Valve has announced that developers who use Easy Anti-Cheat for their games now have a much easier setup for Proton and the upcoming Steam Deck.
As we wrote about recently, it turned out that the announcement from Epic Games on supporting Easy Anti-Cheat for Proton was not as easy as expected. It required an SDK update for Epic Online Services, something developers noted was not exactly simple.
Thankfully, Valve has been doing more with Epic behind the scenes and the process is now much better, which should hopefully mean more developers will be able to do it. Valve has now expanded the developer documentation noting how Easy Anti-Cheat can be hooked up with Proton:
- Proton supports Easy Anti-Cheat without requiring any recompilation, but it does require you to manually enable support for your build by following these steps in order:
- Go into the EAC settings on the EAC partner site and enable Linux support from the dashboard.
- Once that's done, download the EAC Linux library (easyanticheat_x64.so) for the SDK version integrated with your game, and add it to your depot next to the Windows library (EasyAntiCheat_x64.dll).
- Lastly, on the Steamworks site, publish a new build of your game containing the new depot contents. (You don't have to make any changes to the game executable, just include the new files in the depot contents.)
Valve states that starting Monday - January 24, they will begin sending out Deck Verified data to developers that use anti-cheat to notify them of the results. Once they get it, developers will have a week to accept it (broken or otherwise) or do the necessary work to get it sorted.
So, if all goes well, we might in the next few weeks see more anti-cheat enabled titles working on Linux with Proton. This would be great for the Steam Deck, since it ships with SteamOS 3 Linux.
Just some of the titles that could benefit include:
- Apex Legends
- Back 4 Blood
- Dead By Daylight
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection
- New World
- Paladins
- Rust
- Warhammer: Vermintide 2
Quoting: elgatilMmm, I was wondering.. Step 2 is just placing a certain file in a certain dir so, couldn't proton take care of that?
EAC being proprietary, I don't think Valve or anyone could distribute it without a license, even a free (as in beer) one...
QuotePaladinsFrom this list, those are only ones I'm thinking are willing to try to port it, the I think either will wait for people to demand (based on the success of other developers) or aren't going to do anyway.
Rust
Warhammer: Vermintide 2
Specially Dead by Daylight, because that would involve Behavior doing something actually good to it's players for a change
Last edited by BielFPs on 22 January 2022 at 3:28 pm UTC
Last edited by akselmo on 22 January 2022 at 3:42 pm UTC
Quoting: tonyrhQuoting: elgatilMmm, I was wondering.. Step 2 is just placing a certain file in a certain dir so, couldn't proton take care of that?
EAC being proprietary, I don't think Valve or anyone could distribute it without a license, even a free (as in beer) one...
Also, there are multiple versions, as mentioned in the instructions. A script in Proton works have to detect and download the correct version, and every future version.
I can see that as a potential support nightmare, since a customer would only see a broken game, and likely blame the developer, which would have been taken out of the process, and has no way of fixing it.
Quoting: ArtenQuoting: elgatilMmm, I was wondering.. Step 2 is just placing a certain file in a certain dir so, couldn't proton take care of that? (And actually you could control which dir is it by changing the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH) It would remove step 2 and 3 which are the most annoying I think.
Version of anticheat with game is compiled probably need match version of library. Don't know if there is way how proton can get version... and if some game stop updating anticheat, you need multiple libraries...
I have zero idea of the underlying infra of anti cheats, but I'd assume that while adding the "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" trick would indeed work, unless it's enabled on the back end (i.e: allow linux library to queries to even be considered) it would still return as "false"
Last edited by minkiu on 22 January 2022 at 5:34 pm UTC
fenglengshun 22 Jan
QuoteThere are Linux binaries missing on GOG although a port is available on Steam. These developers don't have to do much but upload the existing build, besides their Windows and potential macOS releases, but simply refuse to avoid the work afterwards!
So I have my doubts that many games will be made compatible for a system of which many developers are unsure. They'll rather wait to see how many people will install Windows on the Steam Deck before committing to anything.
I think the situation here with Valve is different than the situation with GOG.
Because the support charge comes essentially to Valve instead of the developer.
If a developer enables EAC on Proton, the validation/testing is essentially made by Valve.
So yes they will have to support Proton, but it won't cost them as much as if they had to support native Linux.
Last edited by Spyker on 22 January 2022 at 8:01 pm UTC
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