They have already said that Celestial (the GPU architecture following Battlemage) is already mostly complete, and is now going through testing in a video interview discussing Battlemage with Gamer's Nexus. Apparently they have managed to streamline the development of their designs so they can be more rapid.

Overall pretty happy that Battlemage is doing so well (even if I have a high end GPU and not really in the market currently). Since a large focus for these designs are for APUs it should which should mean faster, but also efficent designs. Plus competition against both Nvidia (who strongarm the market, and closed drivers) and AMD (who purposely only sits just barely behind Nvidia interms of price and underfund their GPU R&D department).

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Quoting: Mountain ManI honestly feel like a lot of this debate is moot, because there are always less than legitimate ways to reacquire any games you may have lost access to.

Which brings up an interesting legal and moral question: If I have paid for a license to download, install, and play a game on my computer, then does it really matter where I download it from?

Legally speaking, yes. As the license is usually specific that you have to go through the company you bought the software from. Morally speaking... I would argue is completely fine (except maybe if the software in question is a different version. Like a rerelease or port)

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Quoting: zkarjI'd finished all the trilogy. You can download and build from source and download the game data since they are now free. No need to wait for Steam.

It's unfortunate that Microsoft bought Bungie and discontinued Halo development for Mac, which could have helped with Linux port of Halo. At least Halo runs quite well in wine, although I've heard subsequent versions Halo 2 and beyond cannot be run in wine or even run properly in MS Windows, only in Xbox.

After a long time they eventually did release Halo 3 onwards (and the Halo CE and 2 Remasters) via the Master Chief Collection on PC (which is all Halo games except the Halo Wars series and Halo 5 onwards with lots of enhancements, added content and bundled together), which got a steam release and does run really well under Proton. With stuff like optional anti-cheat (to allow modding or if you would rather avoid it on your machine) and anti cheat support for proton (for official matchmade multiplayer). Mods and whatnot all work.

Halo Infinite got a PC version and also does work with Proton, and has a steam release.

Currently the only Halo game to not have some form of PC port is Halo 5, (excluding a windows store stripped down free version that's supposed to give the level editor, game engine like features for more advanced editing than what would of been possible with a controller and a way to play custom games).

Halo Wars 2 does have a PC port but was stuck behind the Microsoft Store as both games came out in that awkward period of Microsoft starting to release games on pc.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: benstor214Are you saying that I am off topic? Rude! :wink::grin:

Erm?!? No, not at all, my question was a serious one!

Man, how little my knowledge about all this is...

All good! (please note, I'm not an expert and haven't messed with anything GPU releated, this is just by doing some brief research on the internet)

Mesa is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan and other GPU APIs like Video Encode and Decode via "VDPAU" and "VA-API" or compute. It resides at the user level and provides a vendor neutral implementation of these APIs, plus provides various collections of tools.

However to do this it has drivers specific for each vendor to handle stuff like Vulkan, this is where projects like NVK come in. They implement a way of handling Vulkan instructions then passing it to the kernel (which will then pass to the kernel driver) and does things like Shader Compilation (which is typically hardware specific).

A Kernel Driver like Nova handles the linux kernel interaction with the GPU, the loading of firmware, and provides instructions to that firmware and from it. It also talks to the Mesa Driver.

Basically the idea here is to make sure NVK and Nova work on new GPUs as ideally as possible without the technical debt that has built up from the likely hackily built Noveau driver (which itself two drivers, a kernel and mesa driver).

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: hell0

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.

This approach I like! Of course it requires analysis of quite a lot of data since even with a "low sample rate" there will still be quite a lot of events to go over for each session so I think that this is still not something that every single small studio can handle, but then again a 3d party expert could sell this as a service.

It does sound like a better way to do it than traditional server-side equivalents, but doesn't solve the problem that the instrumentation needs to be built into the game engine and the anti-cheat service needs to either be bought or developed. There will always be (a majority of) game devs who take the easy/quick/cheap way out and rely on a client side solution, often added as an afterthought.

What about a dual system for anti cheat? Client and Sever. (Though apparently a lot of games do sorta do this already, and it's still a bit ehhhh). Or suing the cheat sellers/hosts to destroy some of the source, since most cheaters are script kiddies.

What would be quite funny is if a developers made a fake cheat, that weakens the cheater ingame, announces that they cheated and makes then a target (with a verse wall-hacks) ingame to everyone on the server (with their account being pushed to cheater matchmaking/servers).

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