Alexandre Julliard, CodeWeavers staffer and Wine hacker today announced the Wine 5.10 development release with some more exciting work.
They've continued progressing Vulkan support for WineD3D, there's the beginnings of a separate Unix library for NTDLL, more glyph substitutions in DirectWrite, support for DSS private keys, ARM64 fixes and other various bug fixes included.
Something bigger came with Wine 5.10 though too, as they also mentioned it has better support for anti-cheat kernel drivers. That's going to be the big one if it's possible to get working properly. Anti-cheat as a whole is the Achilles heel of Wine (and so Steam Play Proton too), as it's often the cause of Windows games being unable to work on Linux through the compatibility layer so it's pleasing to know more work is going on.
As for the noted bug fixes they marked down another 47 as solved. Our usual info applies: some of the bugs they've said are fixed were actually done a while ago and only recently got some re-testing. These include problems solved for: Sniper Elite V2, Sniper Elite 3, Zombie Army Trilogy, StarForce v3, TrackMania Nations ESWC, mouse issues for multiple titles were sorted and lots of fixes directly mentioning Denuvo Anti-Cheat.
See the release notes here for Wine 5.10.
Denovo devs might be working with Codeweavers and Valve directly to fix Wine/Proton to support their anti-cheat?
EAC support still being worked on by Guy1524 and he just revealed that he's working at Codeweavers too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gqvayn/easy_anti_cheat_games_seemingly_working_again/fsnlpa1/?context=3
On an unrelated note, VMware Workstation has announced experimental support for DirectX 11 that can benefit the many anti-cheat enabled games using D3D11 as EAC and BattlEye are more neutral towards virtual machines compared to Valorant's Vanguard that outright bans it. This type of vGPU tech is more accessible to ordinary machines, without the need for VFIO.
https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2020/05/directx-11-now-with-fusion-tp20h2.html
Last edited by Xaero_Vincent on 5 June 2020 at 8:01 pm UTC
Buying FX2 isn't possible anymore for new customers because Zen Studios removed it from Steam's storefront.
Last edited by psy-q on 5 June 2020 at 8:04 pm UTC
QuoteQuoteI pretty much look at this subreddit everyday hoping for good news with EAC ! Thanks for sharing.
Guy1524: Good news should be coming pretty soon 😏
QuoteQuoteGuy1524 is the source, he's a skilled programmer who implemented raw input, the first person to actually get Media Foundation working in games, and he's now been working on EAC support.
QuoteHe was working on BattlEye a year ago. I think he stopped working for anti-cheats.
Guy1524: Yes, I did. The reason why I've gotten back into it is that a member of the VKx community has made software for de-virtualizing binaries, making the task much more feasible.
QuoteQuoteHow long do you think will we have to wait? A month? A year?Guy1524: I'm not sure, I would guess within a month, but you never know. Just know steady progress is being made.
QuoteQuoteSorry to be sort of off topic but does this also mean BattlEye is getting supported? Or would that require separate support?
Guy1524: separate
Last edited by Werner on 5 June 2020 at 8:16 pm UTC
While I would love for those games to run, it makes me also wonder how well those anti-cheats will work?
I mean stuff like Vanguard and DAC are kernel-level and would basically "take full control over the system" or be in the position to do so, if I'm not mistaken.
Would they also work that way under wine?... I mean, if wine was a seperate VM, it'd be fine for them to take full control over the VM, but since it isn't it makes me wonder/suspicious...
Please correct me if I'm wrong, obviously
Last edited by Sonata on 5 June 2020 at 10:09 pm UTC
Quoting: Sonata...
I mean stuff like Vanguard and DAC are kernel-level and would basically "take full control over the system" or be in the position to do so, if I'm not mistaken.
Would they also work that way under wine?...
Wine runs the "kernel" as a userspace process, so no - it would not give them full control of your Linux box. They do have "full control" of anything running in Wine (provided that Wine has implemented the calls they're using).
Quoting: TorqachuNo love for CEG, also from Valve :(
At least there are workarounds for this, such as using Windows Steam in Lutris instead of Proton or downloading a patched EXE file for the game that removes the DRM. No such alternatives currently exist for anti-cheat enabled multiplayer games.
Quoting: compholioQuoting: Sonata...
I mean stuff like Vanguard and DAC are kernel-level and would basically "take full control over the system" or be in the position to do so, if I'm not mistaken.
Would they also work that way under wine?...
Wine runs the "kernel" as a userspace process, so no - it would not give them full control of your Linux box. They do have "full control" of anything running in Wine (provided that Wine has implemented the calls they're using).
Thanks for clearing that up :) , i wasn't fully aware that it actually IS somewhat of a different layer. As long as it's separated this way, I'm okay.
Last edited by Sonata on 6 June 2020 at 7:26 am UTC
Super excited about any work done to improve anticheat compatibility and it's great to see the progress.
It's going to be a slow process I imagine, but they're getting there, building it brick by brick. Anticheat is definitely one of the 'hard problems' for Wine, so I imagine once it's fixed there will be flow on benefits to other areas too.
The only thing I don't like about Wine updates is waiting for them, they're so good. Someone put me to sleep so I can wait up next year and binge read all the update changelogs!
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