Easy Anti-Cheat gets much simpler for Proton and Steam Deck

PUBG needs to add support as the playerbase is HUGE: https://steamcharts.com/app/578080

QuotePaladins
Rust
Warhammer: Vermintide 2

From this list, those are only ones I'm thinking are willing to try to port it, the I think either will wait for people to demand (based on the success of other developers) or aren't going to do anyway.

Specially Dead by Daylight, because that would involve Behavior doing something actually good to it's players for a change


Last edited by BielFPs on 22 January 2022 at 3:28 pm UTC

Exciting! I hope Paladins, Halo MCC and Apex Legends will follow, I miss playing those games.


Last edited by akselmo on 22 January 2022 at 3:42 pm UTC

Good job by Epic and Valve. I'm sure back porting everything wasn't super trivial.

Quoting: Guest

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?

EAC being proprietary, I don't think Valve or anyone could distribute it without a license, even a free (as in beer) one...

Also, there are multiple versions, as mentioned in the instructions. A script in Proton works have to detect and download the correct version, and every future version.

I can see that as a potential support nightmare, since a customer would only see a broken game, and likely blame the developer, which would have been taken out of the process, and has no way of fixing it.

Quoting: Arten

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...

I have zero idea of the underlying infra of anti cheats, but I'd assume that while adding the "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" trick would indeed work, unless it's enabled on the back end (i.e: allow linux library to queries to even be considered) it would still return as "false"


Last edited by minkiu on 22 January 2022 at 5:34 pm UTC

If even just Apex gets it, then I'm going to be so very happy. That's literally the only game that I want to play as of late that has anti-cheat.

QuoteThere 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.

I think the situation here with Valve is different than the situation with GOG.
Because the support charge comes essentially to Valve instead of the developer.
If a developer enables EAC on Proton, the validation/testing is essentially made by Valve.
So yes they will have to support Proton, but it won't cost them as much as if they had to support native Linux.


Last edited by Spyker on 22 January 2022 at 8:01 pm UTC

I wonder whether there's an implied threat here. Do as we ask and get Steamdeck Verified.... or the algorithm might have something to say about surfacing your game on the Store.

I am hoping this will make battle-eye try and do the same thing

Quoting: kon14

Quoting: poiuzThere 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).

Except they don't need to officially support Linux through Proton either. They can just enable it for anyone wishing to play the game while clearly stating they do not offer any support or guarantees about the compatibility continuing to work in the future.

Sure, sounds a bit hypocritical, because it is, but if this was opt-out instead of opt-in nobody would ever call them out for their game breaking at some point.

Lets be real, EAC and BattleEye won't just drop support for Proton now that it's officially included, not unless there's a huge reason to do so, nor would it just stop working for anyone using the official Proton builds from Steam.

The only real world issue with any of this is how userspace detection of cheats on the client side is never going to catch up with kernelspace detection, therefore devs might be reluctant to potentially downgrade the experience for the majority of their userbase over us.
With that being said, I'm not even sure if EAC or BattleEye is actually kernelspace on Windows at this point.

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: poiuzThere 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).

False. Even today you can (try to) run any windows game on wine or proton, and if works fine, if it doesn't work the developers don't owe you support. You can open tickets ofc. But they can copy paste "not supported" and close them faster than you open them.

As a customer I would expect that "proton supported" games, with the badge clearly visible on the steam page, will offer support. But that's on voluntary basis.

Unfortunately, it may be a bit more complicated than that.
Sure, they may choose to enable compatibility and not support Linux users.

However, they still need to support their current users against cheaters, be they using Windows, Linux, or whatever. Which means testing, to be sure that some nasty people don't find a way to cheat through this compatibility, and ruin the game for your player base, which would be terrible.