19 ms·
Another Linux gamer. I seriously don't miss windows anymore. At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you th
by aaomidi 6y ago
Another Linux gamer. I seriously don't miss windows anymore.
At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you the second they figure out you're playing on linux.
This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2.
I really wish companies stopped their draconian policies about Linux gaming. Or at the very least just restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected. Heck I'd manually go in and press a button certifying that I'm a Linux player and I understand that I won't have access to every portion of the game if that's what they need me to do.
But these limitations have also pushed me to explore more indie, or small publishing games that are multi-player. Shout out to Northgard and Deep Rock Galactic (even though it doesn't support Linux natively) for making an awesome cooperative experience that I can have with my friends on Linux.
Also, for developers making games out there. PLEASE test your game with the steam runtime OS thing, not with Ubuntu or a specific distro. The steam runtime is open source and can easily be bootstrspped for any game, even outside of steam. It also ensures optimal compatibility with every distro out there.
- jorvi 6y ago> This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2. About half of Destiny’s active playerbase PvPs. In content drought times, it’s pretty much what keeps the game alive. So yeah, simply false.
- skohan 6y agoBut you could play destiny as PvE game if you want
- aaomidi 6y agoI could, but I would still get banned because of the anti cheat.
- darrenoc 6y agoI don't know why you're up in arms about this, but it's clearly not false. Almost all of the games content is PvE based. The PvP mode is very small in scope compared to everything else that's available.
- aaomidi 6y agoAgain, because I can't just play the PvE content on linux. I get banned upon a few minutes of just launching the game.
- aaomidi 6y agoRight. But I don't care for PvP. I've never wanted to play PvP. I enjoy the raids and the cooperative strikes with friends. Even if it's what keeps the game alive, they have one less active player because I don't have the ability to play with my friends.
- marchenko 6y agoForgive my ignorance, but why do game servers ban Linux players in pvp games? Fear of some sort of modding only available on Linux?
- sethhochberg 6y agoModern anti-cheat platforms can be pretty invasive and tie very closely into the operating system - ie, if designed for Windows, they often simply won't work at all through some other layer like Proton/Wine. This is interpreted by many game companies as an attempt to cheat, rather than simply an unsupported use case.
- xahrepap 6y agoIt’s basically an anti-cheat “feature”. The assumption is that if you’re running a windows game on Linux you’re probably cheating.
- fishtacos 6y agoI'd say there's some basis there. Discussed here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445748
- izacus 6y agoModern anticheats are basically kernel rootkits which go even to the point of trying to checksum your drivers and inspect how they work. They're basically as invasive as they get. They obviously can't hook into Linux kernel so they react by just banning the player.
- invokestatic 6y agoNow I'm biased because I'm an anti-cheat developer, but I really can't see how checking the integrity of your installed kernel device drivers is at all invasive.
- jasonjayr 6y ago
- technofiend 6y agoHow does Stadia strike you as an alternative? It works on anything (AFAIK) that runs Chrome.
- eitland 6y agoNot OP but anything that mentions Chrome is an instant loud no for me these days if I can avoid it somehow. Just like MS 15 years ago.
- izacus 6y agoIt's not Chrome specific though.
- camel_Snake 6y agoafaik Stadia is chrome specific. try visiting http://stadia.google.com/ http://stadia.google.com/ on another browser. I can't even login and view my previous screenshots, let alone play a game.
- aaomidi 6y agoMost every cloud gaming is Chrome specific. Heck the Amazon cloud gaming doesn't even work on Chrome on Linux....
- izacus 6y agoYou're right, I only checked with Edge forgetting that is just Chrome too.
- Skylled 6y agoFor what little it's worth, Stadia is opening to play through Safari (on iOS) soon.
- akhosravian 6y agoNot op, but I think the biggest miss in cloud gaming is no one developing cloud first multiplayer games. Currently in any kind of client-server multiplayer game out there you face n+1 game states (n is the number of players) and a lot of the art is in how to reconcile these. The n+1 is due to most games implementing some degree of client autonomy (e.g. in movement), and the reality of network round trips from each client causing everyone to be slightly out of sync. A concrete example of how this affects players is the experience of being shot after narrowly escaping behind cover in an FPS. Cloud gaming substitutes reconciling these n+1 simulations with some input latency for each player. I think this could produce some qualitatively better experiences for certain games. In particular, Fall Guys is a recent game that I think would play better as a cloud first experience. The interaction between players in Fall Guys is grabbing other players who are near to you. Due to the network latency many players have the experience of being grabbed by folks nowhere near them. A cloud first version of the game would eliminate this problem that simply can’t be solved otherwise.
- techelite 6y agoWhat distro do you use?
- aaomidi 6y agoPopOS
- ldd 6y agoI was seriously considering adding Linux support for my game, that already has turn-based multiplayer, and this thread was the last thing I needed to convince myself it could work. Performance may be an issue. I wonder if people would be ok with electron games sold on steam running on linux...
- aclelland 6y agoOne of the games I run the infrastructure from had an issue with Proton. It caused issues with the multiplayer parts of the game. We were forced to disable support for Proton a few months ago. We posted a bug in the Proton GitHub repo and got a great response from the Devs. The issue was resolved in the very next patch and we were able to enable Proton support again. Other than that issue our players very rarely come to us with Proton specific issues.
- devwastaken 6y agoDiscord and spotify are both electron on Linux, so I would imagine it would work.
- gitweb 6y agoSpotify used to be Qt, has it changed?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tim-- 6y agoYes, yes it has. The UI is still quite good, and doesn't seem to have the downsides that many Electron apps have, except for the amount of memory used by it (still much less than Slack or Skype)
- Zardoz84 6y agoOne of the selling points of Electron was making easy to port apps between platforms.
- 6y ago
- shuringai 6y agoWhile I do share your frustration on linux gaming I thought to give sound to the opposing side who simply had this coming oit of a risk analysis. TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into the system which you cannot inspect from userspace. With linux coming into the party, even if with the amazing work by Wine you do manage to get the desired anti-debug behaviour on the emulated userspace app, linux people can make arbitrary hooks on their kernels. So instead of risking major reddit shitstorms over that 1% players that can cause 3% profit loss, it's better to ditch that 1%
- z3t4 6y agoIn a competitive game don't let clients dictate what the server does. Although I understand there is a performance issue. But clients should not be trusted.
- 495636483 6y agoWould that work for lag? I assume there is some predictive aspects to a fluent gameplay these days. Also for the server to decide which e.g. player someone can see or not, seems quite intense. This seems inadequate to prevent aim assistance too. I mean it's a moot point anyway, since it's probably not too long until bots can play all games better, without additional information or help.
- throw_a_say 6y agoPrediction in online multiplayer games has been around since real-time multiplayer games existed. From my own first experience the first versions of counter-strike 1.x had it, but I'm pretty sure it started quite a while before that. And yes its a classic arms race, in the simple example I can connect my bot to the display output and to input as keyboard and mouse / gamepad and you could probably pretty easily get an aimbot that's superhuman. The solution is not a technical one, just like DRM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
- qudat 6y agoI went the opposite way and got rid of Linux for windows wsl2. I have the random issue but otherwise things run pretty well.
- paule89 6y agoDid the same. Was just not worth the risk of waiting until an issue gets fixed. Or if it even gets fixed. I mean even in GTA 5 working perfectly, the overlay always had an issue of a missing mouse pointer. Also Microsoft Store bought games do not work on Linux. Well and in the end i just want to play my games. And if i want to start modding, don't get me started on the hoops you have to jump through just to get a modded Skyrim with everything installed how you like it.
- kpcyrd 6y agoI have mixed feelings about wsl because support requests from wsl users are usually due to issues in wsl itself. I guess that's how windows developers feel about linux.
- qwerty456127 6y ago> restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected WTF? Why?
- comfyinnernet 6y agoIt doesn't even matter whether someone is cheating. All that matters is whether they're ruining the game. You don't need a rootkit to determine that.
- gentleman11 6y agoWould you ban tower rushers in starcraft/warcraft2/warcraft3?
- comfyinnernet 6y agoMaybe! The real problem is to help people avoid people they want to avoid, not banning clients on technical grounds. A genuine attempt at solving the problem wouldn't be based on universal bans. There could be groups who have their own blacklists. Find the groups you agree with and tick boxes to subscribe to their ideas of who should be banned.
- b0rsuk 6y agoI think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more technical issues with Linux. People who have low tolerance for glitches and problem solving to get their games working would be up in arms. The last example is Hyper Light Drifter. No matter which forum, the latest threads include several about Linux specific problems. And that's a game with native support. Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.
- CivBase 6y agoSeems to me like there should be something like a "Docker for games" which uses container tech to create a lightweight, predictable execution environment for video games. I suppose that's kind of what Proton does, although it focuses on emulating a Windows environment in particular.
- e2le 6y agoSounds like something that AppImage is perfectly suited for, given that each application is a one-click executable with automatic updating built-in and can optionally provide a predictable execution environment although it's not a container. In one particular case, I packaged up Mirrors Edge into an AppImage with the AppRun script taking care to setup the environment and WINE. It worked surprisingly well.
- CivBase 6y agoThat's awesome! If anyone at Valve is reading, I think this would be an excellent feature for Proton or the Steam client.
- Macha 6y agoI'm kind of worried we've peaked on Linux compatibility however. We've seen some of the big franchises that supported it in Valve's initial push (Hitman, Football Manager being the two I'm aware of) back away from it in future iterations and Valve themselves now have Epic as a more immediate threat than the Windows store.
- suifbwish 6y agoIf a game dev team thinks they can stop people from gaining an unfair advantage from just preventing people from running Linux they are morons. Even if you were in Windows you have to do is setup an inverse Linux VM to operate on the local host network in which case it would essentially be a daemon. Even with cigwin and a few other tools, you can use strace to inject system calls and override values right into the PID of the game