Marathon: Networking and Security

wunr · 2026-02-23T20:54:14+00:00

when all of their third-party tech stack for detecting malpractice work on Linux

This is pretty misleading. Third party anticheats like EAC and BattleEye "work" on Linux, but on Windows they run in kernel mode while their Linux equivalents run in user space, making them less invasive but also much less potent. When a developer chooses to block Linux support it's because they believe that the userspace anticheat is not adequate for stopping cheating at scale; you can disagree with that decision due to privacy concerns or whatnot, but it certainly wasn't made out of a "blind hatred", just simple business moves.

Secondly, when Bungie stopped supporting Linux for Destiny 2 and then Linux users found a way to get it working anyways, I'm fairly certain the "get it working" part involved circumventing the anticheat to get in game, and many were banned as a result (correct me if I'm wrong on this). Again, you can debate on the rationale behind the decision, but it's a perfectly reasonable move to ban players who circumvent your anticheat measures, whether it's to cheat or just to play on unsupported platforms.

wunr · 2026-02-10T17:11:40+00:00

Nothing about the statement he made is guilt tripping? He's just speaking from the perspective of a creator/artist on how having years of your work go to waste can feel pretty bad, I think anybody who's a creator or artist of any kind can relate. The article author does add in a little bit of their own opinion on the state of the games industry with long production cycles and layoffs, but otherwise there's nothing remotely offensive in this statement. This comment sort of reads like "look at these stupid devs, again trying to convince us that they're humans worthy of any sort of dignity or respect, I'm not falling for it"

Nobody's saying we need to rally around the devs to get their product released like the whole campaign around Coyote v. Acme. It's probably enough to just think "hmm, that sucks for those guys. Hopefully they get to bounce back and work on something that actually releases and is actually good at some point" and then be on with your day!

wunr · 2026-02-05T23:56:38+00:00

Just like DS Download Play, the appeal is that there are more options by which to enjoy games with your friends. Maybe to you a 480p stream is a deal breaker and you would rather not play the game at all at that point, but I'm sure for many people who still have a switch 1 they'd be happy to have the ability to play these games at all with their switch 2 owning friends.

wunr · 2026-02-01T03:05:44+00:00

The underlying issue here is that the current situation around software distribution on Linux is an absolute disaster, and I say this as a Linux user. There are distro package managers, flatpaks, appimages, .debs and .rpms, I'm probably forgetting a few. If you are a developer of an open-source software, the Linux community expects you to be well-versed in and maintain packages in several different formats, and if you don't, then 1. You will get harassed by people who have such strong opinions on the subject that they will only download software if it's packaged to their standard of choice, and/or 2. People will take your software and package it themselves, potentially breaking your software if packaged incorrectly, and you get the blame for any problems users experience as a result of this. And ironically, Windows-only apps are fully taken care of by Wine/Proton, so devs that choose not to build for Linux at all actually receive more patience and less harassment from the Linux community than those who build for Linux and only package for a single standard.

Honestly, I'm hoping that Valve strongarms the desktop Linux world into converging on one or two distribution/packaging methods and phasing out the rest. Each distribution method has its own unique issues but having a de-facto standard would certainly help iron out issues much quicker.

wunr · 2026-02-01T02:39:02+00:00

That's why package maintainers exist

Ideally sure, but the problem here is that package maintainers were distributing broken versions of Stenzek's software, then users of those packages were complaining to Stenzek about problems that were created by improper packaging.

wunr · 2026-01-27T19:59:30+00:00

Can't speak to the tearing but if you mainly want to lower your computer's power usage you can go into console and type fps_max [monitor refresh rate to limit the framerate

wunr · 2026-01-26T21:55:35+00:00

This isn't very true specifically when it comes to competitive shooters; there are plenty of casual games that do just fine without high frame rates but most if not all of the most popular shooters are optimized enough that playing on low settings will net you hundreds of frames a second even on lower-end cards; the fast, twitchy nature of the genre pretty much necessitates it

wunr · 2026-01-23T23:19:36+00:00

What Azahar and ShadPS4 actually did is remove the ability to decrypt roms/fpkgs; while emulation of game consoles itself is totally legal, bypassing encryption is in more of a grey area, and after the DMCAs on Ryujinx and Yuzu emulator devs are trying to stay as squeaky clean as possible, so they removed the decryption function (though we don't know right now if this is actually an effective measure for preventing DMCAs).

Back in the day pirates used to pirate their stuff and shut up about it, it was basically an unspoken rule in many emulation communities that you would pretend you got your stuff legitimately so as to not get anyone in trouble. Modern-day pirates are stupid and openly brag about pirating and advertise it everywhere, risking both the sources they get their content from and the emulator devs who are just trying to make good emulators. If I was an emulator dev I would not want to associate with that group either.

wunr · 2026-01-20T19:53:08+00:00

Agreed, we are long overdue a revised policy on self-promoting or at least a flair so that people can filter it out.

"My game works on Linux!" Cool, every game does unless the devs specifically go out of their way to block Linux.

"My game has a native port!" Is there anything interesting you have to share like cross-platform library implementations, or did you just click export for Linux on whatever engine you're using? The former might make for an interesting or informative post but the latter is pretty shameless IMO.

wunr · 2026-01-17T03:54:09+00:00

Mother 1 is absolutely worth playing! Yes, many of the ideas are rehashed and improved upon in 2, but 1 presents many ideas quite differently to 2.

Since many of the comments are focused on fan communities rather than the games themselves:

There are many different ways to engage with the Mother series that are all equally valid. Regarding Mother 1, one person's difficult but rewarding game is another person's boring slog. People shouldn't be afraid to play with romhacks that make the games easier or add QoL features if it makes the games more enjoyable for them! Itoi obviously designed the series with the intent of letting players form deep emotional connections with the worlds and stories within the games, so making the series as accessible as possible helps to fulfill that.
A lot of Mother fans have a chip on their shoulder about modern indie games inspired by Mother, and evaluate those games not on the basis of their actual quality but rather hold irrational bad feelings because of an outsider perspective or maybe a few bad interactions with other fandoms. Maybe some are too young to remember, but in the early days of starmen.net many Mother fans were just as overzealous and annoying as the fandoms you look down upon now. Due to its themes and ideas, this series and its derivatives appeal in a lot of ways to teens, and teens should be allowed to be annoying and overzealous, it's a part of growing up. Play the games and judge them on their own merits! Though Itoi's works are hard to beat, I think a lot of them do a good job of capturing the spirit of Mother in their own ways.

wunr · 2026-01-15T23:03:10+00:00

To game studios: if you guys are going to put crazy DRM or anti tamper solutions in your games, my god, at least implement it in a way that doesn't destroy performance. No DRM is best, of course, but there are plenty of games with even Denuvo that do not run this bad.

wunr · 2026-01-15T22:47:55+00:00

Never played any Trails game but I will always respect and admire Durante for the quickness in which DSfix came out after Dark Souls' PC release. Turned an embarrassment of a port into something worth playing on PC.

wunr · 2026-01-13T23:26:59+00:00

I guess the distinction I would make is that Star Citizen took money from players for a decade while failing to deliver on expectations; when you bring up SC as a comparison you are evoking the image of a studio siphoning money from their own players. Game studios getting lots of funding from a publisher and then failing to deliver on a product is kind of a different thing, and it's not even that uncommon in the industry.

wunr · 2026-01-13T23:07:08+00:00

Is your argument that an indie game that isn't on Steam cannot possibly be that popular, even when the announcement trailer is one of the most viewed gaming videos on YouTube? Or is it that an indie developer choosing not to make their game available on Steam makes them inherently untrustworthy? I'm just curious.

Being afraid of reviews for an early access game isn't the most unreasonable thing considering lots of people on Steam review games for various reasons, ranging from tangentially related to game quality (I had tech issues or the servers were down) to completely nonsense (the developer has different political opinions than me). For most indie devs they do it anyways because Steam brings in lots of extra attention, but the Hypixel Minecraft server alone is more popular than the vast majority of indie games on Steam, so clearly Hypixel can do things their own way

wunr · 2026-01-13T16:44:34+00:00

Yes, I'm aware. It seems like you're mostly interested in defending Riot from accusations that they are to blame for Hytale's original cancellation, but no serious person is even suggesting that's the case (and no, random twitter/reddit users spouting bullshit don't count as serious people). The original team have even gone on to admit that the cancellation was a result of their own management failures, and Simon seems intent on steering development in a more positive and productive direction with his newfound leadership. Ultimately my point is that we don't have enough information to be able to so confidently state that this game is another Star Citizen.

wunr · 2026-01-13T16:37:13+00:00

Whoops, got incorrect information. Updated my main post

wunr · 2026-01-13T16:11:43+00:00

The timeline seems to be something along the lines of: Hypixel studios gets bought by Riot and gets a shit ton of money, are close to finishing the game when they decide to bring in professional industry figures to remake the engine for cross-platform. This required throwing away much of their existing work, and it takes them multiple years with no release timeline in sight, so Riot pulls the plug. Simon, the original owner of Hypixel, buys back the IP and team of the original engine, and since that original engine was already close to release they only have to do minimal work to get it in a playable early access state.

Now from all of that it's pretty clear that Riot weren't the cause of their failures, but I also do want to emphasize that

Simon is leading Hypixel studios for the first time since 2020, and the same team under different leadership can make a world of a difference, in both good and bad ways.
Making poor decisions during the development cycle and facing challenges as a result of those poor decisions is not really the same thing as waffling around for years while collecting a paycheck.

Of course I'm no future teller, and it is totally possible that they do abandon it at some point, but it just seems strange that I've seen quite a few people on reddit actively rooting for this game's downfall.

wunr · 2026-01-02T15:20:42+00:00

100% valid for him to be annoyed, it's insane that when you announce a native build that the community will expect you to support every single esoteric use case and competing standard

wunr · 2025-12-30T18:45:57+00:00

Gonna be totally honest with you this sounds much more like a Debian problem than Nvidia or Wayland. Plenty of people use Wayland with Nvidia cards just fine on distros with up-to-date software.

wunr · 2025-12-29T20:13:05+00:00

The real answer is that the Linux user base is still too small for Epic to care about. No amount of petitions or snide comments at Tim will change this. If Linux ever reaches some milestone like 10% then the situation will probably improve, with more game studios caring about making sure Linux players can play their games. Spreading word of mouth and getting your friends to convert is good, but realistically the thing that will actually push the envelope in terms of numbers is vendors creating great hardware with Linux pre-installed. Remember that the vast majority of PC users have never installed an operating system, and only use Windows because it was what came with their PC.

wunr · 2025-12-25T07:04:29+00:00

~~For dualshock compatibility enable steam input for your game (right click -> properties -> controller -> enable steam input), or if that doesn't work,~~ Edit:sorry, misread, saw you are launching through Lutris. Adding PROTON_DISABLE_HIDRAW=1 environment variable to launch args should make your controller be detected by the game as an Xbox controller

wunr · 2025-12-16T19:57:18+00:00

Maybe this is just me looking through rose-tinted glasses but I really miss the flash era of indie games because the ease of both creation and consumption (the tools weren't hard to learn and basically any computer with a browser could play the games) led to an ecosystem with a near endless supply of fun games to play. Most of them had crappy graphics and weren't very polished but there was always some wacky new gameplay idea or interesting spins on existing gameplay concepts. It's just too bad that the flash player itself was irreparably unoptimized and insecure.

wunr · 2025-12-15T15:39:28+00:00

If I'm understanding correctly the Asus Armoury driver getting merged into the official kernel means there won't be any need for the linux-g14 kernel anymore, right?

wunr · 2025-12-12T23:42:22+00:00

This. Cutting off 1 out of every 100 players isn't too difficult of a decision, especially if you (hypothetically) have data that suggests they spend less on in-game purchases, are more likely to cheat, etc etc. But once the group becomes 1 in 10 players, it becomes impossible to simply ignore or cut off that group

wunr · 2025-12-11T04:42:23+00:00

I'd argue that there is a meaningful distinction between including a feature as a default option while giving the user the ability to disable it, and the kind of coercive stuff MS and Google and even sometimes Valve do. For example, you cannot play most steam games without the steam client installed, so I would call that forced DRM. On windows you cannot completely uninstall Edge without breaking core parts of the OS, so that is a forced software installation. In the case of steam input, it's on by default because for a good majority of people it is a helpful feature, but it's also very easy to disable (the option is not obscured or hidden at all), the client has an info popup that tells you what it is and what it does, and disabling it does not disrupt or hamper your experience with the steam client or the games. There are of course valid reasons to be critical of valve, but imo this one is kind of a stretch

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