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.
It will be the same with this, none of the big ones in the game business will move ass
Before this news
EG: there's no player on linux
After this news
EG: let's support linux
What element has changed their mind ?
Everything is changing in rapid pace right now in our world. They can get on for a ride or stay with their old stance and wither out. What times being alive for Linux gaming and towards platform agnosticism
I don't want to be that person, but how many corporations have moved their ass to make their games even a little compatible with proton / wine .
It will be the same with this, none of the big ones in the game business will move ass
Captain Tsubasa Rise of New Champions has EAC and you can launch the game
But yeah i agree the day Black Desert Online will work on linux... there's a little hope
Before this news
EG: there's no player on linux
After this news
EG: let's support linux
What element has changed their mind ?
Everything is changing in rapid pace right now in our world. They can get on for a ride or stay with their old stance and wither out. What times being alive for Linux gaming and towards platform agnosticism
exactly since the announcement of proton everything goes a bit fast which is cool
Nope, the previous kernel work was for DRM, nothing to do with anti-cheat. We even wrote about it as people (still it seems...) think otherwise.While this is really great news, the most relevant part of this in my opinion is: how is this done? I hope we don't need to install some kind of EAC kernel driver or shit like hat?
Afaik you will at least require Kernel 5.11 as it has some syscall firewall to route the EAC calls back into user space and therefore to Wine/Proton.
This needs to be done because AC does not use standard Win32 API calls but rather interact with the Kernel directly.
IF I am not mistaken. I remember reading something like this. But other than that, we'll see I guess :D
I look forward to see how SteamOS 3.0 will be usable on standard desktops... What if a Steam Deck fan decides to try SteamOS on his/her gaming PC and if there is something that makes it easy to install Nvidia drivers?
SteamOS 3 is Arch, Nvidia drivers are as simple assudo pacman -Syu nvidia
and it just works
Yeah but no. The Steam Deck will be targeted mainly at Windows users... Personnally, as a Linux user, I concede that a single command line in the terminal is quite simple, but it's still a no go for mainstream adoption... They've got to think about something similar to the additional driver UI that you may find in Debian distros; mainstream users love these shiny things. Even better would be to keep the auto detect and install feature from the previous SteamOS interations, imo.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 24 Sep 2021 at 12:42 pm UTC
While this is really great news, the most relevant part of this in my opinion is: how is this done? I hope we don't need to install some kind of EAC kernel driver or shit like hat?
This is why I'm in the camp that is happy for everyone else that will get to play what they want but I'm going to stay out of this.
I just want to play games, not allow software I'm not comfortable with in my hardware and OS.
Do someone know if FIFA 21 or PES 21 are using ECA?I don't think FIFA has EAC but I don't know about PES. Online play either doesn't work or is unreliable but everything offline works well
Yes, everything is okay offline, but those games have a great online experience, so I hope they will work at some point.Do someone know if FIFA 21 or PES 21 are using ECA?I don't think FIFA has EAC but I don't know about PES. Online play either doesn't work or is unreliable but everything offline works well
So.... Now all this depends of game devs or wine devs?Gamedevs
Not 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.
Your point makes no sense whatsoever. EAC automatically working in WINE without having to be activated wouldn't constitute official support of Linux any more than a game not having anti-cheat in the first place running in WINE without the devs being able or required to consent with it.
On the contrary, if an active step is required to allow a game to run in WINE, people WILL view that as "official support", even if the devs otherwise don't want to officially support WINE.
It could also be possible that they switched it to opt-in for now in case of unwanted side effects(IF hackers could exploit it or bugs occur they dont want to be the ones to be blamed for it).Not 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.
Your point makes no sense whatsoever. EAC automatically working in WINE without having to be activated wouldn't constitute official support of Linux any more than a game not having anti-cheat in the first place running in WINE without the devs being able or required to consent with it.
On the contrary, if an active step is required to allow a game to run in WINE, people WILL view that as "official support", even if the devs otherwise don't want to officially support WINE.
If it turns out that there are no problems they could easily switch it to opt-in and even later remove the setting completely and just always activate it.
-> https://steamcommunity.com/app/513710/discussions/0/
Fortnight installs EAC, loads semi normally. MediaFoundation problems doesn't like the MFpatch, you can start a game, some times get past lobby area always most definitely crashes when you jump out of the party bus.How did you get it to launch? I can't get it past the BattlEye bit
Maybe they just checked the box and didn't see if it worked properly. (only seemed to work with staging builds of anything)
Its loads in some type of driver as well, if it can't load it's driver d at startup, had to logout of my linux user and log back in again, was doing a hard reset though to be sure. with non-staging the driver would never load.
Gonna wait this one out till next year, have a feeling there is going to be teething problems.
Fortnight installs EAC, loads semi normally. MediaFoundation problems doesn't like the MFpatch, you can start a game, some times get past lobby area always most definitely crashes when you jump out of the party bus.How did you get it to launch? I can't get it past the BattlEye bit
Maybe they just checked the box and didn't see if it worked properly. (only seemed to work with staging builds of anything)
Its loads in some type of driver as well, if it can't load it's driver d at startup, had to logout of my linux user and log back in again, was doing a hard reset though to be sure. with non-staging the driver would never load.
Gonna wait this one out till next year, have a feeling there is going to be teething problems.
Need to use wine staging. I was able to get in game and start a battle lab and drop in but after a few minutes it always crashes. Performance is very bad too.
No different than before. Fortnite, like all others has not updated to allow Linux players in. I doubt Fortnite will either.Fortnight installs EAC, loads semi normally. MediaFoundation problems doesn't like the MFpatch, you can start a game, some times get past lobby area always most definitely crashes when you jump out of the party bus.How did you get it to launch? I can't get it past the BattlEye bit
Maybe they just checked the box and didn't see if it worked properly. (only seemed to work with staging builds of anything)
Its loads in some type of driver as well, if it can't load it's driver d at startup, had to logout of my linux user and log back in again, was doing a hard reset though to be sure. with non-staging the driver would never load.
Gonna wait this one out till next year, have a feeling there is going to be teething problems.
Need to use wine staging. I was able to get in game and start a battle lab and drop in but after a few minutes it always crashes. Performance is very bad too.
See more from me