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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Don't let the visuals fool you - Sunshine Manor is pretty darn spooky
5 November 2021 at 3:56 pm UTC

Noticed that they had a bundle on Steam which included Camp Sunshine, however since that one is not Linux native and is created by RPG Maker MV one have to use an older version of Proton (4.2-9 was the newest that I could use before it refused to even open a game window) and disable the libglesv2.dll with "WINEDLLOVERRIDES=libglesv2.dll=d %command%".

Alisa is a horror game throwback to '90s 3D games like Resident Evil
3 November 2021 at 12:18 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: NezchanHopefully it doesn't have tank controls, which can happily be left back in the old days.

After having played it for some time I can however say that at least I feel that the enemies are not well designed for tank controls (which is the only control method in the game), they are way to fast moving for a character that have to turn in order to run in another direction.

Alisa is a horror game throwback to '90s 3D games like Resident Evil
27 October 2021 at 12:41 pm UTC

Quoting: NezchanHopefully it doesn't have tank controls, which can happily be left back in the old days.

From the video it looks to have fixed camera angle and for those types of games tanks controls are far superior. Tormented Souls had fixed camera but "modern controls" on the left tumb-stick and that was awful.

Steam Play tool Luxtorpeda for running games in native Linux engines sees a major upgrade
18 October 2021 at 8:49 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääVery nice since The Knights of the Old Republic still requires swkotor.ini file tinkering (to set "FullScreen=0" and to add the line "AllowWindowedMode=1" under it).

https://github.com/seedhartha/reone

What I find fascinating is that reone supports KOTOR2 as well even though that one does have a native port (Aspyr), wonder if there are any benefits of either here, I do know that the official port of KOTOR2 have sound issues with newer versions of OpenAL so I had to LD_PRELOAD in the one from Ubuntu 14.04 but other than that it worked quite well.

VKD3D-Proton v2.5 is out for Direct3D 12 on top of Vulkan, improving DirectX Raytracing
18 October 2021 at 8:40 pm UTC

For games where you can choose between DX11 and DX12, is the performance differences between DXVK and VKD3D wildly different from game to game or are there any consistent trends?

Brawlhalla to get Easy Anti-Cheat, dev puts up Beta with EAC working on Linux with Proton
16 October 2021 at 11:59 pm UTC

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.

Techland continue expanding the Hellraid DLC as they try to improve reviews
16 October 2021 at 3:33 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedjeI still haven't sat down and played Hellraid, as I beat the game long ago and always find it hard to go back just to play some DLC, is it worth it?

Have we gotten any word about the second one being native to Linux?

Well it's not even native on Windows yet, being released in December I think. But AFAIK there have been zero words on a Linux release, they keep on doing patches of the first game for Linux though so at least they are honouring that version.

Brawlhalla to get Easy Anti-Cheat, dev puts up Beta with EAC working on Linux with Proton
16 October 2021 at 3:28 pm UTC

Quoting: TheRiddick
Quoting: hell0I'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!

I've been saying this allot lately too. EAC/BE as a AC measure and nothing else is called 100% lazy development! Server side rule breaking checks need to be done. I think Mortal Online 2 has server side AC going on since they discovered early on that client side only was completely pointless!

Server 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.

Brawlhalla to get Easy Anti-Cheat, dev puts up Beta with EAC working on Linux with Proton
16 October 2021 at 3:25 pm UTC

Quoting: Raaben
Quoting: F.UltraYou are already running a closed source binary (the game itself and Steam for that matter) on your system that can already do whatever they like with your system, I don't think EAC brings anything more evil to this table since it does not run in the kernel and does not require root(?).

True, but at the same time it is an anticheat's specific job to spy on what one is doing right? It might not have root/kernel access but it can also do alot of snooping around without it.

It can do no more snooping around that the game already can if it wanted to. In fact I would say that you have a much higher risk of a random game doing shady business than something like EAC since if it turned out that EAC did look at things it wasn't supposed to then EAC might find it self without any market so they have much more at stake.

Note that this is not an endorsement of things like EAC, just pointing out that since we already run closed sourced binaries on our system the game is already over so to speak. Proper sandboxing would help here (but Wine/Proton itself doesn't do that even if you remove the Z: share) but AFAIK EAC would be just as sandboxed as the game in that case anyway so the difference is back to zero again.

Huge difference on Windows where things like EAC AFAIK runs as some kernel module, but again that would only allow it to snoop on other user accounts since the game already have access to all your files and how many really run with more than one account on Windows...

Brawlhalla to get Easy Anti-Cheat, dev puts up Beta with EAC working on Linux with Proton
15 October 2021 at 6:23 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: RaabenI'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.

You are already running a closed source binary (the game itself and Steam for that matter) on your system that can already do whatever they like with your system, I don't think EAC brings anything more evil to this table since it does not run in the kernel and does not require root(?).