• 8 Posts
  • 1.38K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle





  • It’s an arms race, the arms just keep moving deeper into the stack system. Used to happen entirely in usermode, one process poking in and reading/writing memory of the game, so anti-cheat started keeping an eye out for malicious processes. Then at some point someone patched their kernel to cheat in a way the game couldn’t possibly detect from usermode, so someone made an anti-cheat that ran at the kernel level too.

    Modern KLA is basically a fully fledged rootkit, living in your system from boot, doing absolutely anything they can to try and make sure nothing has been tampered with. Validating signatures on bins, hooking memory mappings, watching for anything that might try to read/write the kernel or game’s memory space unexpectedly.


  • Casuals stop playing games when cheaters prevent them having fun, and it’s the casuals they need to keep happy to keep their game alive.

    IMO the answer is to internally maintain a “fun to play with” metric. It would be specific to the game, but each player’s actions and interactions with other players would be evaluated to determine how “fun” they are to play with (might need to be multidimensional, since different players like having different types of interactions). It doesn’t matter if they’re cheating, or if they’re just really good, or if they use cheesy strategies, etc, if the person isn’t fun to play with, then match them with other people who are similarly unfun to play with.

    This would cover your point that, if there’s a cheater in the lobby, and their behavior somehow makes everyone have more fun, then who cares?


  • We have memory security, virtualization and antitampering features

    As someone who games entirely on Linux and wants multiplayer to work out, the features you’re referring to are for keeping the application contained by the kernel, not the other way around. On a system where the user has full autonomy, no application should be able to know what is going on outside of its user space, and I don’t want it to.

    It’d be nice if it was a solved problem, but it’s not. From consoles to phones to windows, currently the industry relies on you not having autonomy over your device for anti-cheat to work. Every other solution is either expensive (obfuscation arms race), or untenable (real time, high resolution server side validation of every property of every player).




  • Steam hardware has so far been pretty niche, though. If the user experience is smooth enough, a SM could replace many people’s xbox/playstation.

    We’re like 5y into the PS5/XBSX, new games are jumping up to $70-100 each, and hardly any are platform exclusives. Msft have all but canceled the next Xbox, and if Sony tries to push the PS6 in a few years, I think there’s a world where a good chunk of people say nah.

    And with the amount of attention Linux is getting from the win10 eol, we could be at the beginning of an historic inflection point in gaming.






  • Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.

    Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.

    As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.




  • As soon as it looked like we were headed into another shutdown, my guess was that their play would be to argue, “alright, it’s shutdown, I guess we don’t have a government anymore. I have no choice then, but to make a new one.”

    Which you’d think would be a widely unpopular move, until he comes in with “and we’ll just use the original US constitution, no extra stuff like ‘amendments’, just good ol’ 1776 like the founding fathers intended”.

    I think his base would actually get behind it.