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Ah, thanks!

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This is an excellent game, not much else to say about it.

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Personnally, I have a 4k tv and still play in 1080p. From 10feet away, I hardly see the difference. Unless you have a 70inch display in your living room, which I don't because I don't have enough space, 4k, just like RT, is pretty overrated, imo.

Edit: Thinking about this, I'd choose 144hz before 4k.

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It might not be the most powerful thing on the market, but neither is the Steam Deck, and yet this is the one that's getting all the attention, despite not being sold anywhere but on Steam digital store!

I have concerns about the Steam Machine hardware that I never had about the Deck hardware. The newer GPU architecture and the low res of the screen of the Deck were chosen to hit a specific performance target. The Steam Machine is going to be plugged into a 4K TV, and the components were picked to hit a specific price. I think the lack of RAM and lack of VRAM are going to hurt it from the off, and definitely in the medium term.

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This honestly couldn't come at a better time. I have an ageing middle range gaming computer and I was more and more leaning towards HTPCs for its replacement as I don't have a lot of time to play anymore and a mid-tower PC takes a lot of space.
I have yet to buy a Steam Deck, and Valve announces this?

Steam Controller will be a day one purchase, and I'll certainly replace my tower PC with a Steam Machine. It might not be the most powerful thing on the market, but neither is the Steam Deck, and yet this is the one that's getting all the attention, despite not being sold anywhere but on Steam digital store! And as my PC is old, it will still be better (especially CPU wise, which is what matters the most in the end for longevity). I have 1080p monitors so GPU will be largely enough. Depending on the price, this Steam Machine could end up being an absolute banger, just like the Steam Deck is! I suspect they will use the same market penetration technique. Sure, the Steam Deck is not the most powerful handheld, but it's also half the price of others...

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And, surprisingly, even though it's using Unreal Engine 5 most of the early reports on it have been quite positive.

This makes me wonder about the state of play in game engines. I mean, the two majors have been Unity and Unreal. Unity had its bit of, um, controversy a while ago, that pissed a lot of people off. And I see a lot of people with the opinion that the latest Unreal sucks. So where does that currently leave most game developers? Do they seem to be just shrugging and living with it? Are they increasingly kicking the tires of Godot? Are other engines seeing growth? What's going on?

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No, that wouldn't . . . wait . . . thinks . . . thinks . . . OH! Right, I'm tacitly imagining that the mouse somehow "knows" its absolute position, but of course that can't be (well, short of a GPS thing in the mouse, which would be kind of overkill), so . . . huh.

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Yeah, but than moving your arm left to right won't draw a horizontal line in let's say GIMP...

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The name gave me a chuckle.

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I didn't even know the mouse had an orientation. Goes to show what kinds of games I (don't) play. 'Cause like, in normal use, it doesn't matter how you twist the mouse around, the cursor arrow or whatever still points the same way. I didn't know the verticality of the mouse ever mattered at all for anything, or was even detected.

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Heck yes!

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Now I only need an easy way to rotate mouse sensor in Linux...


I don't understand that...

There is a mouse driver called Raw Accel on Windows and it allows to "rotate" mouse sensor. Not everybody holds mouse in perfect vertical position. Very helpful in FPS games.

YeetMouse (https://github.com/AndyFilter/YeetMouse) aims to replicate this, but I just don't know how to start GUI :P

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The rocks shall be stoned!

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@Eike, because than the other gamers will come and visit your house when you cheat.
I prefer Kernel anti-cheat personally.
Also permabans can be more perma.

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How sim-heavy are these games ? I'm highly interested in a good Rally game, as long as it's fun with a controller and doesn't require the steering wheel etc.

Open to other Rally game recommendations as well

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For Linux / SteamOS fans, going by ProtonDB the early reports there are nice and positive too with multiple reports on it working great out of the box with Proton.

For how long?

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@Purple Library Guy
On an AMD machine this actually makes sense.
See the primary problem with your solution is that it's still hard to confirm that you run what you think you're running, but AMD's competitor to SGX actually works with mini kernels in vms.
The real question is. Wouldn't it be easier and just as good/bad to dual boot? Maye its cheaper, Windows is expensive.

Edit:
Correction it would be easier on an AMD machine this feature I just referenced does require exactly 0 reboots.

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Say, by modern standards of file sizes, the kernel isn't actually very big, is it? So OK, this is kind of ludicrous, but . . . imagine that the Linux version of Easy Anti-Cheat or whatever DOWNLOADED A CUSTOM KERNEL every time you started logging into the game, and you played the game (and only the game) on that, probably in a sandbox of some sort, and it would get deleted after your session was over. And the custom kernel would be constantly changing so they could tell whether you were using the latest one (and then, yeah, EAC's servers got hacked and malware got put in, but that was only that one time ).

I mean, clearly it would turn the "rootkit" problem up to the max, but from the game developers' perspective it would be the most trustable anti-cheat in town. And you'd have to wait for the download every damn time you wanted to play the game, but . . . if the kernel is pretty small, it wouldn't be that bad.

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Im willing to be infinitely more patient with indie game jam title that hits it big and suddenly has more exposure than they were expecting than I am with a AAA title that has spend hundreds of millions of dollars generating buggy garbage.

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@Uso, @Shotm7 and many others who suggest custom kernels as the solution.
Custom kernels are the problem, because people can legally and practically make their own kernel, make it return whatever they want and install it on their own device.
Anti-cheat makers, which are people who are defending against the owner of the device their software is running on don't trust the kernel to help defend against its master and on Windows Microsoft at least attempts to claim that title on Linux a principled stance has been taken to not claim that title.
Yes even signed kernels are treated as suspicious UEFI level cheating already exists.

Feature wise Linux wins all the rounds in anti-cheat.
Acceptable KASLR, tainted kernels, great hardware security modules integration, etc.
This just doesn't matter, because one could've and probably someone has made a kernel that showed all the signs of having these features, but didn't actually help.


If you ask me the technical solution isn't in the Kernel at all.
It's in the things the anti-cheat developer does trust: the development tools and the trusted execution environments.
To express this belief I hereby release [EASLR(Executable Adress Space Layout Randomization) under the gplv2.1](https://codeberg.org/Informeli/EASLR).


Edit:
Yes, I value this freedom flowing from this principled stance too and the lack of monopolistic power originating from it.
As such EASLR doesn't stop anyone from modifying anything on their computer.
It hampers undetectable mass distribution of this capability on the specific programs we're trying to protect.

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It might be worth grabbing this just to run the in-game benchmark?

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This mod is really the best for Heroes 2. It brings to the game every little quality of life improvment brought by Heroes 3 and the community patches. The perfect way to play Heroes 2 for me, and it's one of the great episode of the serie (with great soundtrack).

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Yall really think 1080p is the common res for living room tvs? Here in the US, I don't think I know anyone with a 1080p tv. Can you even still buy them? I mean like if I go to costco, every single set is 4k. And you can get the low end ones for around $200. I would wager highly that the common tv res in the states is 4k.

I don't know, but... Don't mistake what's being sold for what people have at home. Most, by very very far the most, people didn't buy their TV set this year. Or the last.

My own TV is 768p. 1360×768. So make of that whatcha will, gang

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I'm making a note here.

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What is wrong with me?
Why am I not excited anymore?
When did I lost my passion for gaming?

What has worked for me when I get in this very exactly the same situation (where no games "click" with me and I just wind up putting them down after a tiny bit over and over again) ... I try a different medium. I will pick back up any one of the bazillion scifi books I have on my to-read list, go through 2 or 3 of those and BAM I've got the bigtime itch for a good story heavy turn based rpg. Or start watching a series with my wife (I almost never watch tv normally). Stuff like that. Small breaks always work wonders for me.

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IMO cheating in casual gaming is more of a social problem and requires social solutions. An obvious solution is to stop making free-to-play games. Another one is to link accounts with real identities using eIDs or such − I'd personally be OK with that if done properly, your opinion may vary.

How would any of this solve the cheating problem, without technical anti-cheat?

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One question, could we not just sign the linux kernel and other parts, so that the anti cheat program would know that nothing has been altered? I am thinking about something like steam hosting a list of trusted hashes and that any company that is trusted by steam can push new hashes for theier compiled linux kernels there.

What you're describing is measured boot + remote attestation (typically implemented using Secure Boot and a TPM). It is indeed the technical solution to ensure that a remote peer only runs approved software. I'd agree to use such a solution for official competitions with a cash prize but not for casual gaming where I want to keep full control on my system.

IMO cheating in casual gaming is more of a social problem and requires social solutions. An obvious solution is to stop making free-to-play games. Another one is to link accounts with real identities using eIDs or such − I'd personally be OK with that if done properly, your opinion may vary.

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I see so many people saying it's not an issue because they don't play these types of games, or anticheat is bad/unescure etc. Or even that kernel level anticheat is not effective.

And I do agree that (kernel level) anticheat is... not great, and obviously has the potential to be a really dangerous backdoor. But the truth is that many, many players DO enjoy these types of games - I personally love battlefield and still play BF4 frequently; I used to enjoy COD and played WWII up until it was no longer safe to play and I spent years waiting for MW2019 to work on linux before it was obvious that would 'never' be possible.

I love Counter Strike, and I'm very glad it has had a native client for as long as I can remember - but the fact is that it does have a large cheater problem. CS2 in particular had the top ranks of premier filled with cheaters (whose name advertised their cheat configs) and I have personally seen several cheaters throughout my gameplay. Even 'ragehackers' were fairly common, though it has gotten a little better in the last few months. Cheaters stay cheating unbanned for months sometimes. I use leetify to track when cheaters are banned.

Valorant? barely has any cheaters. Players are notified that the odd cheater they do find is banned the same game they play against them. Their anticheat clearly does work, and unfortunately that is a fact. FaceIt for CS2 is pretty similarly cheater-free from my understanding, and that is Windows only due to anticheat reasons.

For highly competitive games, it can be a necessary evil - MW2019/Warzone players begged for a kernel level anticheat in the hopes it would even alleviate their issues.

What I'm trying to get at too is that this is not just a problem for the people that play those games - Linux just won't be able to grow as much as it should if there is not some way or another to get round these issues. It is a problem that will honestly effect every linux user, not just competitive FPS/MOBA players. Serverside anticheat is not as easy as it sounds, and it's not just because of server costs that companies don't rely on it. I hope it will one day solve the issue though.

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I don't understand why an anti-cheat driver inside the kernel would not work.
I mean Red Hat develop tainted kernel a long time ago: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.html
and a big part of anti-cheat is just improvement over that.
Of course, you would need signed kernel, which would be a deal-breaker for a lot of user.

That would also make anti-cheat unusable with proprietary drivers (so no Nvidia GPU), and would mean that a big part of the anti-cheat would be Free software, and I'm sure peoples working on anti-cheat have no idea how to contribute code.

But if some company starts doing that, I guess this is doable.
Also, kernel-cheat might be a problem today, but kernel anti-cheat can't do anything against hardware cheat, so at some point most anti-cheat will move from kernel-side to AI side. (no sure if it is good news though)

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Personally, I think running an operating system that can't be easily exploited the way anti-cheat developers want is a good thing -- improved security is one of the reasons I use Linux in the first place -- but then I have almost no interest in multiplayer games, so this issue doesn't really impact me.

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@ElectricPrism

If your game doesn't FULLY work on the new 2026 STEAM MACHINE, you are ineligible to be in the FEATURED GAMES BILLBOARD on the HOMEPAGE.

Great solution... assuming your goal is get Valve sued for monopolistic practices.

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