Valve has announced that developers who use Easy Anti-Cheat for their games now have a much easier setup for Proton and the upcoming Steam Deck.
As we wrote about recently, it turned out that the announcement from Epic Games on supporting Easy Anti-Cheat for Proton was not as easy as expected. It required an SDK update for Epic Online Services, something developers noted was not exactly simple.
Thankfully, Valve has been doing more with Epic behind the scenes and the process is now much better, which should hopefully mean more developers will be able to do it. Valve has now expanded the developer documentation noting how Easy Anti-Cheat can be hooked up with Proton:
- Proton supports Easy Anti-Cheat without requiring any recompilation, but it does require you to manually enable support for your build by following these steps in order:
- Go into the EAC settings on the EAC partner site and enable Linux support from the dashboard.
- Once that's done, download the EAC Linux library (easyanticheat_x64.so) for the SDK version integrated with your game, and add it to your depot next to the Windows library (EasyAntiCheat_x64.dll).
- Lastly, on the Steamworks site, publish a new build of your game containing the new depot contents. (You don't have to make any changes to the game executable, just include the new files in the depot contents.)
Valve states that starting Monday - January 24, they will begin sending out Deck Verified data to developers that use anti-cheat to notify them of the results. Once they get it, developers will have a week to accept it (broken or otherwise) or do the necessary work to get it sorted.
So, if all goes well, we might in the next few weeks see more anti-cheat enabled titles working on Linux with Proton. This would be great for the Steam Deck, since it ships with SteamOS 3 Linux.
Just some of the titles that could benefit include:
- Apex Legends
- Back 4 Blood
- Dead By Daylight
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection
- New World
- Paladins
- Rust
- Warhammer: Vermintide 2
rustybroomhandle Jan 22, 2022
Well done, both Valve and Epic!
rustybroomhandle Jan 22, 2022
Quoting: MalAnd that's indeed few clicks away. Unless a studio lost the sources or the libraries, there is little excuse now to not add support.
Well done, both Valve and Epic!
It's even less effort for BattlEye and has been for a while now, and yet I can't think of one game that has asked BattlEye to flip the switch.
I mean the potential return on investment is clearly in their favour now.
Thanks to Valve and even Epic that they were still working on this and improving the situation. It's not as easy as with just sending an email to BattlEye... but it's close.
Fingers crossed!
Last edited by Corben on 23 January 2022 at 10:20 am UTC
Quoting: elgatilMmm, I was wondering.. Step 2 is just placing a certain file in a certain dir so, couldn't proton take care of that? (And actually you could control which dir is it by changing the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH) It would remove step 2 and 3 which are the most annoying I think.
Version of anticheat with game is compiled probably need match version of library. Don't know if there is way how proton can get version... and if some game stop updating anticheat, you need multiple libraries...
Last edited by Arten on 22 January 2022 at 10:53 am UTC
Quoting: JpxsonI think most developers will enable it, it's just a question if they do it now or wait until it starts costing them money not too.
Quoting: MalUnless a studio lost the sources or the libraries, there is little excuse now to not add support.
Quoting: SpykerI fail to see why the most played EAC titles on Steam would not jump on the opportunity to easily support more platforms now.There is a simple reason, not to ship it: If they ship it, they have to support it! That will always cost resources (i.e. money).
There are Linux binaries missing on GOG although a port is available on Steam. These developers don't have to do much but upload the existing build, besides their Windows and potential macOS releases, but simply refuse to avoid the work afterwards!
So I have my doubts that many games will be made compatible for a system of which many developers are unsure. They'll rather wait to see how many people will install Windows on the Steam Deck before committing to anything.
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