As an update to my previous article talking about Easy Anti-Cheat, as it turns out they're not stopping official native Linux support for it at all. Previously we got word from Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios, who said "EAC are pausing their Linux support" but as it turns out that's not right.
Here's what Epic Games told me over email this morning:
Thanks for reaching out! Sorry to see all the confusion on this topic.Garry's comments reflect day-to-day prioritization decisions between anti-cheat issues across all of the platforms we support. These ongoing trade-offs in priorities don't mean there is any change in the long-term development of our Linux anti-cheat, and we remain committed to providing the support necessary for Linux as a gaming platform.
They also notified me they put a Twitter post out in public to also confirm this. Additionally, they also mentioned in a reply to someone on Twitter that work seems to be in progress to support EAC in Wine "EAC/Wine compatibility is currently in a beta state", which means Steam Play support should hopefully come eventually.
For those who don't quite understand, it's likely that Linux-related issues are just a much lower priority (for obvious reasons) compared to issues being found on other bigger platforms.
So…as you were, carry on, nothing to see here. A bit of good news is how I like to start my day. However, it also means I personally jumped the gun on this which seems to have caused a bit of a storm with it being shared wildly across Reddit, Twitter and YouTubers using it to claim Epic Games is killing off Steam Play and so on.
I honestly thought such a well-known game developer could be taken at their word but I was wrong on that. So for that, I apologise. I am only human, I do make mistakes and I will reflect on it.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
EagleDelta May 7, 2019
Quoting: SalvatosQuoting: EagleDeltaNothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...
They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."
Qualifying Garry's claim, maybe, but that "short term pause" may be for a single 2-week sprint (assuming that use that kind of dev process). We do that in development all the time.... we have to do that or very little would ever get done as we'd always get peppered with ad-hoc work.
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Kimyrielle May 7, 2019
"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".
It makes...no sense to me.
It makes...no sense to me.
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Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: Creak@liamdawe The mere fact that you apologize for "jumping the gun" is a proof to me that you want to build a transparent and honest community, and I praise you for that. Indeed you now have way more influence than a few years back, so now you need to be careful with that new responsibility ;)Sadly I'm already seeing people using it to give me grief but oh well, live and learn.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the article and also congrats for becoming a public person ;)
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Garry Newman should just go back to making music. 
What we're talking about here is just gossip. Communications as they are now, we can gossip at the speed of light. I think it is fine to provide information as it is known, and the human race will just need to learn to squelch its gossiping tendencies online.
What we're talking about here is just gossip. Communications as they are now, we can gossip at the speed of light. I think it is fine to provide information as it is known, and the human race will just need to learn to squelch its gossiping tendencies online.
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Quoting: EagleDeltaI'm not saying they shouldn't pause, just that there's no reason to dance around the issue and release such a non-statement. That just makes them look shady.Quoting: SalvatosQuoting: EagleDeltaNothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...
They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."
Qualifying Garry's claim, maybe, but that "short term pause" may be for a single 2-week sprint (assuming that use that kind of dev process). We do that in development all the time.... we have to do that or very little would ever get done as we'd always get peppered with ad-hoc work.
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Quoting: Kimyrielle"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".
It makes...no sense to me.
well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
I don't know how you can live in the illusion that ANY anticheat can prevent ALL cheats 100% ^^
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Kimyrielle May 7, 2019
Quoting: TermyQuoting: Kimyrielle"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".
It makes...no sense to me.
well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
I don't know how you can live in the illusion that ANY anticheat can prevent ALL cheats 100% ^^
That's not what I said nor the point of my post. It's not acceptable NOT to patch your Anti-Cheat software to keep up with the cheaters. You can't "pause" developing it.
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Quoting: SalvatosOr alternatively they could have said "No, Linux support is not paused. We still have someone working on it." They didn't say either of those things; what they did say isn't actually inconsistent with, well, pretty much any reading of the situation.Quoting: EagleDeltaNothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...
They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."
My best guess is they did a pause, but only a little one which has little significance--someone whose file it is was asked to do some other urgent thing for a couple of weeks, or something. But that's based on just sort of the general impression their vagueness seems to be intended to give--and often when people get that vague it's precisely because they want to give an impression at odds with reality, without actually lying. So who knows?
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Quoting: TermyQuoting: Kimyrielle"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".
It makes...no sense to me.
well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
It will work with old well known cheats but will probably fail to detect new ones during the pause. Which means that they create a big backdoor for any MMO that have multiplatform support and a big problem for the devs and community if the cheaters start abusing of any new security breach. In the end this gives the devs of Facepunch yet another excuse to end with Linux
Pausing the development of an AC won't be innocuous to our platform.
Last edited by x_wing on 7 May 2019 at 7:05 pm UTC
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EagleDelta May 7, 2019
Quoting: KimyrielleQuoting: TermyQuoting: Kimyrielle"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".
It makes...no sense to me.
well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
I don't know how you can live in the illusion that ANY anticheat can prevent ALL cheats 100% ^^
That's not what I said nor the point of my post. It's not acceptable NOT to patch your Anti-Cheat software to keep up with the cheaters. You can't "pause" developing it.
@Kimyrielle @x_wing
You absolutely can. I highly, highly doubt that the detection methods are built directly into the app. More likely that they are similar to malware signatures the AV tools utilize to detect malware. Those aren't included in the code, the code (or app) just knows how to parse the data and match it to anything it finds on the system. In fact, I would venture to guess that, like Malware signatures, Cheat detection probably uses a shared DB/detection method and what sets each AC tool apart are:
* Ease of use with the middleware
* Pricing
* Performance
* And other product-specific benefits/enhancements.
Last edited by EagleDelta on 7 May 2019 at 7:45 pm UTC
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