Quoting: F.UltraJust guessing here since I'm #1 not a Windows dev and #2 not a Game dev, but this could be due to some high hopes optimizing since the library calls perform some sanity checks and massaging of the data that you send in so a direct syscall is some ns faster.

Me either, but historically there have been some really elaborate things done with games because you really need the performance - timing your game output by where the CRT electron beam is, for example - and you're optimising for that rather than maintainability. On a console it's probably (relatively) legit (and probably took quite a lot of work), since you've got limited hardware configurations and a fixed software environment, any changes to your assumptions come with a whole other console, and if the performance isn't quite there you can't tell your customers to simply buy a better computer. It's not legit when you don't know the hardware, you don't know the software, and all your assumptions can be completely ruined by an OS update, or driver update, or any number of other things that can happen without warning and completely out of your control.

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Quoting: EhvisIt's safe to say that giving a game away on day one is going to cost Epic. There are two options, either Epic pays per freely given game, or they paid a fixed price. If the first is true, then having as many people get it as possible would increase the cost for Epic. For the second it might make the deal for CA a bit less interesting than they thought it was. Either way could lower the chances of it happening again.

The thing that would stop it happening again is if no one (relatively) plays it for a year, and particularly at launch when they're trying to build hype. An Epic flop.

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Quoting: MohandevirAfter that, will porting the game still be profitable to Feral, if the game is not sold at the initial launch price?

It's going to be (at least) a year late, and a bunch of people are going to have already got it for free. Feral's chances of making it worthwhile to do it have been completely torpedoed.

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Quoting: GuestNot sure what you're driving at here, you want us to get it free on Epic Store?

I think (hope) they're saying to wishlist it for Linux on Steam so that Feral don't get totally dumped, but I could be wrong.

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While we know that some of you won’t like the Epic Games Store exclusivity, we feel like this is a great opportunity for us in a lot of ways

... because Epic gave us a big bag of money.

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That really sucks for Feral.

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I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me before.

Using system calls directly seems like a very silly thing to do with a Windows game, but that's not necessarily as true for an Xbox game. I think the developers that have done this will still get bitten by the support costs caused by the fragility of their chewing-gum-and-string coding method, but it might not be as insane as it might first appear.

So perhaps Quantic Dream have an Xbox version that they haven't released yet, or they found it easier to go PlayStation -> Xbox -> Windows for some reason.

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Quoting: scaineI'm a bit confused as to why they pushed this patch at all. If they only need to establish whether something is happening in Wine, or in Windows, can't they simply apply their patch to a locally-compiled kernel and test a few of the offending games/apps with that custom kernel loaded?

They've already done that: that's how they have benchmarks on the relative performance of selectively trapping system calls. And while the Wine devs being able to play All The Games might be nice for them, I expect that they'd quite like other Wine users to be able to as well.

The issue is that Windows applications are using Windows system calls without going through Wine. Those system calls won't work, because Linux isn't Windows, and they can't be translated because they don't go through Wine.

They need a solution that will catch (self-modifying and obfuscated) code that doesn't go through Wine and somehow still make it work for all users, without breaking Wine for everything else. For that, it needs to go to the kernel - since that's where the system calls end up - and it needs some discussion to find the best approach, and it needs the kernel devs to agree that it's a good idea. Hence the Request For Comment.

I would say that the game developers have done something pretty manky, but this is the least-bad way of handling it if those games are to be made to be able to run.

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Reading over comments and how it's done, it's possible this can help anti-cheat systems too but as always, don't go getting hopes up over early work that's not complete or merged in yet.

My reading of it was that they don't want to take an approach that will definitely break their anti-cheat work, rather than that this approach will specifically help.

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Quoting: elmapul"sidestepping the actual Windows API. "
how is that even possible?

So, again, just as I understand it from reading bug reports about a game I'm vaguely interested in rather than from any in-depth knowledge, most programs will use some kind of library when they need to make some system calls to make something happen - libc or ntdll.dll, say - but it's also possible to just make system calls directly: libc and ntdll.dll need to be able to make their own system calls, too, of course. Windows and Linux both use the same mechanism for this (I think it's a processor instruction and registers?) but they use different numbers in the registers: that is, they'll both have a system call number 12, but there's no reason for it to necessarily do the same thing. In fact, which thing gets done by each number changes between versions of Windows, so the developers doing this need to check the version of Windows and use a look-up table to generate their numbers.

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