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> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future. Although this i

• giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  > though not all developers elect to enable it. Looking at you Rust. Edit: And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not. https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/
  • QuantumNomad_ 11mo ago
    First i thought you meant the video game Rust. Then I saw the arewe…yet url and thought you meant Rust the programming language Then I visited the arewe…yet link and realized it was the Rust game you meant after all
    • giancarlostoro 11mo ago
      I know what you mean, sometimes I google Rust specific things (the coding language) and get Rust the game.
      • spullara 11mo ago
        as a person that plays rust and writes rust I feel this all the time
      • wincy 11mo ago
        For awhile googling “Swift” was like that with Taylor Swift results instead of the programming language.
        • mikepurvis 11mo ago
          Likely a case where Google figured out which one you meant through the telemetry of what you clicked on and how you refined your search, now that personalization is automatic. In my case, I get four regular results, which are the financial standard, the programming language, the wikipedia page for the programming language, and an ISP; then I get a "top stories" block that is all about the singer. More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where either one could be valid.
      • JoshTriplett 11mo ago
        /r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely don't know how people manage to get as far as posting without noticing where they are.
        • robrtsql 11mo ago
          It’s probably because the “create a Reddit post” form doesn’t require you to even visit the subreddit you are posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but apparently many aren’t seeing that.
          • SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago
            "Banner blindness" applies to the rules/sidebar. The user sees it, notices it's not what they're looking to interact with, and ignores it. The same thing happens for modal dialogues where the user will click whatever button makes the message go away without bothering to read the message, only the button text.
        • erikerikson 11mo ago
          It is hard to perceive that which you are not aware exists even with obvious evidence in your face
          • Dylan16807 11mo ago
            That's not a great explanation when there's, you know, rust the material.
        • rollcat 11mo ago
          You are an average person. A program you're using crashes. The only non-generic word you see in the crash message is "SQLite". You look it up, find SQLite, and you bother the developers for help. The problem is as old as labels.
  • jsheard 11mo ago
    > I Don't understand why everyone else does not. It's because the Linux versions of those anti-cheats are significantly weaker than their Windows counterparts.
    • tapoxi 11mo ago
      It's telling that Valve uses a user space anti-cheat (VAC) for Counter-Strike 2, but the competitive community overwhelmingly rejects that and ops to use a third-party Windows-only kernel mode anti-cheat (FACEIT).
      • jsheard 11mo ago
        I think even the "Major" tournaments that are officially sanctioned and sponsored by Valve, though organized by third parties, usually run on FACEIT or similar.
      • bee_rider 11mo ago
        Eh, some employers also have root for your work PC, that’s different from asking to install a rootkit on your personal PC.
      • SirMaster 11mo ago
        Cheating in CS2 is rampant and VAC2 seems to be just about useless. FACEIT is significantly more effective.
      • Draiken 11mo ago
        I mean, people are dumb. Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct. Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there (which is not as common as people make it to be on high trust factor). You think tournament organizers or pro players know the first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing just like everybody else.
  • wafflemaker 11mo ago
    Wow, what a cool site. Just learned that Hunt: Showdown is supported in Linux. And it wasn't the first time I checked. Will love to give it a try.
  • rldjbpin 11mo ago
    so ironic that a microsoft game supports it compared to others who should be incentivised to support players on steam deck. especially when they support platforms like nintendo switch despite vastly different architecture and capabilities.
• ZiiS 11mo ago
  It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translation layers rather than signed blobs.
  • reactordev 11mo ago
    These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games. You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control. The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
    • Goronmon 11mo ago
      Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games. Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
      • reactordev 11mo ago
        Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it. If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security. You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far. But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
• struanr 11mo ago
  Arc Raiders is a great example of a modern and popular multiplayer game that works with proton. I haven't heard about it having a problem with cheating.
  • vablings 11mo ago
    I think a big portion of that is the rather poorly made anti-tamper solution they are using called 'Theia' most cheat developers are too unintelligent to correctly reverse engineer this kind of binary obfuscation
    • cuvinny 11mo ago
      I'm curious, what makes it poorly made if it is working? I don't know anything about it or the game or the state of cheating in the game.
      • vablings 11mo ago
        Poor performance and not super advanced. There are better options on the market that have less performance impact and better obfuscation
        • dralley 11mo ago
          I mean the performance of the game otherwise is pretty decent. Frankly better than average.
          • vablings 11mo ago
            Could be better without Theia but yeah the developers have done a really good job with ARC Raiders
  • d3Xt3r 11mo ago
    Marvel Rivals, Age of Empires 2 DE, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys are other such examples. In fact, Marvel Rivals even explicitly mentioned Bazzite in one of their changelogs! I can't recall an instance when a major game name-dropped a (relatively) minor Linux distro like that.
• skizm 11mo ago
  Valve is the only company I'd let inject anti-cheat software directly into my veins if it meant I could play CS and be sure others were not cheating haha.
• littlecranky67 11mo ago
  I honestly don't know why so many people say that anti-cheat with Proton or SteamMachines won't work. SteamOS is an immutable Linux - especially with their own SteamMachine they can enable SecureBoot and attestation that you are using the SteamOS verbatim efi boot file, kernel, and corret system fs image - all signed by Valve. Just as Battlefield 6 does on windows (relying on SecureBoot). That would still allow you to install other OSes on your SteamDeck/SteamMachine, but it would fail the anticheat attestation. I personally see the push in hardware from Valve particular so that they can support anti-cheat on linux.
• LelouBil 11mo ago
  Maybe they'll secretely fund an open source project to emulate only the windows kernel calls that Anti Cheats use.
  • stevefan1999 11mo ago
    As a former cheat developer, I think it is impossible since it is digging into some specific stuff of Windows. For example, some anti-cheat uses PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine and PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine to strip process handle permission, and those thing can't be well emulated, there is simply nothing in the Linux kernel nor in the Wine server to facilitate those yet. What about having a database of games and anticheat that does that, and what if the anticheat also have a whitelist for some apps to "inject" itself into the game process? Those are also needed to be handled and dealt with. Plus, there are some really simple side channel exploits that your whitelisted app have vulns that you can grab a full-access handle to your anticheat protected game, rendering those kernel level protection useless, despite it also means external cheat and not full blown internal cheat, since interal cheat carrys way more risk, but also way more rewardings, such as fine-level game modification, or even that some 0days are found on the game network stack so maybe there is a buffer overflow or double-free, making sending malicious payload to other players and doing RCEs possible. (It is still possible to do internal cheat injection from external cheat, using techniques such as manual mapping/reflective DLL injecction, that effectively replicates PE loading mechanism, and then you hijack some execution routine at some point to call your injected-allocated code, either through creating a new thread, hijacking existing thread context, APC callback hijack or even exception vector register hijacking, and in general, hijack any kinds of control flow, but anticheat software actively look for those "illegal" stuff in memory and triggers red flag and bans you immediately) From what I've seen over the years, the biggest problem for anticheat in Linux is that there is too much liberty and freedom, but the anticheat/antivirus is an antithesis to liberty and freedom. This is because anticheat wants to use strong protection mechanism borrowed from antivirus technique to provide a fair gaming experience, at the cost of lowering framerates and increasing processing power, and sometimes BSOD. And I know it is very cliche at this point, but I always love to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". I therefore only keep Windows to play games lately, and switched to a new laptop, installed CachyOS on it, and transfered all my development stuff over to the laptop. You can basically say I have my main PC at home as a more "free" xbox. Speaking of xbox, they have even more strict control over the games, that one of the anticheat technique, HVCI (hypervisor-protected code integrity) or VBS, is straight out of the tech from xbox, that it uses Hyper-V to isolate game process and main OS, making xbox impossible to jailbreak. In Windows it prevents some degree of DMA attack by leveragng IOMMU and encrypting the memory content beforehand to makd sure it is not visible to external devices over the PCIe bus. That said, in other words, it is ultimately all about the tradeoff between freedom and control. A similar concept, trusted computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
• Andrex 11mo ago
  Online cheaters are first against the wall when I become dictator...
• jagermo 11mo ago
  companies will go where the money is. If Valve enables, say EA, to have their yearly franchise and in-game-stores on mobile devices, they will find a way.
• im3w1l 11mo ago
  I think if Linux gaming becomes popular someone may come up with a solution where you run a native linux kernel-mode anticheat. That somehow connects to the wine-hosted game. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's what I think will happen.