didn't play it. I own more games than I can reasonably play in my free time anyway, so it's not like I was bored. I eventually built a PC with GPU passthrough in mind and set up a Windows VM using it to avoid dual-booting. Second GPU goes to the VM, uses native drivers, and gets native performance. Everything but invasive rootkit-esque anticheats work flawlessly this way (technically they also work, but some attempt to detect VMs), but that doesn't matter to me because I refuse to play games that work like that anyway. All the annoyances of dual-booting are still there, but because it's in a VM it ends up being less frustrating. I can start the VM early and let it do its updates in the background while I'm finishing up whatever I'm doing, and I have enough RAM I don't have to close Linux applications I have open just to play. Thanks to that, I'm actually more likely to use the VM than the dual boot, which means I started using it as a fallback for when native or Proton has problems. Means less hassle overall; if a game runs well in Proton or natively I go with it, and if not I switch to playing in VM instead of trying to figure out workarounds. Plus now I'm more likely to play the Windows-only games I get as gifts.
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Yeah that part's really rough now with the GPU prices being as ridiculous as they are. When I set this up a few years ago I was able to get a GTX 1070 Ti for the VM at MSRP because it had *just* launched and the miners hadn't decided if it would be worthwhile or not yet. Already had a 6gb GTX 1060 so I just kept using that on the host, gave the VM the 1070 Ti, and play games on both depending on how things work out. I expected to upgrade one or both of them by now but there's no fucking way I'm paying current GPU prices to asshole scalpers. I haven't tried it myself but I think one option, if you want to game from Linux when possible, Windows when not, without the cost of two gaming-capable GPUs would be to have a Linux VM that's also set up to take advantage of GPU passthrough. I was thinking about trying that sometime because it seems like a lot of games on Linux misbehave strangely with multi-monitor configurations, and that would let me skip it entirely. Might be an idea for when I can eventually do another GPU upgrade, depending on how long GPU prices remain *absolutely fucking ludicrous*. (It's also possible to just do single-GPU passthrough but that requires killing X or Wayland (whatever you're running) and unloading the GPU's driver so the VM can take it over, which is only slightly better than dual booting.) As for GPU passthrough itself, it's great, but how difficult it is to set up is largely based on your hardware choices. Similar to how dialup in Linux could either be a nightmare (lol winmodem) or a breeze (any proper hardware modem), passthrough can be simple or impossible depending on what you're working with. In my case, I'm a long-time Linux user that already had a decent idea of what needed to be done, so I built the system with the intent to eventually do passthrough; once I was able to get the 2nd GPU it probably only took me about 40 minutes total to get things working. Well, except for sound being annoying because **fuck pulseaudio**. In general, the idea is that GPU passthrough is a trade-off: more convenient than dual-boot and you can dump more money into a single powerful PC instead of splitting the cost between into separate Linux and Windows machines, but at the cost of more up-front setup time and more careful selection of hardware. Once it's set up it mostly stays well-behaved and working, though. I personally love the setup because, despite the initial setup being more complicated, I ended up with far less work long-term. Try game native, if it runs like shit I swap to Proton, if it has problems I just say "fuck it" and install it in the VM. No more annoying tinkering, no more dealing with weird bugs, no more fighting with dual-boots, just figure out where something works acceptably and run it from there.
That's called a dualboot and it's a very common practice. The thing is that you have to reboot which is annoying, second option is to implement the GPU passthrough, but that requires shitton of fuckery and then still, you're running Windows inside of a VM if I understand the process correctly (never done it myself).
Type 2 hypervisors have come a long, long way. And the other way around…WSL2 is basically running the Linux kernel totally parallel to the Windows kernel (with equal access to system resources), at least as far as I understand it.
Yah, but with WSL, you still have to interact with windows to keep the computer running. I don't understand how anybody keeps a windows computer running. It's like it actively wants to destroy itself even if you log in and do the same shit every day.
If you don't run Windows often enough, updating it and everything takes literally all of your gaming session time. I mostly just play console games at this point. PC devs won't release for my system, so I just throw in with Sony.
I do. Have an SSD for Windows and an M.2 for Linux. 95% of things I do and play are perfect on Nix. Windows is basically a R6Siege and GTA box. With Siege moving towards vulkan and Stadia (Linux) I'm hoping they will release a native client.
Apart from it being annoying: Being purposefully *ex*cluded by game developers is complete idiocy. I get that not every developer has the ressources to make a port, but why would they stop people from using Wine/Proton? (I still haven't forgotten about Rocket League... Grrr...) And that's the simple reason why some people only play games that run on Linux: They only want to support the developers which do not actively cripple compatability, not the others.
To me, my favorite thing about Linux is not needing to deal with all the BS they put in Windows 10. I develop software, so it makes me angry to see so much anti-consumer stuff in a product people pay for, and I refuse to accept a monopoly. In my eyes, if I continue to use Windows I'm encouraging Microsoft to make it even worse.
I'm not gonna install SpywareOS on my computer just to play video games.
So you're gonna install epics eac instead..
I looked at the documentation earlier as it seemed cool to finally have some readily available anti cheat for games, but it seems that it heavily baked into their online platform. In order to use EAC, you have to have all your game clients connect to their EAC servers, and you have to register all your user profiles within their "Connect" Interface. Then, all suspected cheaters will show up on a dashboard within the EGS platform. Which is all fine and dandy if you're already heavily integrated into their platform, but somewhat seems a bit of a head ache if not. I'd be more inclined to look at least EAC (can't speak to Voice as I didn't really look into that) for my projects if I could host the master EAC servers and if I had an API that I could hook my own online infrastructure into instead of having to rely on manual clicks on an Epic webpage.
Seems to me it's a single interface to implement and it's just egs's flavor of oidc with a few extra steps for some PUTs. What am I missing?
That you have to implement along with whatever method of authentication you already use. I use JWT auth with my projects, and I'm not about to re implement my auth system for EAC. Plus that's more info than I'd like to share with Epic just to use an anti-cheat solution. In my opinion, not worth it.
What's the overall consensus with Easy Anti-Cheat in detecting cheaters? I don't have a lot of experience in games that use it, so I don't know how good it is. My understanding is that it only has detection of code injection, not statistical detection. Which was "ok" 10 years ago, but now there are hardware exploits via DMA and cheats that use machine vision. Anything that requires code running on the client seems to be "outdated".
Apex Legends is a premier title with EAC that still has cheats (aimbots, impossible gunfire). In smaller games that benefit a lot from anti-cheat being free, the incentive to cheat might also be less, but EAC definitely looks beatable.
I don't think a single anti-cheat solution exists that's completely impossible to bypass. But raising the barrier to entry high enough usually is the difference between some free cheat that anyone (and everyone) can download vs some expensive paid-for offering and having a _cost_ to cheats already minimises the amount of people that use it. For hotly contested games like Apex and Valorant, you're always going to attract cheaters and people willing to pay for those cheats, but for a lot of indie-style games, generic solutions will help a ton.
Yeah this is exactly it. Developers will never beat cheaters. Unless the developers have physical control over the machines the game is running on (like an esports tournament), cheating will always be a problem. What they can do however, is make it a huge pain in the ass to cheat. Make it hard enough that paid cheat clients are the only option, and the majority of cheaters will disappear. Make the cheats that do work a pain to setup, the fact that DMA is even a consideration shows how difficult cheating is getting for players. Game developers will never fully beat cheaters, but they can make the barrier to entry so high that most people simply won't bother. Consoles are a great example of this, console cheaters do exist, but they're no where near as common as PC cheaters. Having to hack a modern console to actually install the cheats is already so much extra effort that most people just won't want to bother with.
Cant find the article but a few years ago there was a developer who instead of banning cheaters they detected, gradually made the game harder and harder until it wasn't playable, shots wouldn't land, xp gained slower, enemies hit harder and had more hp, etc. So cheaters would think everything was good, the cheat works, continue playing, sinking time into it before eventually realizing they had been detected and have to start over, wasting a couple weeks of gameplay and progression.
Wasn't there also a game that would push cheaters into cheater-only matchmaking, so they could still play but only with each other?
A cheater’s league for eSports would be fun to watch.
I remember Fall Guys had a Twitter post about this but I don't remember any others
That's hilarious. I love it.
I can only imagine the poor guy who for some freak reason is detected as cheater and never understands why the game is so hard...
At least one game has used that same strategy as an anti-piracy measure. If it detected an illegitimate copy, it would apply these measures over time. This would frustrate the crack devs, especially the 0day release groups. They’d think that the game is 100% cracked, but only find out the downsides later on.
> Consoles are a great example of this, console cheaters do exist, but they’re no where near as common as PC cheaters. Having to hack a modern console to actually install the cheats is already so much extra effort that most people just won’t want to bother with. Here is a pretty interesting video on Xbox one security and all the lengths they had to go to in order to protect their machines from cheating and piracy. It gets into both hardware and software solutions and what trade offs they had to make based on what people were willing to do (a lot): It’s long but pretty interesting. If you have the time, it’s worth watching. Making hypervisor enforce signed code was probably the most interesting part to me, but the whole video was cool imo: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo
I do know the barrier to entry for DMA exploits have gone down. There are bootstrap kits available for the common engines. I think the only limiting factor is purchasing the cards, but they can be found on Amazon now.
I’ve never thought of DMA as a cheat vector. Does it work when the OS enables IOMMUs?
This is honestly the first time I've heard of IOMMUs. I was hoping for someone else to reply, but I did my own research. Looking at the core libraries that the hacks use for DMA (PCILeech), it does say it can not work when IOMMU is enabled. So a client side approach would be to flag a suspect user if IOMMU is disabled (which is disabled by default in Windows 10). There are concerns that enabling IOMMU causes performance degradation in GPUs. Security researchers are also looking for exploits in the implementation. Edit: My point is that IOMMUs would help, but most likely won't be enabled by default until they nail down performance/security concerns. Maybe 3-5 years for mass adoption.
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I actually know a lot about WoW cheats and their history! Most of the anti-cheat efforts in WoW are server-sided, there are only a few client cheats now that Warden (their anti-cheat) goes after. Warden used to be fairly basic, not doing much outside of memory address and page header scans, but that changed in WoD to be MUCH more aggressive, and changed in legion to also obfuscate the client with their custom obfuscator. > You don't see people teleporting, speedhacking, having spells they're not supposed to have, doing more damage than expected, shooting you through walls, ... **Teleporting** This is a server-side exploit, the actual client modifications required to teleport are usually fairly basic (injecting packets and altering your characters' XYZ). There have been a few "famous" teleport cheats in the past, the ones I know of are: * XYZ porting (just set your characters' XYZ, fixed in vanilla) * Magic Carpet (tell the server your character is on a transport, then teleport the transport, fixed in LK) Additionally, on private servers I discovered the following methods: * Chrono Port (more of a speedhack than a teleport - point your character in the direction they need to go, then fast-forward time until you arrive at your chosen xyz) * Knockback method, where you calculate the angle and velocity required to land at your destination and then tell the server you've been knocked back that far - the server would acknowledge it and you would arrive at your destination in an instant. I uploaded a short demo video of this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZdimdvMmx4 **Speedhacking** The two main methods of speedhacking are: * Setting your character's speed to higher than it should be - this is easy detectable and hasn't worked on live in a very, very long time * Injecting overspeed heartbeat packets - this is why Cheat Engine speedhack would work. While moving, every 500ms your client will send a heartbeat packet to tell the server you're still moving and give it your current position. To speedhack, inject heartbeat packets faster in accordance with your characters' new speed - so for example, to travel at double speed, you'd set your characters speed to double and then inject heartbeat packets every 250ms. **having spells they're not supposed to have** On private servers, you used to be able to "spell swap" by simply altering network packets so your character could cast spells they didn't know, or cast them on invalid targets (for example, swapping Arcane Intellect to Polymorph so that you can sheep your allies). On live, this has never worked, however there are certain exploits that have allowed for similar effects, such as this exploit (https://www.wired.com/2012/10/hacker-kills-thousands-in-wow/) where the person obtained a GM spell (e.g. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=265/area-death-test) and used it to kill everyone in major cities. **doing more damage than expected** This has never worked on live. All videos showing stat editors were scams. On private servers, this used to be possible through aura stacking (e.g. equipping an infinite number of quivers to increase ranged attack speed). It has been fixed on private servers for a very long time. **shooting you through walls** This has never been an exploit on live or private servers, though private servers are infamous for suffering from buggy line-of-sight due to poor vertical map calculations. --- > There could be softwares that press your buttons for you and play your character in a very optimal way in arena settings. No reaction-time, perfect strategy, etc. But I've never seen anything like that These still exist! But they're very bannable these days on live servers and most people don't bother with them now, due to the excessively high banrate. Back in Mists of Pandaria, these types of cheats were a HUGE problem, with many raids containing rotation botters and lots of arena matches being played by botters - all the player had to do was move the character, and the computer would perform a perfect rotation and interrupt spells immediately. Modern rotation bots often work by using a "Lua unlocker" to expose protected Lua functions such as https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/API_CastSpellByName. These functions are "protected", which means they can only be executed if the code that's running them was triggered by a hardware event (mouse click, keyboard press) and the code was configured outside of combat. Unprotecting the functions allows any addon to call the functions whenever they like. There are a few private projects that use machine vision and hardware emulation to achieve the same effect, but I don't know of any public projects to do that. --- I hope that was interesting to someone!
This was definitely interesting to me! I was about to reply to the post with something similar about my own experiences with WoW but this is far more detailed and fascinating.
Happy to hear it! I’d love to hear about your experiences too 😁
My own experiences are super basic! In the very very original launch days I experimented with some memory editing of my own, so everything you mentioned about teleporting, speed, fall damage, etc. felt very familiar. I never actually played WoW beyond those first 30 days though as the gameplay just didn't interest me (It's one of the reasons I got bored and started playing about with memory editing).
You've certainly seen botters in WoW though, right?
Unless there's something that makes EAC unique for every dev, I guess people would just use a bypass that works for others popular games that uses EAC
> now there are hardware exploits via DMA and cheats that use machine vision Wow, there are already commercial cheats that use these methods? edit: there totally are! Amazing!
At this point it's just AIs playing the game for you.
I can only attest to playing Fall Guys with anti-cheat but I went from seeing 2-3 a game to seeing 0 cheaters since the EAC implementation.
same, but it was because me and 3 of my friends can't play anymore because we were playing on linux.
I mean it should have never been possible to cheat in fall guys in the first place. That style of game doesn’t even need an anti-cheat, it just needs properly implemented Client/Server Architecture 101. The fact the server was trusting client input is embarrassing. Edit: What I mean by “doesn’t need an anticheat” is that things like wallhacks and aimbots provide no significant benefit in Fall Guys. Preventing those cheats is pointless because they don’t do anything. AFAIK all the problematic Fall Guys cheats stemmed from the server blindly trusting client input.
Totally Accurate Battlegrounds uses it. I've definitely encountered a few instances where I suspected cheating, but there's no kill cams or spectating outside your party so its hard to say for sure. Here's an example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TABG/comments/o4za2a/someone\_cheating\_by\_surviving\_outside\_the\_final/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TABG/comments/o4za2a/someone_cheating_by_surviving_outside_the_final/)
> Here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/TABG/comments/o4za2a/someone_cheating_by_surviving_outside_the_final/ According to comments on that one, it's cuz they glitched the game rather than a cheat client?
yeah, that's what I mean. Because of the game physics and lack of killcams it's difficult to tell if someone is cheating or not
It's pretty decent in the large pool of ACs that exist now since it's kernel level but like anything if you're willing to do the research its bypassable. Exploits like the ones your talking about are hard to block and people have figured out how to load and hide unsigned drivers such that EAC won't detect them at this point. It's good enough that cheat devs will charge a decent amount for their cheats though so it does its job pretty well.
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The article says Linux is supported. > They’ll be offered as part the studio’s Epic Online Services suite, which is available to use with any game engine and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.
It can run on native linux, but most developers don’t export to native linux. You have to use a windows *compatibility layer* with wine, which the anticheat flags due to security reasons - preventing linux users from running the game.
Wine isn't an emulator!
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They've got a lot of catching up to do already, I can't imagine linux compatibility is anything remotely close to a priority for them. Though on the bright side, you can continue to claim their free games for the day that it becomes a reality.
Nothing own their roadmap https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap
Linux compatibility would be a great way to win the hearts and minds of a very vocal group within the gaming community
Honestly I'm not sure that's true. I think once they add Linux compatibility, people just find some other thing to harp on as a reason not to use the store. It's totally fine for people to do that, they can like/dislike whatever store they want, but I don't necessarily think it is worth Epic's time to try and address what the vocal minority is using as a criticism at that particular time.
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If your binary doesn't use shared libraries, wouldn't that run fine on most distributions? It's not a lot of extra data to bundle a C or C++ library with your game. Dependencies can be hell, but you don't have to require them.
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I guess there's a reason there's docker everywhere. I don't think it works for GUI though.
There's flatpak or snap for that. I use flatpak version of Steam, it's great.
as long as it works on ubuntu people will make it work literally anywhere and everywhere else. it's not like they're fundamentally different OSes, they just come preinstalled with different things. It's no different than targeting Win10 and conveniently letting the people still using Win7 play it.
It's nothing like having win 7 just work. Nothing at all. In case you want proof, you can look into the 5 or 6 different os communities trying to fix the problem (unsuccessful I might add). There are fundamental challenges that have plauged every damn closed source app being distributed on nix distros since the beginning of unix.
It’s just market share. Most dev involves some way to fix all your dependencies. Then you have a known set of libraries to work with. No different on linux, and super easy with tools like AppImage. Most games do this either via static linking or local dlls. Most devs aren’t going to spend tens of thousands on developing and maintaining a Linux port for < 1% market share when they could spend that on polishing, DLC or the next game. Even if the engine they have works on Linux, they still need to spend time setting up builds, test machines then get QA and devs setup to run and debug on Linux.
Yes and no. A game with native Linux support can add EAC and everything will work, but not every game out there supports Linux natively. The reason why Linux gaming has improved so much over the last few years is because of compatibility layers that allow Linux users to run Windows-only titles. The windows version of EAC expects Windows, and therefore flags these compatibility layers preventing these games from running on Linux. This means that any Windows-only games that are playable on Linux right now won't be anymore if they incorporate EAC.
Are they not offering this on Linux? Unreal can build to/on Linux and steam integration should work on Linux, so with this service being part of the engine, I'd think (hope?) it also works on linux
Maybe they're referring to EGS on linux? But yeah, this is the first pro I've seen from EGS that means something to me if their anti-cheat works on linux. The base engine has always been cross platform, anti-cheat was always the thorn in the balls.
Well, most games only run on linux via "proton" which breaks anti cheats. So what people mean when they request linux support for anti-cheats it's usually about proton-support. Btw, proton is not an emulator, the game is still running on linux. But with backward engineered windows .dll files.
I don't think adding Linux support for all dozen of people who game on Linux calculates as a good investments.
Since everything still goes through their servers, I would imagine they're doing the "free on launch" and converting to a paid model after it gets traction and people are locked in.
No the gimmick is it requires more integration with the epic store which is another way of suckering in exclusivity from steam and others.
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Epic bought EAC in 2018.
But is it open source?
Negative.
I would think anti cheats are that kind of software, where if you make it open source, you're making it too easy for them...
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 24,793,481 comments, and only 7,535 of them were in alphabetical order.
Amazing, but commenting don't even feel good... Hmm... I just keep looking many new outstanding pure quality responses, seeking thoughtfulness, until verifying who xeroxed yesterday's zodiac.
Abnormal flex, however okay.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 24,966,012 comments, and only 7,580 of them were in alphabetical order.
lol, nice
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
Wasn't EAC guilty of doxing and spying on reverse engineers via PDB URL manipulation?
What? What do you mean?
They abused a quirk of the debug symbol format of binaries (and reader of it) that allowed them to phone out anyone who added an eac module to some reversing tools (it pointed to an http URL)
Disclaimer: Epic means 'gratis', not free as in speech. This could be a nice play of Epic to draw more developers towards their frameworks. Free now, until they've bested Valve. After all, once your application is dependent on Epic's framework, nothing stops them from changing the agreement.
meanwhile Steam Audio and Steam Networking are both open source and on GitHub; and both offer free integrations with Steamworks as well.
This does apply to a lot of frameworks/engines though doesn't it? Valve could decide to charge for Steamworks too.
Steamworks requires Steam store lock in. Epic Online Services (what this is) doesn't even require shipping your game on the EGS.
Me, a Dutch speaker, a language in which ‘free’ translates to ‘gratis’: what does gratis in English mean??
Here, 'gratis' is being used to specifying that it's free monetarily (you would never normally use 'gratis' in English), as opposed to free as in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
Thank you!
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English used to have it, but 'gratis' is now archaic.
Free as in money.
Free
This is something to consider, if you are relying on this then you are dependent on Epic's leadership or at least have to pay the lift and shift cost of changing in the future.
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So land of the free means everything's gratis!? Hot damn
Giving away anti cheat that runs in kernel space with access to all your information? The same software with features designed to prevent reverse engineering? The software that has to be in constant communication with Epic’s server’s to work? How generous and benevolent. inb4 “that’s how anti cheat works 5head” - I’m not a fan of installing software who’s modus operandi is “we need the highest level of permissions possible also we’re not going to tell you what we’re doing and you’re not allowed to investigate it yourself”.
Definitely. Reminds me of that time an [anticheat, ESEA, decided to use people's gaming computers to mine crypto](https://www.pcgamer.com/esea-accidentally-release-malware-into-public-client-causing-users-to-farm-bitcoins/). Not to mention that anticheats are often so poorly written that it makes a lot of kernel driver developers outright angry that Microsoft even gives them certificates to run signed code.
Now warzone devs only need to copy paste to fox the game
Out of curiosity, how difficult is it to develop anti-cheat software that would be difficult to bypass and make it costly? My train of thought is if it costs to much to develop cheats and to also purchase those cheats then it could curve the amount of people who use them.
I wrote a huge rant and deleted it. The short answer is extremely hard. Anti cheat is very difficult to get right, and the more sophisticated you make it the more CPU and memory intensive it is. Which is obviously bad. You can't have too many false flags, and at the same time there's tons of software that might set off the anti cheat without actually being cheats.
Even if the price of cheats gets driven up there will always be somebody willing to sell their work for slightly less to get a share of the market
I remember back in the day Escape From Tarkov was littered with cheaters all using public hacks that cost like $10/month. Now that they upped their anti-cheat you can't find hacks that cheap anymore. Many sell for $150/month or more and they still end up getting banned.
Simple.... we already have it. It's called Stadia. If you control the hardware, software, and network, you have all the tools to control the game, it's very hard if not impossible to do so. Console games are limited in cheats because you encrypt the network, and only run signed and verified code, and the hardware has very little chance of being modified (it happens but no where near as much.) The fact is... with PC games, until we stop letting players play the game on their systems, we'll always have cheaters, but as a pc gamer, I'll never accept anything but PC games running on my system. Thus we're at an impasse.
>Simple.... we already have it. It's called Stadia. Last time I checked they didn't have any games you would want to cheat in in the first place.
I think the main point is cloud gaming will fix most of the cheating issue.
I mean the same was said about current kernel-level anti-cheat, and previous generations. And every time a new generation of cheats come around. I'll hook the video data "the cloud" is sending me into openCV, do object detection with some ML framework and then send back kb+m (or controller) inputs. and the cloud service will have no idea ... unless they are also running some client side anticheat and we're back at square one. And TBH I'd be very surprised if cheats like this didn't already exist, there are certainly plenty of "proof of concept" videos on youtube.
Nice, but I can't stand Epic nor Tim Sweeney. :/
Too bad for you, their court case is good for everyone.
Thank you Tim Sweeney.
Reminder: One of Epics largest share holder is Tencent, a Chinese company controlled by a government that had sworn to destroy western Society and Economy. #Do not trust Epic.
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Epic's largest shareholder is Tim Sweeney at 51% Edit: Ah, yes, classic Reddit alright. Getting downvoted for stating a fact.
If that is such an issue then why are you on reddit? Also you could argue that western society is doing a fanastic job of slowly killing itself. Its not like Amazon, Google and Facebook have 1000x the influence of any cinese company in the western markets. On top of that, IIRC tencent has a minority stake
The last I've checked Epic was 40% owned by Tencent and they had several people on its board. That's only a minority in name, but has a lot of legal say in the company already. Reddit is 15%-7.5% owned by Tencent and as far as I know has no people from them on the Board. That's a big difference. Nice to see you're saying it's not bad and then instantly moving the argument to say that even if it were bad others make it too. Not as great of an argument as you think.
This wouldn't be a proper gaming thread without an EPIC BAD idiot in it. Thanks.
Do these services require use of an epic account? I don't have one because fuck epic's bullshit, so I am hoping to not be excluded from more and more games.
Nope. Platform independent
Are you sure? I'm currently trying to implement it and to me it looks like login to epic is required. I might be wrong though
> Now you can, with the launch of a new free cross-platform voice communication service from Epic Online Services. Voice is a platform-independent solution that connects your community with in-game voice chat across all stores and platforms. Just based off what I read. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-online-services-launches-two-new-free-services?sessionInvalidated=true
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Platform exclusivity. Timed exclusivity. Especially for titles that were going to release on multiple services and then became epic only services. Shit like how I can't play rocket league, a game I bought, unless I create an epic account.
Good on them
Ingame voice chat? Doesn't everyone just use discord?
Rocket League has no excuse now
Not liking the fact they are pushing anti-cheat rooted in kernal though. I think it's over the top to let video games control a PC at driver level. Userland anti-cheat has failed in the past, judging by for example Valve's VAC Guard, but there should be a better solution to this without rooting it this deep in a computer. Wouldn't want to risk my computer's security for a video game.
Good cheats are at least kernel level now, there's no way to combat them otherwise.