Today, Easy Anti-Cheat from Epic Games / Epic Online Services has officially announced a full expansion for Linux including native builds and Wine + Proton. This is big for Linux Gaming and the Steam Deck.
For those who don't know, Epic Games owns Easy Anti-Cheat and earlier this year they made it free for all developers making Windows games. Today this has been expanded to fully support developers doing native Linux games (and macOS too).
Not only that, this is the big one we've been waiting for — they've also expanded Easy Anti-Cheat support officially for the Wine and Steam Play Proton compatibility layers.
Earlier this year, Easy Anti-Cheat for Windows games was made available to all developers, for free. Today, we extend support to Linux and Mac for developers who maintain full native builds of their games for these platforms.
To make it easy for developers to ship their games across PC platforms, support for the Wine and Proton compatibility layers on Linux is included. Starting with the latest SDK release, developers can activate anti-cheat support for Linux via Wine or Proton with just a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal.
Sadly it's not an automatic thing for Wine and Proton, as developers do need to actively go and do those "few clicks" but it's a huge step. In the documentation, it says how developers need to "test and activate client module updates for Linux regularly in addition to Windows". Hopefully many developers will go and do it, since it sounds like very little effort on their part. Considering just how many of the most popular games use Easy Anti-Cheat, this is the start of something massive.
Have a favourite Windows game that doesn't work on Linux currently with Proton or Wine? Looks like it's time to politely ask them to hook it up. Just a few of those that would hopefully work if developers update include:
- Apex Legends
- Dead by Daylight
- Fall Guys
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection
- Rust
A good time to remind game developers and readers to ensure you email us news tips, especially if a game enables this to start working so we don't miss it.
Quoting: elmapuli was trying to figure out what anti cheat solution an specific game uses and found this usefull site:Thanks for the link! I expected more games, I didn't really see anything there that I might be interested in. Probably a side effect of not paying attention to Windows game releases in the first place :P
https://levvvel.com/games-with-kernel-level-anti-cheat-software/
Quoting: Sil_el_motSoooo... Fortnite uses eac? Right?Both BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat actually.
Last edited by sudoer on 23 September 2021 at 7:52 pm UTC
Quoting: sudoerInteresting though I've heard Epic Online Services is THE spyware.It's really not much different to Steamworks which the vast majority of Steam games hook into.
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: sudoerInteresting though I've heard Epic Online Services is THE spyware.It's really not much different to Steamworks which the vast majority of Steam games hook into.
Except that it spies Steam games, as many devs like that idea -or playing Timmy's game-.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2594056744
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34410309-Epic-Games-Sucks/list/61760/
Last edited by sudoer on 23 September 2021 at 7:57 pm UTC
Quoting: KimyrielleNot sure why they thought it would be a good idea to make developers perform a "few clicks" to enable other platform support. Developers quite frankly shouldn't have a say about what platforms people run their software on. Just enable it for all EAC games, with no way to turn it off. :S
Hm, freedom of choice - but not for game devs?
No one should be forced to support Linux IMHO.
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