Proton 5.0-1 Released As Valve's Basis For Steam Play Now On Wine 5.0, Latest DXVK

[spstarr]

As long as Wine and the community do not address anti-cheat workarounds with kernel level/shim layers to let us play other games I'm afraid Linux will remain 2nd or 3rd rated gaming platform.

[vb_linux]

WOW. Things are getting better and better. Is Valve preparing for a Steam console? Seriously. Yes there are problem still, but even if it launched today it would have been quite a proposition. It only needs some performance and compatibility improvements and it is good to go. All the gaming work, ACO, Fsync, Proton, seems to me a Steam console possibility is not far fetched. And it would make a killing, seeing how most of the world already has steam libraries....

I think, they are coming with streaming service themselves while supporting GFN from Nvidia too.

[vb_linux]

I wrote a How-To guide on getting the new Nvidia GeForce Now service working on Linux computers. It has a free tier and uses games that you already own. You need a 2nd wired or wireless mouse for it to work properly.

I've been playing some Fortnite and Destiny 2 on Linux with it. Those games don't work in Wine or Proton due to their infamous anti-cheat systems.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/f0jkja/guide_geforce_now_app_on_linux/

thank you. I used the GFN service a long time for free as I have Nvidia Shield Android Box. Only thing is it launches games on Windows VM, so doesn't really get counted as running on Linux.

I hope when Steam finally launches their's, it will be on Linux servers.

[betam4x]

As long as Wine and the community do not address anti-cheat workarounds with kernel level/shim layers to let us play other games I'm afraid Linux will remain 2nd or 3rd rated gaming platform.

They are working on it. Such things are troublesome because they go out of their way to detect an abnormal runtime environment.

A few people have managed to get RDR2 in game, for example, but it crashes/freezes and the patches can't be upstreamed to Wine.

At least one person was able to get PUBG to load, but not in game.

Most of the challenge is reverse engineering, and the EULAs of nearly all these programs prohibit it.

[spstarr]

They are working on it. Such things are troublesome because they go out of their way to detect an abnormal runtime environment.

A few people have managed to get RDR2 in game, for example, but it crashes/freezes and the patches can't be upstreamed to Wine.

At least one person was able to get PUBG to load, but not in game.

Most of the challenge is reverse engineering, and the EULAs of nearly all these programs prohibit it.

Oh people are, but when League comes out with a kernel.sys driver, unless we're going to make Wine load native windows drivers and then have some shim layer to hand off to the Linux kernel, its going to get messy... It's not impossible. I certainly am not a kernel developer to do that

[spstarr]

I think the problem is the Wine development process itself, they are focused on just getting Windows apps to run with Wine, not all these hackarounds/workarounds for games, probably need to fork Wine and make a Wine-gaming purely for gaming use aka Photon that Valve is doing... though we need distributions to ship Photon and Wine separately..

[ssokolow]

Oh people are, but when League comes out with a kernel.sys driver, unless we're going to make Wine load native windows drivers and then have some shim layer to hand off to the Linux kernel, its going to get messy... It's not impossible. I certainly am not a kernel developer to do that

It's confusing because Wine's docs are contradictory at times (apparently because they're enough of a maze for them to have trouble finding everything to update when a detail changes), but Wine actually does already provide some support for faking a kernel to load things into. (eg. this says Wine has no support for loading Windows kernel modules, but recent changelogs talk about extending (not creating) the capability for loading kernel stuff that isn't hardware drivers.)

[aht0]

Anticheats may simply block from gaming because they can't find proper signed Windows driver. Age of unsigned drivers ended with XP, Vista didn't exactly block you from using unsigned drivers but on W7 it was already harder - you had to consciously fuck with OS to boot it with unsigned drivers. W8/W10 - won't generally work at all with unsigned drivers. Kinda hard to emulate cryptography properly without keys.
So it's either "native games" or no wider gaming beyond singleplayers over shims. For that matter systemd may actually be good (it's the only aspect of it I kinda like) - unified Linux, which makes supporting it more appeasing for gaming studios.

[spstarr]

Ok so non-hardware kernel drivers, yes.. and anti-cheat ones are software drivers... but is signed an issue? Since it's wine thats determining to load the driver not a real Windows OS, if the driver is signed by the game developer we load it anyway. How the actual game knows if the driver is signed or not? Wine just 'says' its signed anyway.

I see it like this, game is installed, when game runs either it loads kernel driver or expects it loaded on boot, if the former, then wine loads driver regardless if its signed or not, I don't think userspace gets to know if the driver loaded by the kernel is signed or not, we're not modifying the driver internals or anything.

Correct me if im missing something here?

[aht0]

Ok so non-hardware kernel drivers, yes.. and anti-cheat ones are software drivers... but is signed an issue? Since it's wine thats determining to load the driver not a real Windows OS, if the driver is signed by the game developer we load it anyway. How the actual game knows if the driver is signed or not? Wine just 'says' its signed anyway.

I see it like this, game is installed, when game runs either it loads kernel driver or expects it loaded on boot, if the former, then wine loads driver regardless if its signed or not, I don't think userspace gets to know if the driver loaded by the kernel is signed or not, we're not modifying the driver internals or anything.

Correct me if im missing something here?

Cheaters used to use hacked/accordingly modified graphics drivers back in past. A lot.

AFAIK some of the more paranoid anticheats slam you with an instant ban-hammer when not detecting quite correct environment (game running over Wine).