Summary of “Anti Cheat at Embark Studios” prensentation by Embark Studios Senior Software Engineer Tom van Dijck, at devcom in Germany on August 24.
… Linux presents an even worse situation. Because users can custom-build the OS kernel, embedding a cheat directly into the kernel and compiling it makes it nearly impossible for a game to detect its existence. “How do you detect that?” van Dijck asked, adding that while support for SteamOS and Proton will remain, platform requirements will become stricter.
Though he mentions anti-cheat on Linux being more challenging to implement that on Windows, he doesn’t seem to think that it’s impossible. He goes on to talk about “undetectable” cheating hardware becoming cheaper, which sounds like a bigger problem, but he sounds optimistic about being able to detect those as well.
IMO “platform requirements will become stricter” could mean something like only allowing signed kernels with anti-cheat module built in + secure boot.
Why would a server not be able to do the calculations a client does for rendering only the visible players? I know the answer and it’s money.
Uhh, no… It’s because that’s not how anything works. There’s so many flaws in your argument, but here’s just one: if an enemy player is really well camouflaged but technically visible, then they would be rendered on the client side, but a human player would have to be very observant to spot them and kill them.
A cheater can replace the enemy character’s texture so that, on their screen, the enemy’s camouflage is useless and the player can spot them with no effort.
From everything the server can see, the cheater’s gameplay is legit. They could just be really good at spotting enemy camouflage. Only by looking at the client side render output, you can spot the cheat.
Unless the server is actually rendering the game for each player (which, spoiler alert, isn’t the case), most cheats are not detectable nor preventable on the server side.