The “any backdoors we leave open for it” bit kinda sounds like straight-up complaining that they can’t compromise users’ security without compromising their own control over users’ systems?
That’s a pretty standard position nowadays from a lot of different tech companies. They can’t possibly give the user any freedoms, because it might compromise something. It’s this broad assumption that all users that refuse to surrender control of their device should never be trusted and therefore not have their desires respected.
Like how Google continues to actively punish users that claw back control of their devices through custom roms or rooting, and of course Apple has been doing that forever. Microsoft is threatening more invasive restrictions in windows, too. It’s why shit like integrity checking is continuing to be pushed.
The pattern is very clear: you are required to let them stick their arm up your device’s ass to participate in our “modern” tech space.
It’s the equivalent of a store that forces all customers to strip naked before entering to prevent shoplifting. You of course don’t have to enter that store, but that store has also run virtually all the other stores out of business, and it’s the only one that carries the specific brand of chips you’re looking for.
In my country there was a story about a lady who got viral because it had been customary for shops to make people leave their backpacks and purses on a locker or with an employee. Then a security employee also had to check your receipt against the items in your bag before you left. It’s extremely annoying and cumbersome, it can add up to half an hour of extra time when the shops are full and there aren’t enough employees to do the checks.
So one day she went to buy groceries, before giving her purse to the employee she emptied it and itemized everything there was in there on a piece of paper. Then she bought her groceries and had the clerk double check the price and weight of every item she bought against the price tags and content labels of everything. Including the prepackaged meats. Then, when picking up her purse back, she had the list of items and emptied the bag again in front of the employee.
The manager noticed and went to her mad at what she was doing. She argued with him that they treated her as a thief so she would treat them as thieves themselves and pointed out how she had been charged for an extra plastic bag they didn’t gave her (we get charged the price of the bags) and demanded her plastic bag or money back.
Of course nothing came of it, but it riled social media discourse over here for a while. Some low end (local bodegas) and high end stores stopped the practice as the economic situation stabilized later, but it was still a quirky detail of that dark era. Some employees did steal stuff from customers bags sometimes. Same lady had a field day during the days of stores trying to return change on payments with lollipops and candy. So she tried to pay with a bag of candy and lollipops. That one was wild as well.
How far is the company willing to go to prevent cheating? Cameras in people’s homes to make sure they’re not using another computer that your anti-cheat has no access to?
If players tolerate that then competitive gaming is going in a deeper dark pit of proprietary spyware in the name of fighting cheating, an arms race with no end.
It would be amazing if the runtime (per run) would be lowered
playing through three acts in one sitting is quite long, a runtime like Monster Train (40~90 minutes on non-speedrun time) would be pretty good
Bruh, i wish other distributions could also improve on that matter, i’m not gonna go to Arch, nobody is nice in there and not to mention the kind of show-offs they probably are
You can temporarily set it using sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576 . How to permanently set the value will vary depending on the distro. iirc on debian and fedora, you can create a file under /etc/sysctl.d/ directory with content vm.max_map_count=1048576
Pop!_OS, Fedora, and I think Ubuntu as well have already done this change long ago in this sequence. So no need to switch to Arch. Also, you can edit this manually, it’s just about changing the default.
OK, so a few possible starting points. It looks like you are running a 32 bit programming but may not have all the 32 bit libraries installed. This may be referred to as multilib or similar, but you need the 32 bit versions to run 32 bit software properly.
Second, if the above doesn’t solve it you may be having the same issue I had with Arcanum. I had taken a rip many years back and it had been corrupted so it would segfault like yours is. The solution was to find an alternate image of the disk which was clean and using that.
I doubt it’s the second thing because for an obscure game like this that at some point became free, most uploads on the internet are probably the same. But I will try a different one if the first option doesn’t work out.
Speaking of it, could you provide a more specific instruction or a proper package name for me to install? Because I tried searching for “multilib” and “32-bit libraries” and I doubt any of the ones I found were what I need, but I can’t tell it all looks pretty confusing.
It has steps for enabling 32 bit support, around step 2 enables and step 3 installs wine again after. You need to go through the wine install again after enabling 32 bit support (i386). If you don’t get all the packages with :i386 at the end remove wine and then install again.
With the upload, if it isn’t bittorrent it may be corrupted without being checked. Maybe look for an md5sum and confirm you have the file as expected. If the md5sum checks out you are sorted, if not you will at least know. That said it is as you say very unlikely to be the file, much more likely the libraries. Let me know how you go.
Glad ALVR worked for you on Wayland. It never did for me but it’s been a while. All Linux needs next is support from Adobe and AutoCAD and it’ll be 100% for most people
I know, I know. But what I hear from Photoshop editors, this is one area where Linux still is the alternative as the Foss software here is still of lesser quality than Photoshop. Or has that changed semi recently?
There’s nothing quite like Photoshop, but Photopea helps bridge that gap. Soon™ Gimp 3.0 will be out which will help too. Depending on your needs, Krita is very high quality and up there with professional paint applications. Then there’s a bunch of other tools that fill in more specialized needs here and there. It’s more so a matter of combining & linking the alternatives together to cover your needs best you can than relying on one end all be all application.
It should be law that online only games, when shut down, must release their server software, so the games community can continue to play and use the software they bought.
also make it law that buying software means you’ve BOUGHT IT. not leased access to.
And it shouldn’t be just games, any time it says “buy,” that should be understood to mean complete ownership of that thing. That means:
DRM will be stripped in a reasonable time frame (say, 2-3 years)
for physical goods, no prevention of availability of parts
any server components will be made available for private hosting when the vendor is no longer interested in supporting it (ideally FOSS, but any source-available license should work)
And so on. If the product is intended to be available for a limited time, they should instead say “lease,” because that’s what that means.
and I 100% guarantee they dont want to say lease cause they know people wont be willing to pay 70 fucking dollars for a game that they are renting for a time to be dictated by the developer/publisher, which you have no knowledge of. Is it 3 months? 6 months? 12 years? Who knows!
Yup, that’s why they hide this nonsense in the TOS or whatever. If the intent was clear upfront, they’d have to reduce prices. So that means people don’t really understand what exactly they’re buying.
I’d like to add that anything I own, I should be able to sell. Whether the platform supports it is another story, and I think it’s acceptable for the platform to take a cut since there’s work involved moving licenses, but if I own it, I should be able to lend, sell, or gift my copy to someone else.
Only major problem is when software is reused for future games and releasing server binaries makes attack vectors much easier to find. Apex legends has a major issue with this where a significant amount of code was reused from previous games that have server code available, and hackers have absolutely used it as a testing ground for all kinds of cheats.
Wanna know how to make that irrelevant? Make the server files available from the start. Wanna play with just your friends? Host a server. Wanna play with a dedicated group that actually bans cheaters effectively? Join a clan. Then, when the sequel comes out, who cares if the server tech is already known, because we can just host our own and collectively oust the cheaters ourselves. It’s funny because when multiplayer is handled this way, it stays active for decades. Look at the community for the old Battlefield’s, SW Battlefront’s, Call of Duty’s, Unreal Tournament’s, Quake’s, etc etc etc. They’re small, but they’re all still active and not chock full of hackers because they’re community led and community maintained. That’s a hell of a lot more consistent and reliable than trusting the studio to develop and maintain the server tech, and squash cheating long term. Eventually that system will always fail (look at every old CoD on console, where you can’t run your own servers. It’s basically a coin flip whether you end up in a game with a hacker, and I guarantee the devs will never do anything about it).
That doesn’t make the point irrelevant, it makes it even more likely to happen. Most of us don’t want to play on shitty, self-hosted servers and I’ll gladly remove that option to have a more secure game server.
Hot take, but games don’t need to be active for decades. Everything dies eventually. After 10 years there’s no need to keep running the game servers.
We’re on the exact opposite sides of this argument.
Being able to host your own servers means there is a much higher potential to have servers located close to you, giving you much lower latency. If there aren’t, host your own. This is great for people in, for example, Australia, who often get really poor support in terms of servers in large games. Not an issue when they can host as many as they want.
As for security, what’s more secure than having a server with a password only me and my friends know? On top of that, when a server is my own, I know when it’s going to be down. When the studio is the one controlling all the servers, you are at their whim.
As for games not needing to last decades… why? Do you want to be kicked off of a service you paid for, then expected to buy a new one that’s basically the same thing (which you will also eventually be kicked off)? Especially when the original still (in theory) functions perfectly?
I switched from Windows to Linux during the whole Vista debacle back in 2008. For basically ten years I was out of the PC gaming scene. I fucking love Proton and what its done for Linux as a gaming platform. Now I play (almost) everything on Linux, no sweat. The only things I ever need my Windows partition for anymore are things with those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
Yeah I’m right there with ya, of course it’s the users fault for choosing an alternative OS, it has nothing to do with gaming companies choosing the cheapest, least effective and most invasive client side anti cheat solutions instead of more universal server side ones. Nothing at all.
I kinda get it, there’s a reason games a turning towards P2P architecture instead of the traditional client-server architecture. Servers are expensive and turning the game effectively server-authoritative is even more expensive.
I imagine the cost benefit analysis rarely pays out which is why companies go for the cheaper option.
those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.
Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.
Trusted-Computing requires a more locked down system than any distro provides, and also (effectively) everyone going along with some MS-controlled standards for TPMs and so forth.
allow private servers - you can still have competitive play, just with people you trust to not cheat
anti-cheat on the server only - would require human moderation as well (users could submit reports, which could be compared to server logs)
increase cost for cheating - maybe have players ante up, and lose their ante if they’re caught cheating (e.g. pay for game licenses and have the license revoked); to be fair, this would require independent review
@sugar_in_your_tea Private servers exclude MMOs as a class of game. That works well for death-match style (or BG3 style) 4-player games, but doesn't work for 30-300-3000 people games.
Anti-cheat server-only allows too many cheats. There's already enough trouble distinguishing someone using wall-hacks from someone with good headphones in a game that does 3d-spacial-sound... trying to do that on the server side ... just won't work. Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected
Why? There are some massive Minecraft servers (thousands of players), and Palworld is self-hostable (closer to other MMOs), so I honestly don’t see the issue. You’d have a different set of characters on each server, but that just increases the risk for cheaters who get booted.
wall-hacks
Part of anti-cheat is not sending the data cheaters use to cheat in the first place. A wall hack is possible because the client is aware of what’s beyond the wall, and that doesn’t need to be sent for anything that’s not visible. That increases computation on the server, so games tend to send more game state than is necessary for smoother gameplay.
Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected
There should be a mix of elite players among the “tribunal” for determining whether someone is hacking. Players report other players, and the server should log enough to recreate the play session so moderators can review the gameplay to make a determination. A lot of cheating is pretty obvious to detect algorithmically, so this would be in a “review” scenario where it’s not so cut-and-dry.
But this takes a lot of resources, which cuts into profits, so I think studios tend to just throw on anti-cheat so they can shift blame (hey, anti-cheat didn’t catch it, we’ll forward your report). But I do sincerely believe it’s feasible for serious competitive games where real money is on the line (e.g. tournaments for prize money and whatnot) without clientside anti-cheat. For more casual games, a higher error rate is probably fine.
@sugar_in_your_tea Your response about wall-hacks is my "don't tell the game anything" comment. It's really really damn slow. You typically don't want to do frame-by-frame determination of if an opponent is just in view or not (because that's a full render), so you send the info to the client once it's possible... at which point the client knows.
Even if the game isn't hacked, the video pipeline "knows", and hacks have moved to be outside of the game space (thus the move to kernel-based)
Yup, “don’t tell the game anything” is slow, I’ll give you that. But anything that exists on the client can be hacked, even on a completely locked down console. People still cheat all the time with anti-cheat enabled, and I don’t expect that to change just because they put it in the kernel.
frame-by-frame determination
A couple thoughts:
can be predictive - clients already do a ton of prediction, this just moves that to the server
can run in parallel to normal game update logic
the server should have the (simplified) geometry data and can do a (relatively) cheap visibility check
The data would need to be sent a few frames ahead of time for performance reasons, so there’s risk there, but if someone can wall-hack within a few frames, that’s a good indicator that they’re cheating anyway. I’m no game dev, so I’m probably missing some significant considerations here, but it seems like this is feasible, just expensive when the alternative is a much less expensive anti-cheat service.
And I agree with your reply, this is a hard problem to solve. I just think game companies are pushing the problem onto anti-cheat devs instead of really trying to solve it themselves in a privacy and security respecting way because it’s cheaper and easier to offload a large share of that liability.
@A_Random_Idiot That's basically a form of @sugar_in_your_tea 's suggestion about making cheating more expensive: "We'll find your cheat program later, and retroactively find that you were cheating and ban you. Well after the match ended and everyone else's game was ruined"
If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive. Not to mention, pro-active anti-cheat tends to be rife with false positives, resulting in very public ban waves against innocent people.
It cant be helped, No amount of giving your butthole over to big daddy game company and their rootkits will make a game cheat-free. all they can hope for is to catch the cheaters, drop the hammer on them in bulk, so they struggle and panic to try and find out how it was detected so you can increase their cycle time before they have a new working one out.
But if youre banning people based on operating system, of what’s now the only viable consumer operating system, youre basically sacrificing 100% of ‘keep the game fun longer’ for those players.
So if that’s the philosophy, it would be wildly counterproductive to even put that on the table.
@melpomenesclevage (my personal investment in windows? 0%? I don't have a windows PC, at home or work. I've been Linux primary since ... shit, 1994 or something? I've got some "bought in store" style linux games? I remember when pre-compiled packages were a feature. I'm an old.
I'm trying to help explain the incentives driving the behavior toward kernel-level anti-cheat so that arguments against it can be well formed. I don't want that stuff infecting linux gaming)
Oh. Yeah I’m not in favor of kernel level anti cheat. That’s fucking unacceptable. That’s like the third to last thing I’d ever want to give that level of access.
That’s … not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.
If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive
@A_Random_Idiot Yes, I think everybody has a reactive component to their plan? In the current situation, being reactive in some form appears to be table stakes.
But keeping higher barriers (is believed?) to make it easier to do that, and keeps some of the initial noise down, and pushes the timing off.
AND PUSHING THE TIMING IS A GAIN (to the makers of competitive PvP games)
@KrokanteBamischijf@hperrin (my wife suggested auditing suspected cheats in games like battlefield by forcing them to play in real world paintball tournaments.
I think her experience as a teacher is impacting her suggestions)
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?
Most people cheat on windows. Not cause they are technical or knowledgable… but because they have a credit card
cause they buy cheats designed for windows.
The overwhelming majority of people out there cheating are cheating using tools they bought and use on windows.
So if anything, its Windows that should be treated as the pariah dog of hackers. Cause its where the credit swiping script kiddies are.
Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?
I don’t see this as a negative thing and it is absolutely true to some degree. Most of the incredibly talented low-level developers in the world (you know, those that are actually capable of making non-script kiddie hacks) have a tendency towards Linux.
So no, I’m not dropping the “Linux is a sign you might mean business” thing, especially if their idea of a desktop environment is just a collection of terminal windows neatly tiled together. We should be proud of the fact that some the most talented coders in de world choose freedom of software over anything else.
But luckily most of those people focus their efforts on different subjects. So yes, the problem is definitely on Windows with all the 14 year olds buying cheats off the darknet using their mom’s credit card (dramatized for effect).
Sounds very interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community’s contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.
On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they’ve hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.
Playtron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold.
Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve’s apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.
There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.
Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they’ll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they’re not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.
I’ll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they’ll aim for Valve’s pretty tight hardware integration or whether they’ll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds
What are the potential challenges and limitations of expecting power users to debug an alpha version of an operating system without providing a desktop environment, particularly in the context of the deck being a partial laptop replacement play poppy playtime chapter 3?
Honestly I’d still use XP if more programs supported it. As i said to another user here, it was Windows at its peak. It created the basic layout and feature set that modern Windows still uses, but lacks all the bloat and ads.
Same. A friendly poster recommended Mint and I’m loving it! The fact that it automatically walks you through the dual boot set up was exactly what I wanted.
Yeah, I switched from arrow keys to ESDF going from Doom to Quake. WASD wasn’t the ‘default’ yet back then. And by the time it got annoying with new games coming out, muscle memory was already there. If I could go back in time and do that over, it would save me at least several days of my life rebinding stuff over the years, lol.
linux_gaming
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.