client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs.
i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and the server.
i love steam, but won’t be releasing this there.
it’s reboot-to-play, a modified archlinux iso that boots directly into the game from a usb drive.
i control not only the kernel, but the os, and every running program. you don’t get cortana. you don’t get discord. you don’t get spotify. you get the game. for the duration of play, your pc becomes an arcade machine.
still, this is not enough.
to play ranked, you’re going to have to get a handcam over your left shoulder. it will see head orientation, both hands, full mousepad, and screen. you’re also going to use fixed mouse speed, mousepad size, and monitor size. reviewing any players inputs will look familiar, since everyone is playing with identical settings and setup.
kernel anticheat is not enough. we need a reproducible full os setup, down to running programs and network connections.
even that is not enough. we need provenance of user inputs hooked right up to the game replay system, so you or anyone can review engagements from any parties perspective.
obviously this should all be opt in. not everyone wants to play ranked, and whole-os anticheat should help even without input provenance.
have you ever wondered if you died to a cheater or a god? do you wish you could never wonder again? i do. soon, i won’t.
Valve now catches cheaters using machine learning, which analyzes the demo. Apparently they catch a lot of cheaters this way, and it's more reliable than player reports.
But to be really honest: it's impossible to prevent cheaters. The only way is to play with friends, or to change the incentives of the game where it becomes less interesting to cheat.
For example, a game like counter strike will have a lot of cheaters because you can earn skins and sell them. There are also a lot of players who will buy cheats, because the game is just so popular.
The game design and engine design can also help to prevent cheating.
Honestly, you cannot solve corruption, you need to change the game or the players.
In my view, the Counter strike community is quite toxic, but very profitable for valve, which is why they don't care if their players behave poorly. CS is a nice game but human nature is what it is. You don't find recommendable people playing CS, most gamers play something else because that community is just so terrible to interact with.
What an incredible testament to the lengths men can be driven by spite.
I would like to try your game, sir. But my problem is the people trying to take over my computer. I am not going to solve that by letting you take over my computer.
Let's talk system requirements- could I get away with running it on an old junker laptop?
possibly, depending on the gpu. wickedengine requires modernish gpu.
spite was definitely a part of it. at a certain point while playing and watching fortnite solo build, i wondered why there are so many bugs and if i could fix them. i wanted to understand why ping advantage and storm surge have to exist. this game was my journey to find out. it has been a privilege and a joy every single day.
as far as security, you’re asking the right questions. the typical gamer showing up in my discord doesn’t, so i guide them to them.
if you boot my game, you’ve booted an archlinux iso. what could i do? i could read/wipe your disks, so you should make sure they are encrypted/backedup. i could probe your network. i could maybe even install bios level persistent malware. i could do anything a userspace app with admin can do.
none of this is different from a windows app as soon as you click yes on the admin popup thingy which every multiplayer game needs.
reboot-to-play is better, because assuming you use bitlocker, i can't read every file on you c drive, unlike every game you've installed from steam. i also can't mess up your windows registry, or any other os config.
the reboot-to-play build process is not yet open, but soon will be. even then, the game binary it will download and run is not open.
this and more is explored in the faq on the games site, let me know if you want more answers up there!
the purpose of reboot-to-play is not to corrupt your disks. its purpose is to get all players into an identical state, for fairness, and to avoid finicky windows tweaking for performance. everyone’s pc is a special snowflake. what we want for multiplayer is identical arcade machines. every time you boot, you're in the correct state.
running software is ultimately about trust. you can trust epic, or riot. you can trust steam or apple to vet user provide apps. you can trust me.
do you want to trust me? that's up to you. i would say, wait for launch, watch some streams and videos, and see if it looks fun!
launching soon. working through final matchmaking issues now.
While I appreciate the lack of self promotion, I don't see any name or link for your project in either comment. Can you share one? I'm sure I'm not the only curious person.
I wouldn't be so sure. Life has taught me that people will accept damn near anything in order to get the entertainment they want. If you worked your way up to the point OP describes slowly, over time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if people shrugged and said "it's just what you have to do if you want to play those games".
to be honest, all of this would be worth it just to never have to listen to fortnite streamers whine about cheating/bugs/ping/serverlag/stormsurge/etc ever again. i understand why they whine, but i just don't want to hear it anymore.
i sympathize with their pain, and i have the solution.
You could just not listen to fortnite streamers at all, problem solved. No need for absurd technical measures that are not going to fix anything in the end anyway.
their complaints are valid, and should be addressed. who is pushing the needle with battleroyale? we just accept technical debt as a permanent state of affairs? i think not.
All of this, when you can just play on console.
I know cheaters theoretically exist there, but in low enough numbers on my PS5 games that they don't impact my user experience.
Kudos to your insane game plan. Gonna be hard to get any marketing from Twitch streamers though.
> ps5 can’t play 360hz and can’t use performance mode graphics.
This [0] is your game. Without running it (because I'm not installing your OS on my machine, no offence) there's no reason that wouldn't run at 360Hz on a PS5. A PS5 is an 8 core machine with a dedicated GPU; it's going to be vastly more powerful (and has the advantage of being standardised hardware) than the random beater laptops your players are going to run. If you're talking about rendering at 360Hz - How many people realistically have that sort of monitor? And if they need to splash out £250 for it, we're getting close to the price of a console _anyway_ where you can play other games too.
> consoles are great, but esports will always be on pc.
Except for fighting games, sports games, and most importantly CoD.
> input cheats are common on pc and console, there isn’t a difference anymore.
Theoretically, yes. Practically speaking, input cheats are widespread on PC, and non-existant on console. (that's not to say XIM and co don't exist, but they're nowhere near the adoption level that's seen on PC).
i mean, i haven't built an os. it's just standard archlinux with minor conf. my binaries will run, but they would regardless of the platform.
i can't tell users to go into bios and turn off smt. i can tell them to boot an iso, and have it preset to do that via kernel cmdline. owning the os means i can tune the network stack, the os, the kernel, anything that helps performance. the game itself has minimal config, only keybinds.
i'm really targeting one player base: fortnite ranked/competitive players.
fortnite competitive does exist on console, but barely. it's an after thought, and the game can barely run, even on ps5. most importantly, it doesn't let you set graphics to the settings every pro uses. on console you have default high graphics. all serious players migrate to pc.
the game will run on beater laptops, but it's not a great experience. the players i'm targeting all have desktop pcs and 1080p240 monitors already. if i can get 1% of 1% of fortnite ranked players to try, that would be inglorious. if it's just me haning out with 99 aws servers, that's fine too.
i want there to be an on ramp for new players, but optimizing for low end spec is not a goal. especially with 100 players all standing next to each other, low end hardware falls over. will probably have to limit to 50 or even fewer players depending on how much low end hardware shows up to play.
input cheats are common on console for fortnite, i'm not sure about other games. reads video from hdmi, mitm controller outputs. multiple generations of that, some of it works on pc too, and then pc has a whole new host of similar tech.
input provenance is the only real solution that i can see. the rest is shadows on a cave wall.
> can tell them to boot an iso, and have it preset to do that via kernel cmdline. owning the os means i can tune the network stack, the os, the kernel, anything that helps performance. the game itself has minimal config, only keybinds.
I think this is an interesting idea. Lots of things we do are done the way they are because they've always been done like that. "Turn off Antivirus" has been common advice for PC players for as long as I can remember, this is a neat way to handle all of that stuff by default (nobody needs windows search indexing a scratch folder for a video game).
> most importantly, it doesn't let you set graphics to the settings every pro uses. on console you have default high graphics. all serious players migrate to pc.
One of the reasons people migrate to PC is _because_ of the customization that you're locking down.
> reads video from hdmi, mitm controller outputs. multiple generations of that, some of it works on pc too, and then pc has a whole new host of similar tech.
How does your system defend against a HDMI capture device and a USB device that pretends to be a keyboard?
not possible to stop modification, but i will be heavily surveilling the system, and i know exactly what it should look like. the process tree is known in advance.
handcam anti-cheat and replays will handle provenance of inputs. non-human inputs are cheating.
you could try to boot in vm, but performance will suffer. the server moved off vms for the same reason.
the only thing i really care about is non-human inputs. if you get really creative with booting the game, and aren’t nefarious, i’ll set phasers to stun.
Anti-cheat is always an arms race. A modified image can report anything it wants to your surveillance.
That said, you can win that arms race for a while by doing something sufficiently innovative, different and specialized and you may have that here. I doubt this approach offers a permanent solution though.
Edit: I do think there is a lot to the idea of not trying to put all players through the same level of anti-cheat security. The anti-cheat needs of competitive players is very different from casuals and offering different levels of anti-cheat based on those levels. How amazing would it be if other games did the same and let players choose the level of anti-cheat to use and to require.
eventually gen-ai may be an issue, but we’ll have to see. likely it will always be asymmetric, easier to detect than create. it will make cheating more expensive at a minimum, flawless live video at 1080p60 matched to game inputs will cost gpu time. then we turn up handcam fidelity. 120fps. 1440p. the sky is the limit.
handcam-anticheat is ranked only. pubs has good old fashioned try-our-best anti-cheat. aka thoughts-and-prayers anti-cheat.
i respect your feelings and your choice. happiness, privacy and security are important.
there are however legions of fortnite players who would mortgage their lives for a better game. a handcam without audio during gameplay seems a more reasonable and low price to pay. time will tell what gamers think! very exciting.
Is there a system in place for when my identical brother who is leagues better at your game than me hops on my account and proceeds to mop the floor with the competition?
For most games these days there is thanks to skill based matchmaking. Your brother will be matched up with people in your skill bracket and will absolutely wreck them. Then whenever you get back on you will have moved up in skill thanks to big bro and will now get wrecked until you get tossed back into the lobbies you belong.
People generally hate this though because for one it makes most games into way too serious sweat fest with everyone so closely matched. And for two it doesn’t even stop the entire reason it was built which was to protect the noobs. The elite players can just tank like an nfl team for a few rounds and go back to stomping noobs.
> if you haven’t won a solo build game on 1440p 360hz, you haven’t ever actually played a video game.
I think this is the most insane thing you've written here today, the one thing I truly disagree with. I'm not sure you even agree with it, given you seem to already understand well the difference between casual, competitive, and hardcore competitive play. But are you aware of solo play?
the distinction i’m trying to draw, is that while the term gaming is beloved, it is a very large umbrella. i don’t have a new term to offer, but i stand by what i said. 1440p360 solo build win IS a different type of thing than launching a rocket in factorio. we are going to need new terms.
it’s not about casual vs competitive. it’s about how the game feels to play, and how the adrenaline hits your blood stream.
How does that scale? Handcam anticheat works well for exams and Olympiads where there's limited people and plenty of time to review footage after it's over, but I can't imagine it would work well on Fortnite or Counter Strike unless you staff entire offices reviewing footage full-time. Though I'm also doubtful there'd be many people willing to run an untrusted OS on their computer just for a random game so maybe you wouldn't have that much footage to begin with
when you lose a fight, you drop into replays without leaving the game. scrub back like in a video editor, and watch the engagement from the other players perspective. the handcam footage is available here. cheating should be obvious. report or no, then return to the game, where you can spectate the rest of the match like a ghost.
fortnite replays are commonly used by pros, but less so by more casual players. their main issue is that you have to leave the game to get to replays. they also only kind of work, and don't show full server fidelity. our server ticks at 120hz, and replays are full fidelity.
lots to figure out still, but that's the idea. ranked won't launch for a while, but i wanted to design around anti-cheat from day 1.
failure is a distinct possibility with this game, that's ok. success would be interesting too.
i'm not quitting the day job to build this game. if it never makes a dime that's ok.
i started this to study fortnite and understand it's tradeoffs. turns out, it's mostly just tech debt and accidents of history. i wanted to see if i could do better, and i could.
client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs.
i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and the server.
i love steam, but won’t be releasing this there.
it’s reboot-to-play, a modified archlinux iso that boots directly into the game from a usb drive.
i control not only the kernel, but the os, and every running program. you don’t get cortana. you don’t get discord. you don’t get spotify. you get the game. for the duration of play, your pc becomes an arcade machine.
still, this is not enough.
to play ranked, you’re going to have to get a handcam over your left shoulder. it will see head orientation, both hands, full mousepad, and screen. you’re also going to use fixed mouse speed, mousepad size, and monitor size. reviewing any players inputs will look familiar, since everyone is playing with identical settings and setup.
kernel anticheat is not enough. we need a reproducible full os setup, down to running programs and network connections.
even that is not enough. we need provenance of user inputs hooked right up to the game replay system, so you or anyone can review engagements from any parties perspective.
obviously this should all be opt in. not everyone wants to play ranked, and whole-os anticheat should help even without input provenance.
have you ever wondered if you died to a cheater or a god? do you wish you could never wonder again? i do. soon, i won’t.