Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ssj17vegetaGoogle taking bolder and bolder steps against ad blocking

Going slightly off topic . . . So, can someone answer me this question:
Why can't there be ad blocking that the websites can't even tell is happening?

It's essentially a game of cat and mouse. A website cannot know exactly what happens on your computer, but it can guess some of it. Let's assume you want to watch a video and there is a video advert that should play before it.

• Your ad blocker simply drops the request to the advert, your video plays.


• Now the provider decides to check whether the advert video has been requested and block main video otherwise.


• Ad blocker now send a request but close the connection immediately, faking the advert view.


• Provider adds a check to ensure 100% of the advert was downloaded.


• Ad blocker now downloads the whole advert and drops it.


• Provider adds a mechanism to delay the play button by the duration of the advert video.


• Ad blocker now signals to the player the advert is done playing even though it hasn't played, restoring the button.


• ... and so on

In short, the answer is that it's not possible because you could always invent a new way to circumvent or detect whatever the ad blocker does to block the ads. The good news is that in the opposite is true and ad blockers are free to evolve in order to bypass the new checks.

Back on topic, I personally do not mind subscription models or not owning my games. I've never replayed an old game and as such they do not really have value to me. The same would be true for movies or books, I have no issue reading a book from the library and never seeing it again or ever owning it.

That said, I do not use any subscription service because I have yet to find one that is not just a thinly veiled attempt to extract more money. Unless you count steam, which I use because it offers good value to me. Also, access the the entire steam catalogue for a reasonable amount per month would definitely be something I'd sign up for.

Another consideration is that I care about video games as part of the human culture and history, I would like to see them archived and available long after their original publisher is gone. So any subscription service which aims to block this would be an immediate no (such as purely streaming-based services).

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Labor of Love: Red Dead Redemption 2

Love for money, maybe? A sad joke given that Deep Rock was also a finalist and actually deserving of the award.

Better With Friends: Lethal Company

Only in that it is slightly less terrible with friends than without. However I guess it fits the description of the award and the other finalists weren't much better.

Most Innovative Gameplay: Starfield

Hahaha, no.

Overall, except for BG3's well deserved top spot, there really wasn't much worth in the finalists and even less in the winners.

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Tried the demo, it is pretty barebone (lot of placeholders and some wonkiness) but fairly charming. Though it feels more like a puzzle with a space city theme than a base builder.

Runs mostly ok on Linux (fedora 39):
- had to frame limit it or it would max the gpu (1500fps in the menu, yay)
- sound did not work until I started easy effects or switched output (not the first unity game to do that)

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Whilst consolidation is concerning from a freedom and diversity standpoint, keep in mind that financially it is a lot more nuanced.

Independent studios with reasonably successful games also quit. [External Link]

It is not unlikely Volition would have closed shop shortly after the disaster that was the Saints Row reboot, if not for the backing of Embracer.

In the same vein, I'd wager that after the resounding Darktide's launch, Fatshark can only afford to keep their 180-ish employees thanks in part to Tencent's money.

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Quoting: Installisnt this bad news for linux? from what i understand that engine supports linux.

Unity's linux support is really hit-or-miss see Heart of the Machine dropping Native Linux for example.

Also, most public game engines do support linux nowadays. What tends to be the problem are third party libraries/plugins (like the kind used to play videos or make hairs look hairy). Or the devs lack of competence with the OS.

Overall since Unity's closest competitor is arguably Godot and since Godot has better linux support, I'd say this is a slightly positive news from a strictly linux point of view.

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Assuming a game that sold 3mio copies, 3 installations per copy and a unity enterprise subscription, the additional cost would be approximately $115000. Not chump change, but not sure it even compares to the added accounting costs incurred by factoring this crappy fee model in.

Also does unity aggregate the number of install themselves, then bill the devs based on it? Sounds convenient, can I also bill my company based on my 25h/day -self determined- work schedule?

Quoting: slembcke

Quoting: Smoke39What is the relevance of number of installs?

If I was to guess, it's because they are squarely targeting the mobile free-to-play market where installs are high. You gotta remember Riccitello (the CEO) insulted developers as "f*cking idiots" if they don't monetize right. From the context... he meant microtransactions. This was just last year, and that's where he thinks the money is. (https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/79190/unity-ironsource-john-riccitiello-marc-whitten-merger/)

As pointed by slembcke, the only context in which this business model has a sliver of sense is mobile F2P games. But even then, it is probably about the worst and most convoluted solution anybody could think of.

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Quoting: GeamanduraThe name is just so idiotic. Imagine if Blender was called Open 3D Editor. Or Audacity was called Open Audio Player. No imagination, no energy to live, this comes straight from the desk of Toby from The Office. [...]

Counterpoint: I use openstack, every component has its own cool name unrelated to whatever it does: neutron, nova, cinder, glance, octavia, heat, magnum, designate, gnocchi, horizon and so on. Heck, even versions have names instead of numbers. Know what? It's effing annoying and serves no purpose whatsoever aside from confusing newcomers and making my life miserable.

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Quoting: F.UltraServer side checks however is a major performance pain, having it client side means perfect load balancing. So it's not only about being "lazy", it has a real impact on the number of simultaneous clients you can have per server.

There isn't really a need to run the checks in real time or on the same server as the game's logic. In fact it's probably a pretty poor idea to validate every action synchronously as it would lead to horrible game experience in most scenari due to network latency. It would also let cheaters know exactly what was detected or not.

The correct approach to server side anti-cheat is to analyse information statistically to find outliers and then determine whether these outliers are just good players or cheaters (using human validation if necessary).

Let's imagine a cheat letting you fire a weapon faster than intended and let's say the server records every hit. That's all we actually need. After each game the server can ship that game's record off to our anti-cheat analyser. The analyser looks at all hits recorded and find that player A has over 10 hits within 5 seconds with a 10 second reload weapon, player A gets banned.

Better yet, proceeding this way lets you detect cheats that may be invisible to normal players. If your 10s reload gun reloads in 9.75s that's an advantage but nobody will notice it with certainty. If it happens once, it could be chalked up to some weird lag compensation or chance. However if a player consistently reloads ever so slightly faster than possible, a machine will catch it over time.

In short: you should think of server-side anti-cheat as some sort of replay watcher/analyser bot, not a validation of every keypress in real time.

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Quoting: Corben

Quoting: GuestI'm curious though I doubt we can ever fully know, how bad is this Proton/WINE implementation of EAC security/privacy-wise? Yeah I know it'd be better to be safe and sandbox or still never play those games at all if concerned, but I'm just wondering if there's insight how it operates.

Same, I'm also wondering how effective EAC on Linux is, if it's not running on Kernel level as it does on Windows. I guess only time will tell. But this would also mean that more people will have to switch over to Linux (which is kinda good), if it would be easier to bypass EAC there than on Windows (which would be very bad though).
And I recently heard that even with EAC enabled there are still people successfully cheating in Fall Guys?

I used to provide servers for several popular games years ago. I've tried to keep cheaters at bay (which is a real pita when you only partially control the server), that's how I've acquired most of my knowledge on the topic.

Client-side anti-cheats are fundamentally flawed. They try to render the client trustful by wrapping it in some thin protection, whilst running in an untrusted environment. That's the same as putting a padlock on a cardboard and leaving it without surveillance in a park overnight, expecting it to be fine and unaltered next morning. It might happen, but it won't be because of the padlock.

The truth is that any somewhat popular game will have cheats available for it. Though almost all cheats that are reliably updated to bypass anti-cheats are paid for.

Quoting: GryxxAccording to developers of Robocraft it is worse. At some point they disabled EAC for anything other then Ubuntu family (on Linux Native), arguing that there were too many cheaters.

I've played robocraft. Whilst the game was fun and enjoyable to play, they're a prime example of trying to make up for jokingly bad cheat-proofing by using third party tools. Their servers trust everything the clients send: that weapon with a fixed unalterable 10 seconds reload is ready to fire again after 0.1s you say? Sure, go ahead! That speed you can't reach with your current setup is what you're cruising at? Seems alright!

They had cheaters before using EAC, they have cheaters after adding EAC, they will have cheaters from every OS until they implement server-side counter-measures (or the game loses enough players to no longer warrant cheat creators to bother any more).

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