Epic Games Announces Easy Anti-Cheat For Linux - Including Wine/Proton

[Awesomeness]

Oh great, Chinese Tencent spyware now compatible with Linux.

[tuxayo]

The only anti-cheat is server-side sanity checking, everything else is just a minor annoyance. Client-side anti-cheat is purely just for marketing to make companies feel better.

How does this address the issue of wallhacks or radars in FPSs?
Or subtle shooting assistance like recoil compensation?
Or revealing the map and removing fog in RTSs?

These complex to address issues don't make ok the use of invasive non-libre software though.

[tuxayo]

Oh great, Chinese Tencent spyware now compatible with Linux.

Yes, there is definitely a downside in having more Chinese or US spyware compatible. There would be use for something like https://exodus-privacy.eu.org for PC games.

[kiffmet]

I thought this would never happen, because it benefits Valve, which competes with Epic, and also because it benefits Linux, which Tim Sweeney seems to despise. Obviously my expectations were wrong.

(...) maybe a domino effect will come.

Assuming that the Steam Deck and comparable platforms manage to establish as a stable ecosystem, we might aswell get a Linux version of the Epic Games Store (maybe also GoG Galaxy and others) in the future. Games sold to Steam Deck users would otherwise be a market that only Valve and Valve alone could capitalize on. Hopefully this forces Epic and similar listed companies who have to maximize their profits in order to please investors into supporting Linux… They can excert quite some leverage afterall.

[Ironmask]

How does this address the issue of wallhacks or radars in FPSs?
Or subtle shooting assistance like recoil compensation?
Or revealing the map and removing fog in RTSs?

These complex to address issues don't make ok the use of invasive non-libre software though.

Skill-based gameplay elements are inherently impossible to create an anti-cheat for, as a skilled player is indistinguishable from a computer. This is a gameplay/social engineering issue, not a matter of detecting cheats. Client-side anti-cheat is the exact same thing as code obfuscation, it stops 0% of dedicated people, only slows them down. It's a band-aid over a much deeper issue.

[doomie]

Epic announces the year of the linux desktop. Fascinating.

EDIT: I have some angry normie friends waiting on stuff like this. It might make a bigger splash than people talking about Deck realize.

[schmidtbag]

And suddenly overnight, we should see more than half of the non-working games in protondb move to working status. This is a pretty big deal.

[jaxa]

Oh great, Chinese Tencent spyware now compatible with Linux.

Don't like it? Don't play it. I only use GOG and Steam.

[Quackdoc]

The goal of anticheat is not to stop cheating, it is to ban the cheaters. there is a fairly significant difference. as a competitive gaming company, stopping cheaters don't make much financial sense when you can sell them the game 10x times and more. to stop cheating, anticheat is nothing but a part of a necessary solution. anticheat software universsally sucks. Client side anticheat is easy enough to bypass. and server side anticheat isn't viable unless you are running a private server.

[AmericanLocomotive]

I'm not so sure this is Epic really embracing Linux & Steam Deck. I think it's more indicative of their feelings of where Microsoft is going with Windows, and their recent experience with Apple. I think they realized the "closed garden" ecosystem of hardware & software that many are going to is ultimately going to harm their profits.

Ironically the Steam Deck running "SteamOS" and a custom version of "Steam" at the surface level seems no different. But Valve seems pretty committed to "openness", at least for now.

How does this address the issue of wallhacks or radars in FPSs?
Or subtle shooting assistance like recoil compensation?
Or revealing the map and removing fog in RTSs?

Two of those issues are solvable server side. The simple solution to issues 1 and 3 is that the server should only transmit information about the game-state that a player can actually see. So if something is going on behind a wall or in the fog-of-war, that information should not be transmitted to the client at all. However real world, I believe there are performance implications of doing that - both server and client side.