My solution is simple: if it does not work on Linux, the game is out.
Long story short, if the Steam Machine gains enough market share, game publishers will want to join in because it will mean more money for them. It’s all about money.
It’s just a skill issue on the part of the developers.
Making anti-cheat properly is hard. Writing a spyware that watches everything that happens on your PC and blocks any attempts of touching the game is way easier, but bypassing that is easy with solutions that have higher privledges, thus being invisible even for the anti-cheat. You can just fake calls or hide memory from the anti-cheat, or just edit the anti-cheat in itself.
The solution for that is to run anti-cheat in the highest possible permission - the kernel.
Now, you could just make another kernel-level program that would have the same permissions to defeat that, or just edit your OS (i.e Linux, or a VM) where your cheat lives outside and has even higher privileges than the anti-cheat.
This is where Windows comes in - the only way to run kernel code is to have it signed by Microsoft, and that certification process is extremely difficult and annoying, which puts a pretty big hurdle in front of cheat developers. It’s the easy way out.
You could also somehow reverse-engineer Windows and run a custom version to bypass this. And that’s where TPM comes in, which (if I understood it right) validates that your Windows is the official signed one, and thus the kernel anti-cheat is safe. You can’t have this kind of affirmation on Linux, and the lazy developers who don’t want to invest into actual moderation and proper anti-cheat solutions just resort to kernel anti-cheat rootkit and require TPM to be enabled.
There’s not much Steam can do about this, aside from locking up their OS with signign keys and certification for priviliged software, along with setting up the whole TPM so you can’t run modified versions, which isn’t really possible since they are based on Linux.
The solution for that is to run anti-cheat in the highest possible permission - the kernel.
Cheaters just sidestep the kernel entirely and use DMA hardware instead.
At the moment its rather expensive at ~$400 but prices will probably drop over time.
Oh, cool, so if I understand it right, you have a hardware that directly reads the physical memory, so you can access it unrestricted and undetectable from another PC, where the cheat runs, and then you use a HDMI fuser to merge the output of the game and the cheat that runs on the second PC on a single monitor.
That’s actually really clever, I love solutions like this. Not that I approve of cheating, I have 0 respect for people who (unconsesualy, as in all involved parties agree to it being allowed) cheat. But from the hardware/security point of view, it’s amazing.
Oh, cool. Tbh I haven’t really looked into cheats much, but I did briefly work in cybersecurity where I was doing malware development, where AV avoidance is basically the same problem as game cheats are dealing with, so I just extrapolated what I assumed works the same.
This is a cool piece of tech, I’ll look into it more. I like seeing new exploits, thanks!
That’s too complicated to teabag people in Battlefield, but what would I know about the scene I’m not a part of.
Well, now I’m interested how far it can go in professional cheating. Any vids about that?
Not necessarily cheating, but use of external cheaters like this guy using an AI and electric shocks to have it move his arm
Thanks for sharing them. I’d consider the second one completely unfair, while the first one is, well, that’s how I’d like to imagine the experience of occasional cheaters from now on.
“We’re expecting console numbers this time, and then they developers will have to support it.”
Pretty much the answer I’d expect. In my most outlandish hopes, I’d love for this thing to serve as proper competition to the PS5, it’s certainly more exciting than Xbox right now, and pretty much sounds like what MS is planning to try for the next Xbox anyway.
That’s probably not likely, that kind of threat would require some really aggressive pricing, and Valve can’t guarantee as much vendor lock-in money post-sale as Sony can. That said… man it’d be incredible to see Valve step into that near-monopoly as well and viably compete against both Switch and PS5, as they both pretty desperately need competition to keep them working for the consumer.
There’s really nothing new, it’s the same as it was on the Steam Deck.
If the devs are not assholes they can easily allow Proton, from what Valve said before often all it takes is literally one checkbox on their side.
Give it the same desktop mode as the Steam Deck and I’m already sold.
That’s KDE Plasma. You can use that on most distros
Thank you!
That’s what I was hoping for, because I’m loving my Steam Deck for it (and Bazzite on my laptop too).Bazzite is peak for a couch or media pc. CachyOS is great for daily use computer with a focus on gaming, especially laptops
Bazzite made installing and running it on an HP Victus laptop with dedicated Nvidia GPU a breeze.
Does CachyOS handle dedicated Nvidia GPUs well?
Arch would be nice as base OS, too. Although I’m quite happy with my Fedora derivative.
What kind of shit question is that???
You should be questioning the game developers if they want to implement server side solutions instead of installing rootkits on users PCs and dictating what settings they should use.
Fuck off Eurogamer. No game should require any sort of kernel level access or setting change on your PC.
I mean, Valve could explicitly say that they have some trusted hardware and software stack or something and let games know whether the environment’s been modified.
That’d require support from Valve and be about the only way that you could have both a way to run in locked down mode for multiplayer games where addressing cheating is a problem (and where I think the “closed console system” model is probably mote appropriate and the “open PC model” is at best kludged into kimda-sorta working like a console) and also let the system still run in an “open mode”.
My own approach is just to not play most multiplayer competitive games on PCs. I’ve enjoyed them in the past, but for anything seriously reflex-oriented like FPSes, your reflexes go downhill with age anyway. And they come with all kinds of issues, even on a locked-down system that successfully avoids cheating. People griefing. You can’t generally pause the game to use the toilet, deal with a screaming kid, or answer the door. The other players, unlike game AIs, aren’t necessarily going to be optimized to play a “fun” game for me. You don’t need an Internet connection, and being in a remote area isn’t a limiting factor.
I think that the future is gonna be shifting towards better game AIs. Hard technical problems to solve there, but it’s a ratchet — we only get better over time.
The burden should be on the developers and a server side solution. No PC should be invaded with software to stop cheating. It’s cat and mouse anyway with client side detection, by chasing it so hard they are just incentivizing the creation of less and less detectable cheats.
The whole “its an untampered system” thing doesnt work. It’s like Secure Boot now randomly being required in games. No user should have to enable or disable anything like that just to run a game. It’s their device, they should have the freedom to do what they want and still run an application.
I think the invasion of bots in games is ruining them personally, no matter how old I get, or how bad I get at them, I still want to play against real players. I wouldnt mind a mode with just AI for people, but they should never be mixed in with real players.
The burden should be on the developers and a server side solution.
There are some fundamental limitations on what you can do with purely server-side solutions. If you’re playing online card games, sure, you can do viable pure server-side stuff to resist most cheating. That’ll get everything short of using, say, a calculator to compute probabilities or count cards or something.
But with, say, FPSes, that’s not really practical. You need to have some information on the client that the player shouldn’t be privy to to mitigate things like latency. For example, if another player runs around the edge of a wall and becomes visible, your client needs to know that it’s behind the wall and rounding the corner to rapidly show the opposing character becoming visible. And that means trusting client side code. And that entails trusted hardware to do reliably, and that can’t be done by the game developer — it’s gotta have support from Valve if you want that.
It’s practical, VACnet has existed for over a decade. It might not be perfect, but it’s a start and any company serious about anti-cheat could take that premise further.
The downside is that cheaters have to play at least a game before they are detected. Client side stuff is better for initial prevention, but even that’s becoming trivial as most good cheats dont even run on the same computer as the game anymore, circumventing all AC software anyway. If your game costs money to play, that’s already one of the biggest hurdles, so prevention isn’t worth chasing at the expense of privacy and security of users.
Any downsides from server-side are nothing in comparison to the downsides of client side anti-cheat.
How can you implement server-side anti-cheat?
Some things are harder, but for starters a few ideas:
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Either check that the reported positions of players, their movement speed, etc are consistent to what the game would allow you to do (don’t fly, don’t go faster, don’t go through walls,…) or only accept player input, process it server side and then send positions etc back to the client. (You can do some local interpolation, but the server wins, when there’s a miss match). That should get rid of flying, no clip, teleportation, evasion of projectiles, … You can also analyze the inputs for abnormal behavior like the precision with which you aim for the (center of) the head, aiming through walls, etc.
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Do all hitscan and projectiles etc. server side. Never let clients report that they’re hitting other players. This is calculated on the server.
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Do only report other player positions when they’re on screen or almost on screen. If the client doesn’t know where the enemies are, wallhacks are impossible or harder (note that some information may be transferred to the client for the sake of spatial audio etc!)
And so on. Do not, never ever, rely on client side data or validation. If a cheat program can alter the client, it can alter the data it sends. How do you ensure, that the client is actually official and “your code”, when it can tell you anything it wants to tell you? You can only make it harder for others to impersonate your client, but never impossible. Especially on PC, when you can execute just about any code you want?
All of those things are already computed on server. The purpouse of anti cheat is to not let computer to game for you. To not precisely click heads, step out of danger within 1ms of seeing it or reliably hit timings and combos. Such things can be hard to detect, and it is an ongoing battle between detectors and cheats. And ordinary people are on the loosing side, as they face forced kernel rootkits, false cheat detections and grace periods during which cheaters are still allowed to play.
Which is what server side AC solves, they don’t want to do it because of money and expertise required vs here have a rootkit.
VACnet has always been like this, trained on all the games played. It’s had its problems sure, but I have never had to install a rootkit to play their video games. That’s the baseline any other game should be achieving.
So, nothing that can defeat a good aimbot or limited wall-hack then, and a lot that would interfere with lag compensation.
I mean yeah, all that can be done server side should be, but there’s a lot that can’t be.
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Machine learning. Oh this player did this impossible move more than once, maybe we should flag that.
Valve have been doing it for more than a decade. Now imagine what others could do, they are so caught up on “AI”, but wont try and use it for anything it could actually be useful for.
How do you tell the difference between someone with a good aimbot (that simulates real input) and someone who’s just really good?
You can’t (server side).
Very easily, that’s what machine learning is for.
You can’t tell with client side either, so that’s a null argument. Anti-cheat is always bypassed, most good cheats don’t even run on the same device anymore, completely circumventing any kernel anti-cheat anyway.
On the server, they have all the data of where a player could be, what they could see, what they could hear, what human mouse movement looks like etc. that can all be used to target cheaters in a way they cannot get around. Player reporting would still exist of course for any other edge cases.
Client side anti-cheat has more data than server-side, because that is where the player’s actual screen, mouse and keyboard are.
The cheat only uses data available on the client - obviously - so the extra data about game state on the server is irrelevant.
“ML” is also not relevant. It doesn’t make the server any more able to make up for the data it doesn’t have. It only forces cheats to try and make realistic inputs, which they already do. And it ends up meaning that you don’t understand the decisions your anti-cheat model is making, so the inevitable false positives will cause a stink because you can’t justify them.
It doesn’t have to extinguish 99% of cheaters, hell, it doesn’t even need to extinguish cheating all together. It just has to make the problem manageable and invisible to players. That’s something server side can achieve. I’ll take the odd game with a cheater in if my entire PC isn’t ransom to some random company.
If cheaters exist but can’t blantantly cheat, then it doesn’t really effect the game anymore and the problem isn’t visible to players. You are never going to get rid of cheaters, even at LAN they have injected software in the past. It’s a deeper problem than we can solve with software.
Client-side AC has proven futile over and over again, even today with all the kernel AC. As I already said: most good cheats don’t even run on the same device anymore, completely circumventing any kernel (client side) anti-cheat anyway.
Why be allergic to trying something new? Something that isn’t invasive, a massive security threat or controlling of your own personal system.
I remember buying a Steam Link directly from Valve back in the day for like $7 because of some sale they had. I really hope the same thing doesn’t happen to the new Steam Machine
Steam link and controller! That was such an amazing deal
I think it would have to be wildly successful to achieve that goal but 🤞🤞
