this is nice not because its kernel level anti-cheet but having access to games that utilize it on linux is a huge step in it being adopted as the default computer gaming platform
This recent video talks about some related topics.
Also, fuck Epic and KLA.I am not excited to have Linux-kernel anti cheat spyware on my machine, but I guess it’s good to free gamers from Microslop monopoly.
As long as it’s not kernel level, good with me
I hope we get a commen solution for it. So not every game company needs a Linux kernel module.
I hope we get absolutely no solution for it.
We don’t need kernel level anti-cheat.
We never have. We never will. We didnt need it on windows, and we dont need it on Linux
The fact that there are wildly popular games out there, that don’t use it, that successfully control cheating to a level that you barely experience/see it, is proof of that… its not only proof of it, it should be the absolute entropic death of the goddamn topic.
The only reason to want a kernel level anticheat is so they can poke around in everything you do and send it all home.They get to police their game… They don’t get to police and monitor my whole fucking life and everything I do on my computer.
If I wanted big brother monitoring everything I do and sending it all back home, I’d be using Windows 11.
Any company that says they need this for their game is lying, and deserves bankruptcy and death.
What are those wildly popular games that don’t use it?
counter strike for example… ring0 AC is only available via other matchmaking platforms like faceit
You couldn’t have chosen a worse example even if you tried.
It also doesn’t even work. There are so many DMA cheats out there that make kernel AC systems a joke. Meanwhile, Basicallyhomeless built a physical aimbot mousepad that can’t be detected because it doesn’t even hook into the computer. It moves the mousepad to correct your aim. It’s extreme, I know, but the point is that motivated cheaters will always find ways to make AC systems completely useless. Kernel AC has already been defeated, and it’s too high of a cost for something that is already defeated.
Yeah, at the physical aimbot mousepad level, the only thing that can detect that would be utilizing something like machine learning techniques for detecting/flagging accounts.
I fail to see how ML would be able to distinguish between that and a really skilled player aiming normally.
You wouldn’t necessarily need machine learning, but you would need some sort of heuristics algorithm that checks a player’s inputs to ensure they look like real human inputs. I’m sure the auto-aim mouse pad makes microadjustments or sudden changes that aren’t feasible for a human to make, and that sort of stuff is readily detectable.
Not feasible for most humans to make, sure. I just wonder where the line gets drawn between ML and MLG, or even if it’s a bright line at all.
Especially when it comes to Epic. Tim Swiney can’t stand not being able to control everything
You’re looking for people passionate about both reverse engineering and also anti-debugging? Okay then.
Know thy enemy
They already have it running and functional. It must still need more work because it’s opt-in for developers, and they don’t have the confidence to enable it on Fortnite.
I suspect it’s getting attention now because Steam is showing decent numbers on Linux. Way better than when they first shelved the anti-cheat.
Iirc, they have 2 versions of epic anti cheat and the one used in fortnite doesn’t have the Linux support.
The kernal one doesn’t support Linux but you imagine a Linux build would include the other one just like any other non-Windows build.
and they don’t have the confidence to enable it on Fortnite.
Tbh, I’m not convinced it’s that. I think it’s just Tim Swiney not being able to eat crow after bashing Linux for so long, especially after Valve has ibvested so much into Linux
Then he cries about valve having a monopoly after he can’t catch up.
They’ve supported Linux for years through Unreal Engine, and the first thing they did when they bought EAC was give it Linux compatibility.
Tim “steam is a monopoly and must be destroyed because of it”
Also Tim “windows being a monopoly is fine actually and we should do nothing to support alternatives”
If it’s not a technical problem, Epic is taking cash under the table from NinMicroSony to keep their platforms relevant. That wouldn’t surprise me either.
They are trialing it with Rocket League which they updated to use EAC without dropping linux support.
I just hope the Linux growth doesn’t stagnate due to the insane PC market right now and the potentially DoA steam machine, otherwise alot of this development could go to waste.
If it’s epic store I don’t want it. If I wanted DRM I already have Steam and it’s better.
You’re not getting root access, plain and simple.
Waste of time. Drop the anti-cheat altogether. I do not want it. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter what platform it comes on.
It would be funny if they added kernel level anticheat for Linux and it used DKMS.
Do not forget, this is unreal engine work, a native linux build with an anticheat kernel module is the likely path here. Huge step forward for the kind of people that need that kind of thing to move from windows
The server should be the authority. Never trust the clients. For fucks sake it isn’t this hard for game developers to build their shit right.
That doesn’t stop a client from rotating walls so they get culled and don’t appear, or modifying shaders to outline enemies, or using coordinate data to run a map/radar and auto aim bot.
Most of the time I think you can let the community self police, but for competitive play you probably can’t stop all forms of cheating. That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.
That doesn’t stop a client from rotating walls so they get culled and don’t appear,
You’re talking about FPS games, a subset of competitive games. This, and the other things you’ve brought up aren’t a problem for other types of games.
Most types of RTS and 2D fighting games will not have any of the problems you’ve listed.
But for FPS games specifically, the server should not report player location unless the player is visible. If people elsewhere in this thread are right, the server already does this with ray tracing. Not the fancy lighting stuff, just the basic “draw a line and see if X is hit” stuff.
And most FPS games will already have that logic built in, as they tend to use ray tracing for bullet hit detection, often referred to as ‘hitscan’.
So no amount of wall invisibility will have an effect.
or modifying shaders to outline enemies,
IMO the game should give all players the ability to turn on outlines for enemies/teammates anyways. People who have difficulties parsing colors should have that as an accessibility option.
Marvel Rivals already does this, and allows the player to choose the color that most stands out to them.
or using coordinate data to run a map/radar
Not a problem if the server doesn’t report player locations unless they’re visibly.
and auto aim bot.
This one is admittedly a little harder, but again not impossible to deal with. Chess sites already do this with ELO tracking and matching moves against the best possible move.
If on Wednesday you’re playing like an ELO 600, and Thursday you’re suddenly playing like an ELO 3200, you’re cheating. In an FPS that would look like going from an accuracy of 12% to an accuracy of 100%.
Most of the time I think you can let the community self police, but for competitive play you probably can’t stop all forms of cheating.
Sure, but instead of being passive and using kernel level spyware like most AAA studios like to do, doing the basic sever side authority checks are far more effective.
That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.
And he was caught. Do you think we should be checking every chess grandmasters butthole going forward?
That chess guy used a remote controlled butt plug to cheat, people will always find a way.And he was caught. Do you think we should be checking every chess grandmasters butthole going forward?
He was accused (by his opponent Magnus Carlsen) of cheating, and it’s the internet that made a meme of using a buttplug as a means of cheating. There was never any legitimate accusation of using a buttplug to cheat, and there was never any consequences for him. In fact, he sued Magnus for defamation and they settled out of court.
To be clear, uh… the butt plug chess thing is a meme.
Like, it was never substantiated, it comes from one high level player basically insisting that the other guy who he had just rage quit a match with must have been getting outside signals and when asked how he said “a vibrating butt plug.”
And thus it became a joke because it was such an absurd suggestion.
No, I don’t think chess players need the butthole check. Just give them an MRI before a match (jk)
Those were just off the top of my head cheats. Even for non FPS games like civ they discovered a guy was using a bug to load the map seed and map out the goodie huts for an advantage while streaming.
People were able to figure out his play was suspicious with math and look closer.
Even if you remove non visible players, you still need to render footsteps and sounds through walls. I think it’s a fine idea, to quote the mathematician from Jurassic Park “life, uh, finds a way”
I actually do agree that cheat detection should be a mix of ML and algorithm based signals that result in review. For non competitive play the ratio of cheat votes or something probably works well enough.
I think kernel level anti cheat is too invasive, and it’s weak.
I don’t really know what the state of cheating in those types of games is, fighting games feel epically Wild West, with specialized controllers or grips and single frame hits. The creativity of fighting game players is amazing.
Those were just off the top of my head cheats. Even for non FPS games like civ they discovered a guy was using a bug to load the map seed and map out the goodie huts for an advantage while streaming.
that occurence is actually a guy cheating in a tournament/league
here is a explanation and how they caught him
But for FPS games specifically, the server should not report player location unless the player is visible.
It does so for performance.
It’s not a big performance hit.
It’s not lighting/rendering raytracing, it’s the same math that hitscan guns do. Draw a line between point A and point B, if the ray collides somewhere in-between, then that line is not a valid visibility line.
You can cut down on these checks considerably if the player’s camera isn’t even pointed at another player, or if they are out of range.
Most FPS games are typically run by big studios on big servers that have plenty of computational power for this.
It’s not the computational power it’s the lag.
The butt plug chess guy was some smart shit.
“We’re gonna need root access to your asshole.”
Not the worst pickup line I’ve heard.
Making the server the authority means the client don’t really belong to you. Leave that shit to other OS with their ever growing abuse of their uses to the benefits of big tech.
In a multiplayer game, the client renders and accepts inputs.
Then, you can also just freely release the server hosting software, as was the norm in gaming, for decades.
Ever hosted a private server for anything? Batllefield 2? HL2DM? Quake 3? Minecraft? Conan Exiles? Arma 1 2 or 3? etc?
Shit, even the original Deus Ex has a mutiplayer component, that you can host a private server for.
There’s no reason that a client being subservient to the server, in a multiplayer setting, means that nececassrily you don’t control the game client.
What you are thinking of is a ‘thin client’, where the client is now not even doing rendering of the game, its just accepting player inputs, and your gameplay is actually you watching a livestream being rendered somewhere else.
Thats not the same thing as deisgning the client and server in a clever way such that the client cannot force things onto the server that it should not be able to.
Yes and no. This very much depends on how the game is implemented. In an open source game, the code is still yours to edit to your heart’s content, it’s just that if you’re a client you’d be bound to what the server says happens.
In a closed source game, if the server executable is released, there is at least a degree of ownership there.
It is actually hard. For example, if you’d only send enemy data for visible enemies, you’d have pop-in when they come out of the corner. And how do you determine if they’re visible? Do you take into account shadows, transparent objects, tiny gaps? Even if you somehow solve that, you’d still have to fight stuff like aimbots, which can work on just the information that the player should have. Do you add maximum aim velocity? Check for movement that is “too good”? If you never trust the clients, then people with higher latency would be at an even bigger disadvantage and have even worse experience.
The real answer is you either make the game only playable between friends or you have to hire moderators and generate report logs. None of this kernel shit is necessary people just dont want to pay people to work anymore. This is supposed to be entertainment, its not worth the spy network they’re building inside of it to “stop cheaters”.
You know who is at disadvantage when higher latency kicks in? The one who abuse the latency compensation mechanisms worse.
Ask Elden Ring players what they think about fighting in high latency and those who induce high latency on purpose running the builds that fare better in it.
For example, if you’d only send enemy data for visible enemies, you’d have pop-in when they come out of the corner
That is technically feasible, and only really needed for a specific genre of game, in which you are already set up to do the sort of ray tracing needed to make that happen.
And how do you determine if they’re visible? Do you take into account shadows, transparent objects, tiny gaps?
The answer to this is again ray tracing for the most part.
Even if you somehow solve that, you’d still have to fight stuff like aimbots
Not really. An ELO tracking method works just fine for a good chunk of that. If a 600 ELO player suddenly starts having stats of a 1400 ELO player overnight, they’re almost certainly cheating.
then people with higher latency would be at an even bigger disadvantage and have even worse experience.
How? This is for the server to handle, not the client. And for niche problems where it somehow would have a difference, artificial latency can be applied such as how the game Forts handles it.
Pretty much everything you’ve listed is from a FPS shooter perspective, which is not the only competitive game out there. These problems are solvable without kernel level anti-cheat that all these companies love to go for.
Looks like it’s easy after all. All these engine developers must be idiots, not thinking of such easy solutions
But seriously, it’s not that simple as you make it out to be. You can’t just raytrace your way into a reliable visibility check. Especially server side. and then also compensate for network lag
Doesn’t matter which genre you want to apply it to
Looks like it’s easy after all. All these engine developers must be idiots, not thinking of such easy solutions
I’ve been doing game development for over a decade. Game development isn’t easy, but doing server side control of the game isn’t any more hard than any other part of game development. If you have the skills to make a game, you have the skills to make cheating a non-issue.
And that especially applies for the AAA game studies putting out the majority of the FPS games which are most hard to do server side authority.
You can’t just raytrace your way into a reliable visibility check.
You can’t just expect that a visibility check/complicated visibility check is needed in every game. Not every game is an FPS.
Almost all RTS and 2D fighter games for instance would not need complicated visibility checks, as they tend to be played on a 2D plane, which makes it easy to figure out if something is in sight of another thing, if they need to do that at all.
I’ve played Speed Runners quite a bit. Zero visibility checking is needed for that game despite it being highly competitive. All the server needs is your inputs, and it handles all the movement, hits, speed ups, etc all on it’s own. Or at leas they could if they programmed it right.
Another example, Zomboid, an indie game, already has visibility built into the core of the game. It does everything I am talking about doing. They have zero need for any kind of anticheat.
Rocket league: No need for any visibility checks. Everyone already can see everyone.
League of legends: All visibility logic is already built into the core of the game.
Super Smash Brothers: No visibility mechanics at all
/u/Mika is talking about Elden Ring, and I’d guess that visibility is not a big part of that game if at all, given it’s all medieval combat. The server can consume player input and tell the clients what’s going on, no need for any complicated logic.
Not all games are FPS
Meanwhile on GTAOnline, cheaters can summon explosions on your position, teleport you around, spawn busses over your head, lock you in a prison cage, summon literal money bags, all because the server is for some stupid reason at a AAA production, not the authority.
Also server side raytracing is not that computationally expensive considering all you’re doing is comparing positions of players and maybe simulating a bounce or two in 2D space.the only time it’d be that bad would be in games like fortnite/pubg where they want the massive sightlines. So instead just do the rt check in a radius from the player that coincides with fog/draw distance
I agree with you, I think game dev isn’t easy but these solutions aren’t difficult either. It’s just, Why try and fix what ain’t broke and your company already likely has a contract with anti cheat providers like Denuvo.
Server side anti cheat is a viable and smarter solution, we have more than enough computational power to run it. So lets stop making artificial walls between platforms and enjoy playing the game
World of Tanks has had this since 2011.
People hate the spotting system. We always have, but one issue Wargaming does NOT have an issue with is most forms of cheating. Most standard forms of “knowing” where the enemy is do not work - to the stage that as the game dies due to other reasons, the organized botting problem to get rewards has become more and more apparent. People run dozens of clients and then have to drive to specific places and then also be the player scoring the hits on their own “unspotted” account.
There are less dumb ways to do this than the WoT spotting system.
WoT spotting system is an attempt to gamify the entire concept of spotting/situational awareness.
Does your client actually know that the enemy tank is there, but just does not let you the player see it, untill certain conditions are satisfied?
Presumably, the server knows where all players are at all times.
Does the server send other player locations out to other players… at all times? When they’re in the view frustrum and view distance range of the player? That, but also only when the spotting system stats for your player tank/crew/profile says you are allowed to see them?
To what extent is it the client or server that is making decisions realtime as to if you player X can see player Y? What do the stages of decisions look like?
Like I am genuiely asking those questions. We can’t really know for sure without the source code, so… ?
You can tweak a lot of how those kinds of systems work, and, you can make an enemy player view culling system work without an entire situstional awareness game mechanic.
You can just make it part of how networking and rendering work, and have that be the same for everyone… and if you do that well, people will not even realize you are doing it.
Clients are given only what the server says to tell it, it’s part of why I think the system has not been implemented elsewhere. As soon as you add this type of spotting system to anything with faster movement it would create issues. No client has all the information and every action is getting server-checked as the game plays out. It creates a bit of a funny with this because a tree will fall over, and you know a player did it, but the client is not told anything other than “put this tree in XYZ orientation now”
There are no mods to force it to show enemy positions or change the maps. No injection cheats. No wallhacks. No invincible god-mode, flight, or becoming unspottable or flying into/out of the map. No turning a single shot into a laser of damage, or unlimited magazine. No recoil cancel. No getting kicked from session like GTA or mod-menus.
I figured this out as an 18 yo fucking around with GMod, making gamemodes that were designed to thwart exploits and hacks.
If a professional gamedev can’t figure this out, that’s a skill issue, or a manager who won’t listen to the devs that do not have skill issues.
Every problem you have listed has a solution in proper game architecture and optimization, and latency compensation.
There are of course no 100% perfect solutions, but there are very, very good ones. You can’t stop somebody that’s gonna go to all the effort to set up a seperate box that does the aimbotting and hwid spoofs itself as not being there… oh well actually you can, overtime, with serverside analysis of games and gameplay.
Literally everything you’ve listed is a solved problem… its just that most devs don’t think these will be problems untill they’re halfway through making the game, and then its too late to make low level changes without fucking up the dev cycle set by management.
Basically, the answer to most of your questions is ‘yes’ or ‘cleverly’.
There are publically available papers on all of this.
Part of that is perfectly possible. In counterstrike some 3rd party matchmaking services do the visibility check already on the server side. iirc it’s literally a variable that can be changed. But Valve has no intersest in wasting those extra CPU cycles on their servers. Same goes for all other BS anticheats. It’s much cheaper to have the clients do all the work.
Do they really? Doesn’t that really mess up client side prediction?
inb4 it’s a kernel module that only works with secureboot and signed kernel images, and kills the game if you have xpadneo loaded.
Sweeney has been known to manipulate public sentiment (read: impressionable children) to his advantage. Trust nothing until you have the source code.
Sweeney has been known to manipulate public sentiment (read: impressionable children) to his advantage
This is just standard behavior for game companies. Look at Valve’s strategy – actively work to get children addicted to gambling and then cry foul at any regulation.
Both CS and TF2 are rated M.
Neat, and this supports what argument exactly?
Children should not be near those games. And it’s parents job to make sure of it.
Oh, so you agree; Valve generally and Gabe specifically are mortally repugnant actors and should be criminally liable for their premeditated and deliberate targeting of minors.
I agree that they started a machine that was unnecessary and it is repugnant; I still blame parents for any children involved.
Never have I seen any minor targeting from Valve.
No, Valve made M-rated games, it’s the parents’ responsibility to not have kids playing them.
I know, they’re Parents, these unblamable entities, but here we are, sex has consequences.Valve bears a legal, ethical, and moral culpability for targeting minors specifically and with ill intent for decades.
I bet you think cigarette companies are blameless because there’s an age requirement for tobacco, too.
Look in the mirror, chud. Simping for billionaires is a bad look. It pollutes your soul.
We really love saying companies aren’t your friend until someone specifies that also applies to companies you’re a fan of and think are super cool
Valve may be much less anti consumer than other companies (and I appreciate their contributions to linux), but they are a company, and what are companies? Not your friend
They absolutely still have issues, they are not without skeletons in the closet 😅
Valve is a good company in that they make an enormous amount of money running steam and they use that money to fund generally positive things. That’s about as good as you can hope tbh
That’s pretty much definition of textbook capitalism: they benefit from doing something that benefits others too.
Too bad this is a rare case in the real world capitalism
It’s more common than you think, like Apple has done a great job integrating privacy and security features into their OS both because they don’t really stand to gain from user data collection the same way Google does, its a good selling point, it helps them protect their app store revenue streams etc. nd also because they actually care about it.
OTOH they are agreesively anti right to repair
Doesn’t mean they’re justified to cover for Epic by saying, in essence, “b-b-b-but Valve does bad stuff too!”.
Hopefully they’ll cancel out all the other Champignonhead Anti-Linux Cheat Enginneers working there
Tim Swiney spent decades being anti-linux until he realized how much of a bitch it is to work with microsoft.
Same reason GabeN switched.
GabeN actually used to work for Microsoft, untill he realized more people had DOOM installed on home PCs, than… Windows.
He helped basically port DOOM to Windows 95 / DirectX, realized you can run games on PCs and there was a market for it, therefore, found Valve.
Same reason GabeN switched.
Took him a while, though. Remember that he was originally employed by Microsoft and when he founded Valve and they licensed the Quake 1 engine, among the first things they did was to port the engine to Microsoft Direct3D (luckily they kept the OpenGL renderer because back then Direct3D ran worse).
It took them both quite a while but at least they seem to be coming around.
Good to see possible Linux support in the future. Even if Epic burned the bridge between them and me, its good to have them on board for everyone else who wants to play their games.
I’m happy for anything that makes it easier for people to abandon MS.
