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402 points _JamesA_ | 5 comments | | HN request time: 1.32s | source
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jekwoooooe ◴[] No.44382924[source]
The last missing piece for full Linux gaming is anticheat. Last I looked into it, the major vendors don’t want to support it due to lack of kernel security and the ones that do, game devs refuse to allow it (destiny for example)

One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming

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TheCraiggers ◴[] No.44382994[source]
Anti-cheat today is a stop-gap measure at best. For various reasons such as improved OS security and security concerns with this software, ring zero anti-cheat won't be around forever. Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse.

We already have the technology now to do it better. A combination of only sending what info a client should have, and server-side checks. As soon as something like UT ships with that built in we can hopefully forget about this horrible hack we currently have to check for cheats.

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armada651 ◴[] No.44383144[source]
> Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse.

The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. However since those cheaters are few and far in-between they can be handled through player reports.

The goal is to stop the mediocre cheater who simply downloaded a known cheat from a cheating forum. If you don't stop those you'll get such a large wave of cheaters that you can't keep up with banning them quickly enough.

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mmis1000 ◴[] No.44384245[source]
With the emergence of AI cheating, cheats don't even need access to memory anymore. The cheat can entirely run on mouse and screen peripherals and the computer will have totally no idea what's going on. The best you can do is behavior analysis. But it always comes with chance of misreports.
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armada651 ◴[] No.44385163[source]
Direct Memory Access cheats will always perform better as they can reveal the location of an opponent before they're even visible on the screen.
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1. Sammi ◴[] No.44385860[source]
Why are players who aren't on screen even in the client memory? The server shouldn't be sharing sensitive information.
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2. chmod775 ◴[] No.44386055[source]
You can minimize that to some degree (Valorant does this), but due to movement prediction/network latency you do have to overshare a little bit.

I imagine that most game devs just look at the incredible amount of work this takes to implement and complexity it adds, and decide to not bother. Valorant can do it because the game itself is low complexity, the developer has deep pockets, and also the added competitive integrity is valuable.

3. legacynl ◴[] No.44386897[source]
Although that looks like an obvious solution on first glance it's not really technically feasible. Things like gunshots or footstep sounds are not visible to the player, but still need to be relayed to the client.

As far as I see the only way around not sharing anything that's outside of the immediate perception of a player is to have the audio and graphics be entirely rendered server-side.

4. mystified5016 ◴[] No.44387751[source]
Game servers are complicated and have a lot to manage.

It's infeasible for the server to keep track of each player and do frustum and raycasting to every other player to check who can see who every frame.

Culling out of view entities also has the problematic effect of when a player spins around you now have to stream in several big chunks of world state in the few milliseconds before the user clicks to get that 180 no-scope.

5. SirMaster ◴[] No.44389190[source]
How else would the game render the enemy player's sound around corners and in adjacent rooms without knowing their location for instance?