That's what most people do I imagine, me included, but we might have to adapt. If more and content out there is just a bit of information padded with unholy amounts of LLM lorem lipsum, there won't be a choice.
I think what I’ll do is get a hobby that is not too expensive. Like, you have to buy something overpriced to satisfy a midlife crisis, but at least I will try to get some nice headphones (not harmful at least, and with nice headphones you can play your music quieter, save your hearing) or a good bicycle (healthy!) out of it.
Anything but a sports car, really. Driving around in a sports car is just advanced sitting, which I already do to much of, and they are very expensive.
Sports car does not need to be expensive. I think it's more about having a purpose and being useful rather than anything else. I saw it in me and other people I know that went through that period. The greater the thing you're working on the less you'll feel any change.
Continuing with the dev bio theme, I'd suggest kicking off a mid-life crisis with a decent microscope, petri dishes, and maybe some planeria or something else to study.
By all means go back to university, even do a PhD, if you find a subject you’re passionate about (and have the beans to finance it). That’s what I did and it was great!
I find the probability of someone on the internet being able to give you sound advice, without knowing your situation and personality extremely small.
For me personally it is most of the time about the balance between what you can afford, what would you think you would like to achieve and what you miss would. Reasonably, most of the people can't "have it all" (family, money, peace of mind, results, etc.).
Well it’s not lucrative in the tech company sense but it is interesting science. It keeps the brain engaged. So less competition but a harder space if that makes sense.
The larger breakthroughs will be driven by AI and new instruments. Biological understanding has always been about developing the right tool/instrument to answer a question.
That's the only major roadblock left, rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work. I'm not sure how Valve could address this without people getting angry. They could eventually leverage their immutable rootfs setup to enable attestation of the system stack and run the games in security hardened containers?
My feeling is that Valve's approach via using wine/proton is pragmatic in terms of getting something that works for them and reduces how much they're held hostage to windows, but it's a missed opportunity to go further and decouple PC gaming from windows. As it stands they are downstream of whatever MS does to the 'reference' platform and how developers use it (because that's where the majority of users are).
I'd love to see what would happen if a consortium was formed to take responsibility for gaming on the PC platform, and I wouldn't be surprised if MS wouldn't mind abdicating maintenance especially if their xbox fortunes have waned and there's less mutual benefit for them.
Valve basically tried the later approach with the initial Steam for linux push which included steam machines and the steam controller. It did have some level of initial success but clearly had lost momentum and the developer support it had seemed to fade after a few years. There were quite a few direct ports during that time though. I think they would have preferred that approach but ultimately decided it was a bridge to far.
If linux gaming requires you use a blessed immutable OS where everything you run is either unprivileged or signed by a central entity, it's not much better than just using Windows at that point.
Kernel level anti cheat is a failure. You need to control the hardware to do it properly. The only hope is to wait for less locally intrusive and more robust anti cheat solutions.
Basically the only possible solutions at this point lie in the AI space.
> If linux gaming requires you use a blessed immutable OS where everything you run is either unprivileged or signed by a central entity, it's not much better than just using Windows at that point.
Yes it is, given that unlike Windows you still ultimately know what code being executed on your computer and have some degree of control over it.
Should add, this isn't necessarily something I want, lucky for me I don't really play the games that require anti-cheat. But it is something that Valve could conceivably do.
You have as much control over it as you do over windows in this state: i.e. uninstalling the OS.
Just because you know what the base is doing, doesn't mean you get to see what the proprietary kernel level drivers, loaded at runtime, are doing.
Really it's effectively as good as having windows and running an open source web browser, or an open source kernel driver. It doesn't change the fact that your computer is being fundamentally controlled by components you can't change, some/many of which are also proprietary.
This isn't a problem unique to what we're talking about, virtually every desktop PC on the planet has proprietary blobs running regardless of the OS used. I agree it sucks, but they're also not strictly necessary to run the containerized setup I proposed (any more than they're necessary to run the computer itself). It's possible to have attestation without anything proprietary/closed source.
While it's possible to have attestation without anything proprietary/closed source. If you look at widevine you will quickly notice how that's very unlikely to happen. While it's possible to do this in containers, if you look at how DRM is built into the HDMI protocol, you will notice that it's unlikely you'll ever get to control a base while running the proprietary stuff in a container.
Your idea is somewhat possible, but it's never going to happen in reality. I can already run windows in a VM for the exact same result.
It's unlikely sure, but I look at the alternatives and they seem even less likely. I really doubt consumers would be happy with normalizing rootkits on Linux, even those at Valve wouldn't want that. So what other choices are there? That question left me with the answer I gave.
Running Windows in a VM would be less efficient than running a stripped down Linux stack inside of a container. Going the Linux+Wine route requires less proprietary code and would be free to license. Hardly an exact same result.
There already are games with anti-cheat on Linux, they're just using (arguably) less effective versions of them.
Valve are financially incentivized to get as many games working as possible, I don't think it makes sense for them to do nothing at all about this. They have a head start now due to the general crappiness of Windows on a handheld but Microsoft's mobile offerings could catch up and given that would have Call of Duty among a lot of other heavy hitters available while Deck wouldn't, that is a problem that Valve would need to solve in order to not get stomped.
I think there are three fundamental categories of cheating threat models that actually matter: State poisoning, Information leakage, and Input automation
State poisoning means your game was poorly written, period. Either that's a vuln within the code itself or badly implemented netcode. A 2-player game can have total asynchronous client separation and still be peer-to-peer. A more-than-two-player game is almost always run on a server that serves as the single source of truth. In either case, a game that doesn't make the fundamental guarantee that the inputs available to a player and maybe some initial random seeds are the sole determinant of the gamestate have no hope, and rootkitting your computer because they wrote their game's statemachine or interfaces like shit is not the correct solution. If your answer to this is that big game studios shouldn't have to learn how to write more solid code, this means that the sanctity of their game isn't that important to them, not that they should get to root your computer
Information leakage may be somewhat harder. Often you want the simulation to be running client-side, so a naive model of netplay would have the full state available to all clients from a technical perspective... but this doesn't have to be true. In most cases, you can do partial state with rollbacks to make it much harder to cheat from a technical perspective, even making no guarantees about the clients themselves. I think even when this is hard, the correct path here isn't rootkits, it's approaches that start to approximate zero-knowledge proofs. This also means there's a rich literature of zero-knowledge proofs to draw on
Input automation, to be honest, is basically hopeless to prevent upfront regardless of what you do. If you can plug external hardware into your device at all, you can rig up something that automates your inputs. This can be hard to even verify in person, let alone through even a rootkit. I don't personally think it's worth worrying about that much, but if you care about macros and the like, it's really difficult to prevent. However, if there's money on the line or something, there are good analytic forensic techniques to detect this kind of cheating after the fact. Maybe this is where "AI" could actually help, as some kind of sequence-based anomaly detection that can run in real time might be able to detect unusual input clusters, but I worry that the false positive rate is going to be super high. Honestly seems like a lost cause. But crucially, not a lost cause that you get around via compromising the OS at a kernel level
Anti-cheat that "needs to own your kernel" is more user-hostile corporate bullshit. Most games work fine on linux, but frankly no game is worth a rootkit, and no game needs one. The fact that some companies demand it should be viewed as those companies trying to scam you. That's not how the security of anything on the internet works. It's only how security of a bunch of mobile stuff works because Microsoft has trained generations of otherwise smart people to believe their total lies about security, and Google and Apple have taken advantage of this to secure a massive amount of control and surveillance over everyone who owns a smartphone (Which is increasingly required because they've also convinced people that fake 2FA that's just your phone as a single source of identity that can in fact often effectively be 1FA because it can override other authentication methods in most cases is somehow secure. The fact that everyone has a device with a bunch of proprietary backdoors that they don't have root on and that serves as a single lynchpin through which their life can be ruined is the most fundamental destruction of personal computer and identity security that's ever been realized - to say nothing of privacy, and that's a huge accomplishment given all that Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have done and still do to compete for the title)
Giving a corp a backdoor to your computer doesn't secure anything except that corp's ability to fuck with you. Don't believe Microsoft, Apple, Epic Games, The NSA, or anyone else who tells you that the best way to secure something is to give them a backdoor. Fuck all those people. They have not only gotten their slimy tendrils in a ton of people's stuff through these lies, but have propagated bad information about how to do security to a ton of organizations. If someone who works at one of these scummy companies or agencies responds to this with some condescending corp-speak at me, I've got a bunch of work to do so I'll probably not get to you immediately, but I pre-emptively say that making this argument at all fundamentally undermines your credibility, and also I hate you on a personal level. You've been a spook too long and it's rotted your brain, hypothetical internet stranger who might not even exist, quit your job and fix your heart
Basically, don't believe any of this "We have to own your computer for your own good" nonsense. That's a scam. Every time. Also, proprietary software should be assumed inherently insecure by default, not the other way around. A better world is possible
The reason companies seem to bother at this point is that, by implementing increasingly intrusive anti-cheat, they force cheaters to be increasingly subtle. With sufficiently intrusive anti-cheat you end up with gamers believing that the game they're playing has no cheaters.
This currently happens in at least some of the games which utilise kernel level anti cheat, as demonstrated by numerous videos on the topic which also shed light on massive communities of cheaters who just end up buying or making their own hardware based cheats.
Gamers will believe anything a company they like tells them. The fact that these companies can attract arguably the most insufferably delusional audience of frothing bootlickers to ever walk the earth to defend them doesn't justify their decisions on a technical or an ethical level
If the explanation for why a company needs a rootkit is "they don't want to spend effort on a better solution" that means that solving cheating isn't a priority for them, and if we care about that we shouldn't buy their game. It especially doesn't mean you should accept a rootkit to buy their game
I view self-identified "gamers" as a cult at this point. If my goal were to persuade them of anything, I'd probably fail. I'm not in marketing for a reason. But the fact that a bunch of fools believe in something doesn't make it true
I bit of anger or at least disappointment in your post. However, "The fact that everyone has a device with a bunch of proprietary backdoors that they don't have root on and that serves as a single lynchpin through which their life can be ruined is the most fundamental destruction of personal computer and identity security that's ever been realized" is completely true.
You should be angry at people who try to hack your computer with the express intent of spying on you or controlling your behavior. I am angry that people will waste my time trying to defend this behavior to me, whether it's about phones, smarthomes, or video games
Also, the thing where people think being angry makes you automatically wrong has gotta be a holdover from lead paint. I truly can't believe people are that stupid naturally
I just gave an in-depth breakdown of why that's not true. Your reply amounts to saying "nuh uh!" with no justification. There is nothing to engage with in this reply. It doesn't even attempt to have any substance
Your in depth breakdown doesn't address the substance of the argument at all, it's mostly a distraction.
Servers can not bear the entire weight of guarding against cheat, it's impossible. If you don't understand that then you are not in a position to be writing any sort of breakdown.
Several games and game protocols require security on the client side to be able to stop cheats. You can't have security on the client side if the client has full access to the hardware and OS.
It's not more complicated than that, and your 'breakdown' doesn't adequately address that. You can dismiss this point if you like as you did when I made it in my previous reply, but it doesn't make it any less a fact.
That's ridiculous. A server only needs to be capable of running a single authoritative copy of the game and handling dead simple network requests to prevent every kind of cheating that matters except input automations, which you can't prevent reliably with a rootkit anyway. If you have a case where this isn't true, feel free to expand on it instead of just blindly believing it must exist. You don't need client-side control to make very powerful guarantees of systemic security in much more serious contexts than a game. You're not only doing special pleading, but you're doing it for a scenario that, as far as I can tell, has no theoretical reasoning and no examples, because you haven't provided any. I have to conclude it's imaginary. I gave you a good breakdown of what threat models I think exist and some sketches of technical solutions, like client separation and authoritative servers. I speak from both sound theory and experience implementing netcode here. Maybe you are too, but I can't tell from what you're saying, because again all I'm hearing is "nuh uh, sometimes you need it!" I see no why, how, or when in that argument. Is the problem you can only fix by having total control over the whole platform of every client in the room with us right now?
> every kind of cheating that matters except input automations
So basically, except the most common types of cheating.
> which you can't prevent reliably with a rootkit anyway
Yes, this is basically what I was saying when I said you can't stop cheating so long as the consumer has control of the hardware.
> instead of just blindly believing it must exist
Well, with respect, I think it is you who is blindly believing all cheating can be stopped server-side. I find that claim to be patently ridiculous.
> no examples, because you haven't provided any.
> all I'm hearing is "nuh uh, sometimes you need it!"
You're right, I haven't provided examples because this is common knowledge in the industry or to anyone that knows anything about trying to prevent cheating. I wasn't prepared to have to give a lecture to defend my point. But really, if what you are saying was correct, then all these companies must just be incredibly incompetent for not preventing cheating server-side, right? Because it's just so easy?
More than that, it's a very basic principle in security that if someone controls that hardware, most security can be defeated. The exception is stuff with DRM and things like a TPM where the consumer doesn't have full control, and that is the only way to truly prevent cheating. That's just a fact.
So you're saying that the sole concern in anticheat software is macroing? Alright, do you need to control every peripheral connected to the computer as well? How can you guarantee there isn't a SoC on someone's keyboard that sends a bunch of signals that they didn't have to type? Maybe we gotta put a little spy chip in every copper wire sold in every country, just to be sure it's not connecting anything to anything else. You know, in case someone is trying to cheat
Anyway, the fact that industry giants want to be in the very lucrative business of controlling the computers people use and have made up all manner of silly justifications for it is not news to me, but I have no reason to believe them, and saying "well lots of people who I consider to have enough authority that you should take their word for it also believe this, take my word for it" isn't particularly compelling. If you don't expect to need to justify your position why even bother making the claim? I don't assign automatic unquestioned epistemic authority to you just because you claim to be espousing the consensus view of an industry, and it's an industry full of crooks built on an industry full of crooks in the first place
> So you're saying that the sole concern in anticheat software is macroing?
Can you quote where I said that? I'm certain I said no such thing.
Are you really reducing any client side cheat to just macros? That's either disingenuous or willfully ignorant.
> Alright, do you need to control every peripheral connected to the computer as well?
Ideally, yeah. Look at Playstations for example. People can't play with cheats running on the same OS interfering with the game because they don't have control of the hardware. They can still cheat with peripherals though, as the situation with the Cronus Zen showed, and so yes, to stop cheating control of the peripherals is needed. With a recent real world example to corroborate.
> Maybe we gotta put a little spy chip in every copper wire sold in every country, just to be sure it's not connecting anything to anything else. You know, in case someone is trying to cheat
You're trying to dismiss what I'm saying with hyperbolic sarcasm, but it isn't working and isn't funny. iPhones, Apple Devices in general, Nintendo devices, plenty of Android devices, game consoles, none of these give the consumer control of the hardware. They don't need a keylogger and transmitter to stop cheating, they just need for the cheaters not to have control of the hardware. Like I've been saying.
There is a reason GTA5 on console has no cheats and on PC they are rampant, and it isn't because Rockstar are completely inept at preventing cheats serverside, it's because that isn't possible.
> "well lots of people who I consider to have enough authority that you should take their word for it also believe this, take my word for it" isn't particularly compelling.
My stance isn't based on faith but detailed understanding. You have yet to support your position with any evidence, and so far your point is refuted multiple times over by real world evidence. Occam certainly isn't on your side.
If you want to support your argument you're going to have to do better than trying to dismiss mine as just being the result of an appeal to authority fallacy. Do better, or admit you had no idea what you were talking about and were just speculating/guessing.
I actually listed three threat models for cheating in video games that I think matter, and then explained that for those broad classes as I described them, one was a solved problem (If players can change the state of the game in unintended ways directly, your netcode is not just bad, but worse than ready-made standardized solutions that exist), another is solvable with netcode (probably provably so. For example, garbled circuits protocols are a subset of zero-knowledge proofs and can be used to obfuscate domains as broad as any input a neural network is training on, and those are general function approximators about which we can't really make good structured assumptions about what information they will need), and the third is not even solved by a rootkit. You then quoted me about the third, input automation (I then shorthand this later as "macros"), and say
> So basically, except the most common types of cheating
So yes, I concluded from this reply that your concern is about macros, or context-free input automations. With good computer vision models we could also externalize certain classes of context-aware automation from the base system via a camera and an edge GPU on the external device, but this is exotic enough that I assume you're not worried about it. For macros, you can use a keyboard or mouse or joystick modified with a circuit to automate inputs that come from the device in a way that's indistinguishable from those generated by a human user, except perhaps approximately through forensic sequence analysis, which you could do in the network layer or on a server just as well
> You're trying to dismiss what I'm saying with hyperbolic sarcasm, but it isn't working and isn't funny. iPhones, Apple Devices in general, Nintendo devices, plenty of Android devices, game consoles, none of these give the consumer control of the hardware. They don't need a keylogger and transmitter to stop cheating, they just need for the cheaters not to have control of the hardware. Like I've been saying.
I am, as I said, well aware that tech companies are plunging us ever-further into a pervasive dystopian panopticon, which may sound like a silly thing to say about older game consoles, but not ones with cameras and microphones, and which may intercept network traffic, and which you have financial information tied to, and it is certainly not a stretch to say about phones. This is neither hyperbole, sarcasm, nor even subtext. In fact, it is the crux of our disagreement. If your conceit here is that I should accept this as inevitable and not oppose it at all, we have nothing to talk about. Really, if you're going to repeatedly insist that you have epistemic authority and it should exempt you from having to make any actual arguments, the least you could do is to keep up with the conversation.
Let's break this down since you seem confused. I am arguing here that your specific claim that you need this level of control to make a fair video game fails on its merits. Video games are here used as one justification for why it's good that your computer is being controlled remotely by a tech company instead of you. You are here acting as the advocate for that position, essentially that the price of freedom to control the device you play a video game is people cheating in video games. Your arguments so far are "This is the only way" and that this is "common knowledge in the industry", and then I guess a bunch of condescension about how my disagreeing with this premise automatically makes me naive or foolish*. You are correct that I haven't cited specific examples, because I am the one making the general argument, which I've defined in terms of three threat models I'm claiming exhaustively cover the ways someone could cheat at a video game that one could plausibly hope to prevent. Really, your job here is a lot easier, as all you need to be right is one (1) specific counterexample to my claim, a single case where it is definitely impossible to prevent cheating without controlling the computer of the game client, but where it is possible with that control. I'm well aware already that many video games implement "anti-cheat" measures this way, so I wouldn't count "Well they did it here and here and here" as counterexamples. To do this, you could point to a case where one of those classes of threats has no other feasible solution, given control of the server or even on the assumption that at least one player isn't cheating in a p2p context. You could even say "Actually you missed a whole kind of cheating in your threat model", and then demonstrate that it would still be cheating and that it requires a rootkit to accomplish, or something like that. But also, you don't need a counterexample. Maybe my reasoning's wrong somewhere, and pointing out something about it that falls down would at least be a starting point. Instead, you say "This is obvious, everyone knows this, I can't believe I have to explain this", which is you trying to use status in place of an argument. I don't respect that in almost any context, but even if I did, you have not established here and I have no reason to assign you this epistemic status. So in effect, you have not made anything resembling a compelling argument for your position, empirical or otherwise, as I said. As you said, you are under no obligation to, but if that's your tack, it's weird that you bothered to reply at all
*To be fair, I made a really similar argument in my first reply! It applies equally in both directions, and is pretty facile - a combination of an ad hominem attack and begging the question - in both directions. I wrote it in a tone intended to convey that it was more meant as partisan invective than actual argumentation, but regardless of whether you got that subtext, it's not exactly a pillar of my claim here
> Let's break this down since you seem confused. I am arguing here that your specific claim that you need this level of control to make a fair video game fails on its merits.
No, I'm not confused. You're just very simply wrong. No question about it, it's not a matter of subjectivity, you are 100% absolutely unequivocally incorrect on this issue.
I can only assume at this point you are incredibly stubborn. You clearly have a lack of experience and knowledge in this area, yet you are doubling down on your position, despite it being trivially shown to be false by numerous real world examples and very basic, irrefutable facts and logic.
But you're the type of person who thinks that you're right no matter what, and that all these game developers must just be inept, right? I feel that I've already wasted time pointing out you are wrong and I'm not interested in an is-not/is-too argument with someone that would rather write essays and argue semantics than have the basic decency to admit they have no clue about what they are talking about. No one's even reading this discussion anymore, is your ego really so great?
I won't be continuing this convo, but feel free to have the last word. Good luck.
Dang you sure are great at saying nothing really confidently. I'm not even being stubborn here, you just refuse to explain yourself. Not only do I have no reason to care what you think, I don't even know what you think, except for "You're wrong." I've said it before and I'll say it again: Why bother to write a reply at all if you're not going to say anything meaningful? I can't even say your argument is ill-formed because you simply haven't made any such thing at all.
I honestly don't know what you're asking me to do here. You show up and say "Nuh uh you're wrong" and I say "Why?" and you say "I can't believe how stubborn you're being!"
What the fuck?
Like the one example you cited is an instance where even on a console this control-based paradigm didn't work, and your only conclusion was that this obviously means you need to control even more stuff, instead of even considering other approaches. It's a real "When your only tool is a hammer" type scenario far as I can tell
My days of thinking AAA gamedev must be a terrible culture in which to make software are certainly coming to a middle. This has downregulated my willingness to take "I'm an experienced gamedev" as an argument for epistemic authority in the future
I definitely explained my position and provided an argument. If you can't see it, it's only because you are letting your own voice and thoughts drown it out. Which, from your post history, seems to be quite a typical behavior for you.
I'm legit not seeing where that is. You say some games, or "game protocols" require client-side protection... why? Just saying it's the only way doesn't explain anything at all. You have confusingly tried to give me examples of... anticheat mechanisms that rely on the total control of some hardware. I know those exist? That's not what's in question.
Maybe your only experience developing these things is with a specific set of tools, and those tools require that? I'm sitting here trying to parse out anything that looks like a rationale and I just can't find it, just more "This is the way it is. This is the way it's done". I know that already. I am saying it doesn't have to be. You're not engaging with the question in any way, just getting upset with me for not conceding that you're right and trying to insult me about it. "I looked up your post history and I see that you argue with people here a lot". You got me I guess?
If it upsets you so much to have this argument, you probably should disengage from it, but I'm genuinely baffled by the whole thing.
> Maybe your only experience developing these things is with a specific set of tools, and those tools require that?
lol. More personal attacks. Your entire thought process is wrong, laughably so. Maybe your only experience is speculating on things you don't have a great knowledge of on HN?
Please, just tell me, if you are so sure you are correct, why these game companies can not solve the problem as you suggest? It's because they are all inept and simply not as smart as you? That's it, right?
> I'm sitting here trying to parse out anything that looks like a rationale and I just can't find it,
Nah. You're just willfully ignoring it. I don't think you're engaging in good faith at all. I'm not confused in the least, despite your constant accusations, and I've been pretty clear and unambiguous.
Your post history shows you as someone who can't ever admit when they are wrong and frequently resorts to ad hominems, and can't bear not having the last word. That's all this is. Now, since you want to play, I guess we'll see how long this goes on for.
I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so. Of course anti-cheat that backdoors a bunch of people's computers is good for the company. They get anticheat and a backdoor that could be valuable for selling data later, or preventing piracy too, or responding to subpoenas and being a hero that caught a terrorist. I dunno. Surveillance and control is popular for a reason. It's not because it's necessary for everything it's billed as necessary for. That's a sales pitch
Also, I guess you're not reading my post history very carefully when deciding it's a good ad hominem attack to use, because just this week I had a heated argument about some culture war shit and the nature of governments and ended up realizing I was being an asshole and making assumptions about someone, and apologized for it. I get that I'm pretty belligerent, especially on topics like how we live in an orwellian dystopia of surveillance and a majority of people in my trade seem to range from complicit to actively advocating for its necessity, but it really sounds like you're responding emotionally to my verbosity and tone and using this to try to discredit me instead of having anything substantive to say about the topic at hand. It is exactly an ad hominem attack, no more, no less
Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position and you are only using ad hominem and appeals to authority. My fundamental claim is that anticheat mechanisms for multiplayer games are possible without client-side control, wherever they are possible at all. So far, in opposing this claim, you have not given any justification whatsoever, opting instead to claim this is obvious and well-known and thus requires no justification. I made the only good faith argument either of us have made in this whole thread right at the beginning, the post you initially responded to, and you refuse to engage with it in any sense. Every reply you've made is argument to incredulity, ad hominem, or naked appeal to the authority of your supposed expertise, the consensus of the games industry, etc. I would love to engage in good faith with substantive arguments. You are doing neither.
"You think all the smart people in the games industry are wrong?" is just another appeal to authority. I don't think they're stupid, I think they have no incentive to value the privacy and autonomy of their userbase and look for other solutions
> I think game companies could totally solve this problem a different way, but their incentives are not aligned to do so.
This is your root assumption underlying everything else. This also doesn't make any kind of sense. These companies put a lot of money into trying to stop cheaters. People don't want to play a game that is rampant with cheaters, it's bad for business.
The incentive is there. The incentive is more than there. As are their well reported attempts which end up making some gaming experiences incredibly negative for consumers, reporting in incredibly negative receptions which put a big dent in sales.
To say the incentive is not there is just...silly. Or disingenuous. Either way it's simply not true.
So, again, why hasn't Rockstar or Activision made these trivial modifications to completely and entirely stop cheating serverside? The cheating gives them negative press, hurts sales and turns people away from their software. So why haven't they fixed this since it's so easy?
> Here, I'm genuinely trying to understand your position
You keep repeating this but honestly I think it's bs. My point is clear and been repeated several times. You continue to try and refute the points I make; if you didn't understand my point, you wouldn't be able to do that. Honestly, I think most of your reply here is nothing but noise. Just focus on answering the top part of my reply, because eventually, inevitably your claims will be shown to be false, and the assumptions you rely on will be shown to be incredibly unlikely. I don't expect you to be able to admit that or concede, but I expect it will be entertaining for future readers and useful to those who are unfortunate enough to engage with you in the future.
I swear it's insane that anyone's this obtuse. Read better. I said companies do not have an incentive to respect users' privacy and autonomy. They have anticheat solutions that work for their customers willing to take that hit. That's not in question here. We're talking through each other because you either can't read or are willfully misunderstanding. You have conflated anticheat with kernel access when the whole argument is about whether it's possible to prevent cheating without it. If you're going to insult people's intelligence it would behoove you to be able to read. This isn't some minor quibble either. Nearly every post you've made has fundamentally missed the point of the one it's replying to. I can either assume you're not arguing in good faith or that your language comprehension is inadequate to communicate meaningfully. Either way this is a waste of both of our time
Almost every comment you make takes the dumbest possible interpretation of the comment you're responding to and runs with it, probably because setting up and flicking over strawmen like you're doing gives the illusion that you're smarter than you actually are to those who aren't paying attention (though based on how unpopular your posts are I guess it isn't working that well).
Not sure if it's deliberate or not. It makes you a miserable person to talk to in any case.
my problem with them is that they open room to a lot of risk when the dev fuckup and they don't even work. plenty of motivated cheaters bypass them you can even find tutorial on youtube for that. that mean they only make the experience worse for linux user.
The Anti cheat stuff along with some graphical glitches on some games (namely the original Deus Ex, ancient I know but I love it) meant I couldn't fully commit to Steam on Linux. But booting up the Master Chief Collection and signing into Xbox live to play Halo 3 on Linux at better framerates than Windows really tickled my sense of irony, what a feat they've managed!
And I also miss community maintained dedicated servers, with some opinionated admin who boots off cheaters. I don't like installing the kernel-level anti cheat stuff even on Windows, it is no better than that Sony BMG rootkit that kicked up a storm years ago, now we just accept it in the rear for some reason. Centralisation ruins everything.
Community servers can't offer strong cheat protection. If you can modify the client then you can cheat most of the time, and the server can't necessarily do anything.
> rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work
Yeah, that's called piracy. The ant-cheat stuff isn't going anywhere, and even without it plenty of games require DirectX which has no Linux equivalent.
It isn't piracy, anti-cheat technically isn't DRM. Many games let you disable it for the purpose of running mods. Even Halo: Master Chief Collection, a Microsoft game, has concessions made by the developer so that it works properly on Linux given anti-cheat is disabled (they've mentioned it in patch updates).
Judging by the second bit in your post there I guess you haven't been paying much attention to gaming in the Linux space in the last 6 years or so, lol.
Ripping out the DRM absolutely is piracy, and it's the only way to do it since the companies themselves are not doing it.
Anti-cheat absolutely is DRM, a lot of the time. It explicitly uses DRM tech from companies that make DRM technologies. At the very least I guess if we want to be precise we could say DRM is often a component of anti-cheat technologies even if anti-cheat isn't explicitly DRM.
I've been paying attention to the gaming space, and I know it still sucks unless you use Steam and Proton (which can't be used without Steam). Valve even pretty much gave up on their console because the developer support just isn't there.
Lmao, c'mon dude. Many companies are, in a literal sense, doing it, I gave you an example of one. Splitting hairs about the definition of DRM misses the point that it's treated as a separate thing. I was also only making the point that it's the anti-cheat that stops the games from working rather than issues stemming from compatibility layers, getting your panties in a bunch because of the mere theoretical possibility of removing anti-cheat from a game is ridiculous.
Proton can be used for software outside of Steam (though isn't designed for it) but is made up of open source components that definitely can be used separately from Steam. Proton is a Codeweavers-led project and the vast majority of the improvements Valve and it's contractors have made to Wine and it's supporting projects that Proton rely on have made it upstream. Steam Deck is selling extremely well and major publishers are testing their games and making changes specifically for the platform. Steam Machines was a decade ago, the state of play has changed.
You didn't say DirectX was a big deal, you said 'DirectX has no Linux equivalent'. It does, it's provided by Wine and it's supporting libraries wrapping DX and D3D API calls to SDL and Vulkan. Feature parity is strong and performance is in the same ballpark, as it would need to be given the software is being developed in mind for an anemic mobile AMD SoC. Though in spite of that even DLSS and ray tracing works on hardware that supports it.
I call bullshit on you paying attention, you're saying too many things that are provably incorrect.
> I call bullshit on you paying attention, you're saying too many things that are provably incorrect.
I'm not incorrect. I don't think you have experience with what you say. Have you actually tried to use Proton without steam? Yes, the changes eventually make their way back into WINE but Proton is basically unusable without Steam unless you want to do a lot of work.
Saying Linux has a DirectX equivalent via WINE is preposterous. WINE is offering compatibility with the WINDOWS solution because Linux DOESN'T have an equivalent. WINE might forward some to SDL and Vulkan, but neither of those are anywhere near to being a complete replacement for DirectX.
And I'm not 'getting my panties in a bunch', I was just pointing out a fact. If you want to turn it into semantics and throw insults, that's your choice.
SDL and Vulkan are equivalents to DirectX, to state otherwise is itself preposterous. Is it a complete implementation with perfect compatibility? No, but that's not a realistic goal or expectation even on Windows. One of the first steps I take to get older D3D9 games to work on Windows is to use DXVK, Microsoft's own implementation of their APIs isn't perfect either, having atrophied over the years.
Outside of Steam I use Lutris, which works fine. Though it's rare that I actually need to use it, given I have Steam and the vast majority of my games library is on that platform (as is just about everyone elses). Saying that the reliance on Valve's store is a problem is I guess a valid one in a ideological sense, but practically? Steam dominates PC gaming, it's what matters, even more so than Microsoft's own store.
You're the one who tried to spin up a semantic argument over your overly broad application of the term DRM, I had no interest in getting into that.
> SDL and Vulkan are equivalents to DirectX, to state otherwise is itself preposterous.
SDL and Vulkan are no where close to being equivalent to DirectX. What they are is useful in some scenarios, and good alternatives to some parts of DirectX.
It's not preposterous at all, and I'm sorry to say you clearly have a lack of knowledge in this area to claim otherwise.
Since that's beyond clear to me with your last reply, I'm just going to bow out of this discussion at this point. Good luck.
"equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject. Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.
That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
> "equivalent" was the word used by one of the developers working on the Proton stack during a conference talk on the subject.
Yeah? You got a source? Can you show it wasn't in a particular limited context and was used in the same sense you are using it now?
> Which is correct usage, since "equivalent" doesn't only mean exactly the same in every way but can also mean equivalent in purpose, which they are.
Nah. They are still not even close to being equivalent in purpose. SDL is a little closer, since it wants to be the API for all aspects of gaming and 3d development, but it isn't quite there. Before you double down on your point, maybe you should really look at everything DirectX offers, and everything the alternatives you claim to be equivalent offer.
> That is literally what your whole point is leaning on, taking a narrow definition of the word equivalent and spinning up a take that makes you feel right about yourself (meanwhile throwing an accusation at me re: abusing semantics). It's so desperate and stupid.
LOL! You've described yourself here and only yourself. I'm not the one arguing semantics. You claimed two things were equivalent, which are not. I simply pointed that out, and instead of just taking the L you, and only you, are arguing semantics. I absolutely agree, it is desperate and stupid.
How about just...actually supporting your claim, if you really believe you are correct? You know, instead of arguing semantics, or trying to deflect and falsely accuse me of doing so?
I'm not up on gaming on Linux because I'm not a gamer (in last 12 months I played no more than 10 hours for that Stellantis game I found on Steam because it's natively compatible with Linux, and never tried emulation/whatever in last decade), so I guess you're right. But usually the need for advanced games is one of the (few) reasons that I consider enough to "allow" a friend to install Windows instead of going for MacOS. Anyway I'll try to catch up a bit about the state of the art of Linux gaming, just to give an alternative to anyone that seeks for any kind of help in that.
Clojurescript compiles to Javascript and so inherits some of it's idiosyncrasies.
This is one of the real problems of clojure: you need some knowledge of the host language. It's also one of it's major strengths, and the only reason a lisp managed to get so much (relative) commercial traction.
It won't be worth looking into, because there's nothing they (devv.ai) can do, short of trying some automated self-improvement loop a la devin where the AI writes code, evaluates the code, fixes issues as they arise... Still not worth, it's not their core business.
You're just hitting a limit of the LLMs, they won't give you bug-free code, specially not from the first time, specially not complex ones like galloping timsort.
