Quoting: finaldestSo Valve are validating games that are no longer available to purchase.

Was going to buy "Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition" but it is no longer available to purchase on steam.

If you own it since old then you can still install it on the deck. And the initial main market for the deck is most likely already steam users with a huge library of windows games.

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Quoting: alejandro-bringas

Quoting: Adrianodl

Beginnings of a WMA decoder.

With this all games that uses Media Player to run a video playback in the game could run without tweaks?
Like Resident Evil 5 or Catherine Classic?

Those games need a tweak, the problem is that in the current versions of Proton, after version 5.13, you can not install WMP11 through Protontricks, it gives you permission error, you need to use version 5.0-10 to install WMP11 and thus be able to run the games that require it, such as RE0 or RE1, it's something that's problematic and annoying to do.

There is a fork of the script here https://github.com/HoodedDeath/mf-fix [External Link] that works for Proton past 5.13

I also see that the original script https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-installcab [External Link] have a patch since 2021 https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-installcab/pull/36 [External Link] that claims to work for newer protons as well, not tested that one though.

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Quoting: muadib1988Star Citizen has also promised linux support. everything on the official website has been removed

Well to be honest they have also promised to make an actual game for over a decade :)

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Quoting: RCLTo all people saying that not trusting the client or moving the game to the cloud is the solution - you seem to ignore the existence of network latency.

I think that you are misunderstanding what people mean. People are not saying that putting a game like Fortnite in the cloud would be a good solution for the gameplay itself, no what they mean is that putting it in the cloud is the only solution if you really want to stop the cheaters. As long as you rely on the client being honest you are going to loose this battle, there is not a single thing that you can do to make it work this way.

Now there can be made an argument that, well we don't need to be 100% free from the cheaters so if client side makes it just 90% safe then that might be a good compromise. Well the problem is that the real world numbers are probably more like 5% then 90%, going by peoples experience there are vast amount of cheaters out there for these highly competitive games.

And I've seen this first hand, back in my Wii U days I became quite good at the online part of Watchdogs, but then suddenly one day almost every single opponent I tried to hack would instantly find me long before I had even travelled to where they where in the game (which is impossible without cheats). That was the last time I ever played a game online.

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Quoting: oberjaegerI do believe a solution could be found, if it is really wanted. I believe creating a kind of trusted bubble should be technical possible, and it should be no problem for a program to check if the kernel (or the bubble) has be corrupted.

To do that you require a completely locked down system where a single entity controls the private keys and use something similar to TPM to make sure that the entire software stack is what this single entity expects it to be.

But just to show how hard this is to actually pull off we can just point to the available cheats for consoles, and consoles by their very nature try very very hard to create such a bubble (not to specifically avoid cheats but to be the single controlling entity of the entire machine, aka to make sure that you only buy games from them and not run something of your own on it).

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Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: pete910Oh come on, just about everyone knows it takes seconds to look for an apk and install it for andriod. And lets be honest, a cheater is going to know how to do basic things on any platform and there is no need for custom roms to be used. On IOS I would agree with your point.

Android is so sandboxed that you aren't going to be installing Fortnite cheats with an APK off the Internet, except if you somehow found a hacked Fortnite client that is still somehow respected by the Fortnite servers. Otherwise you'd at the very least need root in order to poke at the running processes from outside the official binary and although it can be done, it is not common knowledge. You are also still not acknowledging the other side of the issue, which is that the Android market is so unbelievably big that it's a great deal even if you have some cheaters. You just cannot equate the Android and Linux/Deck markets and assume the same risk calculus applies everywhere.

Wouldn't the much greater marker on Android make it that much more susceptible to cheaters and thus much more profitable for a cheat-dev to write an exploit for?

A quick google shows that cheats for Fortnite on Android is just a simple APK that you can sideload, what those do is apparently to replace the Fortnite launcher with one patched to load the cheats.

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Quoting: toorTo ensure that a program hasn't been modified is impossible to get totally right, it's always a fight between the pirates and the security experts.
I don't think that not having access to the source code of the kernel helps much with security. Security through obscurity is bad. The source code of the kernel can leak, or Microsoft servers can get hacked, or people can try to make sense of the binary, although "illegal", I doubt that the cheaters are concerned about it.
I guess the pirates just don't have the skill or the patience to modify the kernel, closed source or not…
Sure it would require more effort, but still, security through obscurity is a poor way to secure a system.

Also, you have to release under the GPLv2 only the modified kernel code, not the module itself.

And the entire source code for both Windows 10 and Windows XP have leaked over the years so they are out there for any one interested enough to find.

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Quoting: SamsaiEAC also contains a kernel-level component, which on Windows is installed as a kernel driver. This allows EAC code to run at a very privileged level and inspect essentially any and all parts of the system in order to detect tampering. This provides a very broad level of monitoring, which is also harder to bypass.

Yet cheaters today bypass this every single day. What they do is that they write their own kernel drivers that simply mess with the stuff that EAC looks at in order to make everything look as if the cheat wasn't there. The hard part here for the cheat-devs are not the Windows stuff, it's determining what the EAC driver is looking at, when it does it and what it expects to see.

Since the EAC driver is closed source this is a little bit harder than if they would have had access to the source code, but they have tools to make this work with the closed binary. In the end this is only a cat and mouse type of game where the cheat-devs releases version 1 of their stuff, EAC tries to detect how they do that and makes a new version of EAC to circumvent this at which time the cheat-devs have to do the same and they release v2 and it goes on and on in an infinite loop. The Operating system does not come into play here so this is independent on Windows vs Linux.

The main problem is as you write yourself that it's extremely hard for a closed sourced driver to keep up with a constant changing Linux kernel since Linux changes the internal API and ABI if something better is possible while Windows keeps constant API/ABI interface for kernel drivers. None of this is due to being open- or closed source, it's just down to the philosophical difference between the two systems.

Also note that this very problem would affect the cheaters as well, which is why IMHO cheating this way would be actually harder on Linux and the cheats would simply stop working much faster here than on Windows where the API/ABI would not change.

Quoting: SamsaiBut the problems don't end there. Since Linux is a fully open platform, there is technically nothing that would prevent a determined cheater from cracking open the Linux source code and making some tactical changes to how the kernel behaves, building the kernel and then making the EAC kernel module blind. On Windows the EAC developers can assume that the black box that is the NT kernel is at least somewhat difficult to modify by users. This means that in kernel-space they can assume some level of security through obscurity. On Linux this assumption does not hold.

Rewriting the entire Linux Kernel to make the EAC module blind (which of course would trigger EAC that something is happening) while making everything else work just fine is IMHO a much harder undertaking than what is presenting here. It's a theoretical attack vector that most likely will never happen in practice. Besides the massive undertaking of this fork, they would also have to carry on support for new kernel releases to support new hardware so the maintenance burden would way outweigh the support burden that the cheat-devs have to do today so I fail to see how this would be a chosen path for any of them. They would also have to have a way for their users to put external kernels into the Steam Deck of which we right now don't know how easy that would be.

IMHO one could just as easily argue that the cheaters could invest into ReactOS to make it Windows 11 compatible and then have cheaters replace the Windows kernel with the ReactOS one with added "make EAC blind" patches.

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Quoting: EagleDelta

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: Lancabanwith everything saifd about the Linux kernel and different versions and hackabiltiy etc. yet it plays on Android, even on 3rd party Roms and Kernels just fine.

Would that not have the same exact issues and from a significantly larger player base than desktop Linux users?

Right now I can take my phone, root it, throw on a different Rom, and even use a different customized kernel, and still play Fortnite. This has been done, proven, viewed, tested, and seems to be OK.

Theoretically yes. I think the overriding issues are that Android is a market big enough to take the risk and generally speaking tech illiterate enough that the likelihood of someone installing a custom ROM to cheat in Fortnite is so unlikely, that it doesn't register as a realistic risk.

From everything I've read, they do try to prevent custom ROMs from playing the game. Even when those Custom ROMs do get it running, they have to have root disabled, play services must be installed, and safetynet must pass its checks, among other things.

So, it still requires a fairly locked down Android OS to run the game.

So in other words, they manage to implement some safeguards even when run under the evil Linux kernel :-)

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: F.Ultrathere is no need for cheaters to force Fortnite to work on the Steam Deck in order to cheat, they can cheat right now using Windows

Soooo... Your logic is that since they also have a challenge to tackle cheats on other platforms, they might just as well expand the attack vector?

I mean... That is what you are saying here.

No my logic here is that EAC is chasing an impossible goal and there is nothing that Windows gives them that is helping them in any way shape or form here. It's simply a huge waste to put the worlds most secure lock on a crappy thin door that every single person can kick in while at the same time arguing that you will refuse to install this lock on houses with a chimney because some very determined thief might climb down it (Santa). And we haven't even begun to talk about the presence of windows, how stable the door frame is and so on and on.

But to continue on what you IMHO falsely think is a logic fallacy, if it's so easy to cheat right now on Windows (and will continue to be for eternity) why would any cheater bother to switch to a Steam Deck where there at the moment exists zero working cheats? I agree with you that normally this would be a kind of logic fallacy, but in this case it is not because the original premise is a falsehood / red herring.

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