You’ve got Black and White working? I’ve smashed my head against that one before but never got it going.
The issue is that the copy protections check for a physical disk (with various methods) sometimes “Windows” ISO tools work better (CDEmu CloneDrive…) you would need to run them in the same wine prefix. But the easier way might be to find a nocd “patch” for your application ;)
While some software is capable of perfectly copying copy protection “tricks” 1:1 on a iso - it’s usually just better to crack the game with a nocd patch as mentioned above. It’s a quality of life improvement and can even improve load times (though modern hardware probably makes it trivial.)
Yeah I usually scan github or other gits usually find a repo with a crack available as long as you have the game already its just the exe and whatever files are needed
If they can’t find a nocd patch heroic games is awesome for setting up no dmr prefixes and has a option to run outside exes in the prefix just by dropping it in the settings menu
Nice man thats awesome you should check out lampray
Currently only supports BG3 and cyberpunk2077 but has plans for Bethesda games I think the beta on his discord might allow them. Anyway it’ll be a linux mod manager for multiple games once complete
Thanks for shouting this out. Honestly the only thing keeping me going back to Windows is the complexity in getting modding done on various games, Bethesda and BG3 among them. I know it can be done, but there are too many hoops for my post-work brain to jump through. End up running out of spoons to keep learning all the new concepts. This is exciting, definitely keeping an eye on this as hopefully the final barrier breaker to switch to Linux full time.
Slowly the hold outs are realising open source drivers are here to stay. I don’t think propriety divers are ever going to go away but now you can have a fully open stack for all the main GPU stacks out there. I suspect more designs are insisting on open drivers and Nvidia doesn’t want to be ruled out at the start.
I think its more a case of trying to hold on to the market shares they own. Its been slow and in very very small pieces, but the fact amd has made their ai gpu stuff open source, have semi decent integrated gpus and have open gpu drivers did some things.
On top of that a company coalition against nvidia for a cuda replacement was started. Nvidia have to be careful in the next few years
They might also want to be in the running for a future Steam Deck or Linux based gaming console. And fully open source drivers is a requirement, especially if Valve is involved.
There’s also the whole thing about how AMD gets improvements from community involvement, and Nvidia then has to integrate that into their closed development cycle. They’re always a step behind and losing out on all that free development labor.
You don’t and likely never will get a fully open stack for those GPUs. Even the latest Radeon cards have a lot of closed-source binary blobs for firmware.
Where the line is drawn between the driver and the firmware blobs makes a massive difference though. Look at the recent case of AMD trying (and failing) to license HDMI 2.1+ for their open source drivers.
Hopefully AMD start doing what Intel does and including a DP -> HDMI 2.1 converter in the card itself. There are already third party adapters that work reasonably well with existing AMD GPUs, especially on Linux. If they had their own implementation they could iron out the quirks and driver issues and get something that should be equivalent to real HDMI 2.1.
As a fellow Linux user I entirely agree. I stay off the forums as much as possible. My latest crime was uploading a tutorial on how to update the bios on certain laptop models. Got fucking roasted, even on lemmy.
For some reason Linux forums are like stack exchange; an extremely toxic neckbeard pissing match.
Eh, you’ll get the worse of any userbase if you go to a community specifically for that OS. Go to PC Master race or whatever to see the opposite problem.
I’ve been on Linux exclusively for something like 15 years, but I almost never bring it up. In fact, I don’t even mention my distro of choice unless it’s directly relevant, and if asked I recommend something different (I recommend Mint Debian edition because I’ve heard it’s very user friendly).
I also find many people in communities like this insufferable as well, so I spend my time trying to tone them down a bit with comments like “Linux isn’t for everyone, but it’ll always be there if you decide to give it another try.” I use Linux because it works better for me than Windows, yet many here make it a religion or something. It’s kinda weird.
This is understandable, and honestly xwayland is great, even with fractional scaling now, at the very least on KDE. I think simply relying on xwayland is a very viable solution now for a lot of apps. and it helps work around a lot of issues so that’s always a major plus
Think so, I actually had a different perspective Games that I run under native x11 stutter to the point where I don’t enjoy playing it anymore (rocket league in my example) but under xwayland the game runs without any issues/stutters
Everything I’ve tried works better under Wayland than it did under X :3 Battlefield V, for example (why I play that… who knows :-\ ) has always taken a bunch of struggling with Wine/Proton versions and settings to get it to run at all, and even then it was a crashy glitchy mess. I decided to try it under Wayland just for the hell of it and somehow it’s absolutely flawless now (okay fine, there’s some kinda mouse focus bug I’ve been working around but still). Sooo now I just use Sway all’ the time. It’s great. I made a whole thread just to gush about it. Wayland and xwayland both seem to be doing great! Woo! Cheerness! \ö/ 🥳 et cetera!
It’s not really hacky as far as I know, it’s just the old status quo. On X applications could scale themselves if they have high DPI support, and that’s what KDE is allowing. And it works great. The vast majority of apps I use support high DPI on X, and they work perfectly fine on xwayland.
It is legitimately a great experience using xwayland like this. A lot of apps I use, they look perfectly fine, they perform perfectly fine, and they’re not broken, which is a massive plus.
Of course, this probably does break one or two apps out there. I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution. It’s far from it. But honestly, I think it’s a really good solution. It allows developers the ease and flexibility of developing for X11 if you don’t need Wayland’s features.
Of course, you are still losing out. Having proper touch support is such an amazing feature with Wheland. Don’t get me wrong. I love a lot about Wheland. It’s just a pain in the ass to develop for. It is nowhere near as flexible as X11.
Setting the DPI is only a partial solution and plenty of assets and rendering will be incorrect. It is more crisp, especially for text, than the approach others take of upscaling though. It’s probably the approach I’d prefer personally.
I’ve seen this argument pop up but I’m confused with technical details on how it would work. Wouldn’t the client still need to download the game? Modifying the game files is a vector for attack. If it’s fully online on their servers then it would be pretty slow wouldn’t it?
The client is nothing but a display. All it downloads is vid and all it up loads is control. The only actual issue is potential for lag. ag is solvable by designing with it in mind.
Think about things like stadia. If they are viable so is actually running the game on the server. This way all the activity is server side and everything coming from the client is validated.
The actual issue is that the game servers and networking would be more expensive. And that is the real reason they do it with DRM, it is cheaper for them. Your experience is not important to them.
The lag issue is really one of design and cheap server side infrastructure. A shooter would use a time stamp to allow position validation for when the shot was fired. Simply reduce the micro management and you've resolved most of it to start with.
It is only slow if the infrastructure is crap. And you are complaining about the current state and not what would happen. Very, very few games have been released over the past decade with LAN play and the no online required is only a bit more. You objections are very hollow.
And which company is currently about to release that for the first time? See this is about DRM on games and none of the companies are paying to put that on antiques. I can still roll my Mechwarrior Mercenaries 2 server as well, but that also isn't relevant to this thread.
I am genuinely curious how anti-cheat works on an open source OS. I don’t know a whole lot about how it works to be honest, but is there no problem with cheaters being able to manipulate the entire stack down to the kernel level?
Like I’m aware cheaters can decompile code so closed source isn’t necessarily that much better. Did I just answer my own question or is there more to it?
This is why client-side anti-cheat is a terrible idea. It gives you the illusion of control, but really it doesn’t prevent a motivated party from cheating, and it opens up everyone else to kernel-level vulnerabilities when the anti-cheat software inevitably has a bug.
Client side anti-cheat should merely discourage low effort attacks, and the real cheat detection should always be server side looking at patterns of behavior. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to reach for client side anti-cheat than build an effective server side anti-cheat.
This is a really good answer, thanks! I like to imagine what a fully open-source future would look like and I imagine server-side anti cheat is the solution.
I don’t think popular games will ever be fully open source, but our operating systems could be.
I have very little proprietary software on my system outside of games, and it’s mostly limited to a handful of firmware blobs (e.g. GPU and WiFi firmware, CPU microcode, etc), with the clear exception bring browser DRM for streaming services. Everything proprietary on my system is sandboxed in some way, so I’m reasonably protected from most of that nonsense, but it’s still there and probably always will be.
Having proprietary software isn’t the issue IMO, as long as I can sandbox it. I can’t sandbox kernel level anti-cheat, so I’m never going to install a game that requires it. That’s my line in the sand.
Mostly profit motive. Most open source software is free, mostly because it’s really hard to profit from something anyone can build for free. As soon as the source is released, someone will make a free build of it available and undercut the devs.
Devs, artists, etc all need to eat, so the game needs to be profitable enough to cover that.
It’s not like games can’t be open source, and I’ve played plenty that are, they just won’t likely be profitable.
I aim to one day make money via a pateron model like Godot: getting paid before development… that requires a good reputation via what I have already made. If paid enough at that point then it doesn’t matter if I don’t get more at distribution. Before that hopefully some donate (⌒_⌒;)
I also hope gamers one day have their equivalent of the recent Unity devs moment. See the potential for abuse of power and no longer tolerate untrustworthy proprietary options - thus moving profit motivate to open source/free software.
I also want to make games and distribute them for free. I want to follow something like the Dwarf Fortress model where development is funded by fans and I build it because I love it. However, I’m not at the point of my life where I can do that, so for now it’s a motivator for me to retire early.
But that model is highly unlikely to become the most common distribution method for games, just like it isn’t the most common distribution method for other end user software. People just don’t donate nearly as much as they’re willing to pay for equivalent software. Building software is expensive, so if you’re in it to make back your investment, propriety software is the way to go.
Devs, artists, etc all need to eat, so the game needs to be profitable enough to cover that.
And yet the devs, artists, etc of FOSS programs also need to eat, and the software is still FOSS.
(Sure we should all be donating, or rather, they should get their income from our taxes since oftentimes they literally are the backbone of the world, but that’s one more convo to the pile)
But that’s not at all how things work. Most FOSS devs do it as a hobby or as part of a day job working on proprietary software. Very few FOSS projects employ full time developers, and for those that do, it’s rarely a majority of the code changes for the project.
But let’s say we somehow convince governments to fund FOSS development, they’re not going to want to fund game development, they’ll fund one Linux distro and the software needed to fill government needs.
If a large game engine like Unreal Engine suddenly switched to the GPL, game devs wouldn’t touch it with a10 foot pole. They’d either develop their own engine, switch to a different proprietary engine, or use something like Godot where they can keep their project under a proprietary license.
One thing that I hope becomes more common is open source game code + proprietary art, sound and narrative. Game devs, artists, writers, etc deserve to get paid for their work, and we deserve to know what’s running on our computers. The more game devs use open source engines, the closer we get.
Maybe it’s because I am an amateur dev and not just a user but I like the freedom with assess that are creative commons and am put off when an open source game uses (edit) proprietary assests. Don’t see why they can’t get paid the same way open source dev would.
I don’t think we need open source games, we just need to be able to sandbox them so they don’t cause security or privacy issues. As long as they don’t need control over the kernel, I can containerize them and only give access to the things they need.
Not all anti-cheats are kernel-level though, only the most invasive ones are. BattlEye, the one used in this game, is not one of them, though I don’t know the specifics of how it works.
Sure, and I don’t have issues with those, provided they are happy living in a sandbox. I think clientside anti-cheat is stupid for other reasons, but I won’t actively avoid a game just because it has it, provided I can separate it from the rest of my system.
Firstly, not all code executed on an open source OS needs to be open source. For example: Epic Anti-Cheat, which comes with a Linux-compatible mode, is fully closed source. So right off the bat we’re going to put to bed the notion that somehow the platform of choice makes it easier for bad actors to pull apart and examine anticheat software.
Secondly, yes, there is a problem with cheaters being able to hide from anticheats on Linux. This is because on Windows it’s relatively easy to run kernel-level code via drivers – this is why most anticheats require admin permission to install a monitoring driver before the game will run. The anticheat is effectively rootkitting your system in order to circumvent other rootkits that may be concealing epic cheatz.
On GNU/Linux, almost all device drivers come prepackaged in the Linux kernel, so there’s no direct equivalent to the Windows approach of allowing users to install third-party code into the most protected rings of the OS. It’s still possible through the use of kernel modules (see NVIDIA drivers), but as evidenced by how annoying it is to use NVIDIA devices on Linux, this is a huge PITA for both the developer & the user to deal with.
So that’s the rub. On Linux, anticheats just have to trust that the kernel isn’t lying. This has been a perpetual thorn in the side of developers like Google, who’d really really like it if they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a given Android device is not rooted (see SafetyNet). Google’s solution to this has been to introduce hardware-backed attestation – basically a special hardware chip on the device that can prove that the kernel software has not been tainted in any way.
It’s also true that the ease with which a program can interact with kernel level drivers opens up a whole host of potential exploits including but not limited to recording all internet traffic, all keystrokes, listing all files & programs, accessing memory of other programs and more. AAA client-side anticheats require some pretty incredible trust in the vendor to not be either evil or incompetent.
Right so on a technical level it is actually harder to do client side anti-cheat?
Thanks for the information. That hardware backed attestation reminds me of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, where hardware DRM was introduced and then forcibly deprecated when it was found to be vulnerable… so of course the vulnerable hardware was now worthless except on the black market where it was worthwhile to pirates because it was known to be already cracked.
That’s a good point. I realise my question partly plays into a misconception about the security of closed source software, that it’s somehow harder to mess with.
I mean people are training neural nets to look at the screen and aimbot by modifying the mouse inputs, which is just an impossible thing to detect.
Because I prefer it in functionally every way to Windows. I prefer (when feasible) to use open source and/or FLOSS software. I am vastly more familiar with Linux than I am Windows on a technical level. I generally dislike most things about Windows.
and use Steam
It works, it’s convenient, they have a generally good track record of not screwing over users.
I prefer many of the features of Linux distros, but using a client like Steam defeats the purpose of them.
That is a pretty serious leap in logic. You’re welcome to not like Steam on a technical, moral, and/or philosophical level but at the end of the day it is a single application and saying that using Linux while also using Steam “defeats the purpose of Linux” is ridiculous. Linux is an Operating System, it is meant to assist the user in computing. If the user is using Linux to compute they are fulfilling the exact purpose of Linux, that being an open and free operating system to be used by any who desire it.
It’s a private company that isn’t for sale. There was another leak a week ago where they were trying to acquire Nintendo which IS publicly traded, but I think the private shares still control 51%, but that’s old info.
Are you using the Steam version or the Rockstar version? Because the former should just work OOTB (unless something has changed recently). The latter can be a pain to get working.
I expected Civilization VI to run fine, and… it did. although anti-aliasing decided not to work.
It has a native version and sometimes they are missing features/performance. Try forcing Proton.
while Win 11 is basically “don’t worry, it’ll run!”
That hasn’t been my experience at all, even with gaming. But YMMV.
linux_gaming
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.