I never play AAA games with anti-cheat, so it doesn't bother me much, but this is still exciting.
>The developer or Rust has already confirmed that on his devkit EAC was working as expected on the Steam Deck with SteamOS – while it will apparently require some modifications from the devs themselves to make it work (not as seamless as Proton itself).
SteamDeck, even if it doesn't break any sale records should still be enough to prove the viability of a gaming console PC that doesn't need Windows.
You and me are in the same boat. I don’t like multiplayer games and most AAA games aren’t my cup of tea so out of the ~20 games I really play all of them work great!
> "The biggest problem is anti cheat software. As soon as they figure that out it’ll get a lot higher!"
Doesn't "figure it out" likely mean rather invasive and user hostile kernel module(s) to prevent cheating? Because the alternative is that Linux becomes the preferred OS for cheaters and the game makers redouble their efforts to detect it; Valve's interests in promoting Linux are not necessarily aligned with studios' interests in promoting a cheater free experience.
Call me an optimist, but "figure that out" could mean game developers stepping up and fixing their games to be more intrinsically robust to cheating. It seems kind of nuts to me that so much development effort has been poured into invasive software that invades the kernel, scans memory, reads the list of running processes, etc. rather than the (admittedly also hard) problem of designing games such that cheat software doesn't work as well.
Reminds me of a company I worked for as a junior dev, not gaming related, where our bread and butter application was hopelessly full of crash bugs, to the point where you couldn't even run it for more than an hour or so continuously without it crashing. Instead of investing in the effort needed to fix the crashers, they instructed me to create a separate "launcher" application that stays resident, waiting for the application to crash, and then re-launching it saving as much state as possible. It felt bonkers to me but I guess it made sense to somebody.
I was wondering if memfd_secret [1] could be a part of a solution to this problem. Sounds like it. Of course, it'd require a recent kernel version, which is an obstacle.
Given that Steam OS is going to be (already is?) built on top of Arch Linux, and supposing that most Steam games that are "Linux compatible" are going to be targeting that as a base platform, this might not be as big of an obstacle as you think (provided Steam plans to keep the OS up to date).
memfd_secret won't help. It only protects memory from being accidentally leaked by the kernel due to an unknown bug. The cheater could easily recompile their kernel to make memfd_secret do nothing.
You're right in a general sense, but it's a bit deeper -- and shallower -- than that. Battlefield 4, for instance, runs some kind of server-side thing (FairFight) and wants ye olde hoary PunkBuster running on the client.
Obviously, the installer tries to install and start PB then errors out quite spectacularly, as one might imagine such a program to do in a wine prefix, but then you can just download the PB executable and run it in the wine prefix post-install no problem. Origin plays surprisingly nicely, too, though it generates a total of six windows that you can't close during play or it freaks out. There is some additional fuckery required; Wine's networking needs a bit of massaging to allow BF4 to advertise its ping to multiplayer servers, and you'll get kicked if you've got a ping of "-". [0]
Thing is, though, Proton is Wine-and-allied-trades. In the fullness of time I suspect new BF4 players won't have to jump through these hoops as Proton generally, and its script for BF4 specifically, gets updated. And others are already racing ahead, too, borrowing from and providing for Valve's fork of it. GloriousEggroll, recommended for BF4 [1], is the most robust varietal currently.
Multiplayer in a general sense is going to be a little bit more difficult to enable than merely waiting for updates, IMO. I'm not savvy enough to properly understand the arguments, but I've read that the translation layers for graphics, DXVK et al, could easily be repurposed by clever enough end-users to eg wallhack by making textures transparent, etc
As sibling comments point out, resistance on the part of the devs (or publishers?) to simply enable the Linux support that already exists is probably the biggest hurdle.
To my knowledge, most major anti-cheat has both native Linux and Wine compatibility modes (like EAC), but most studios disable Linux support altogether. One of Valve's mission statements with the Steam Deck was to use it to leverage vendors into adding Linux support for their games (e.g. See, it runs fine! All you have to do is enable Linux support to get on our platform, we'll handle the rest.)
Cheat software is a problem, too. CheatEngine with game scripts works only under Windows. Clever use of it can vastly improve gaming experience on some games.
not exactly, I ve played some games (last time was the metro 2033) under wine and cheat engine (under wine too) worked.
Also there is (linux) Gameconqueror/scanmem that work with wine games as well (you need to target the game's ".exe" process).
Gameconqueror works, but it is far inferior to cheatengine, especially with preset mem locations for various games (there is a ton of them on fearless revolution forum).
But CE never worked for me on Linux, quitting immediately. Maybe I'll give in another try when I have a chance to play.
I know what you mean, I had the same issues at the past with different distos/wine versions (I am on Fedora now). Also make sure you use the same WINEPREFIX for both the game/cheat-engine. It's a mixed bag anyway :(
100%. Cheat Engine is an excellent tool for working around old odd mechanics that don't quite work right or were balanced against gamer expectations from an era that was very different from today. Or just as a tool for bypassing game design decisions that you happen to disagree with.
Sometimes you get games that have a fully feature dev console and you can do it all in-game, but that's sadly much rarer these days.
I mostly used it in Rome: Total War to keep enemy settlements population high. With Huge army sizes, computer players quickly deplete their manpool and can't field a decent army, leaving you with no opposition once you survive the first onlsaught. So I locked in their cities pops to the max.
Or I do it to fight boring grinding, because at my age I don't have time for such meaningless activities
>The developer or Rust has already confirmed that on his devkit EAC was working as expected on the Steam Deck with SteamOS – while it will apparently require some modifications from the devs themselves to make it work (not as seamless as Proton itself).
SteamDeck, even if it doesn't break any sale records should still be enough to prove the viability of a gaming console PC that doesn't need Windows.