Vanguard, the Riot Games kernel-level always-on anti-cheat used for League of Legends and Valorant, has always required launching on boot and staying on even when the game isn't open. With security features added in the recent version of Windows, there's now a process to get Vanguard to only run when the game is running.
The post also goes at length into the kinds of cheats that are used, especially kernel-level cheats.
That was a fun article to read of something I haven't had to think about in a while. It brought to mind moments in game development of having pixel art needing to be drawn on an integer value despite the game logic using floating point math. I tried something similar to the +0.5 in places so that it wouldn't look as bad (especially when there's a moving camera, which also needed to be truncated..).
I also enjoyed the 2002 article by Jonathan Blow [1] that's linked at the bottom. The visualization from the first article helped a lot once this started to go more in-depth.
Thank you for the extra visibility on this issue. I'm in the exact same boat: account suspended, waiting for the 60 days appeal process. Hopefully it will be resolved swiftly!
Based on the latter tweet in the chain, I'm wondering if Carmack is hinting that Foveated Rendering (more processing power is diverted towards the specific part of the screen you're looking at) was one advantage envisioned for it. But perhaps he's saying that he's not so sure if the performance gains from it actually justify building a custom OS instead of just overclocking the GPU along with an existing OS?
Costco requires a yearly membership, so I think they are implying that the incentive is different. Costco has a strong incentive for you to leave with a decent time there, and feeling like you got a good deal (mostly through buying items in bulk) so you'll continue to renew your membership year after year.
At Walmart they might organize the store to get you to buy candy at the checkout line, or have a lot of less-than-healty options to tempt you near the essentials, to maximize the profit in that way. Because you're not shopping at Walmart because you want to be.
Disclaimer: I haven't been to Costco at a long time. And they still try to get you in their own way with free samples you can find all over the store.
First I had an unsuccessful journey with GameMaker, then a lot of time spent modding Minecraft in middle school without really understanding how to code. Finally, LÖVE ended up becoming my main time-sink for most of my free time through high school, about a decade ago.
Every evening I would start a new project. Some were random game ideas, some were to study certain aspects of math (like fractals), some were just meant to be nice to look at. This is where I learned a lot about game design, and also a lot of the harder aspects of programming (after that, my college CS degree ended up being a breeze).
I was working alongside an internet friend on these. Sometimes we would collaborate on something exciting, sometimes we would work alone on something and share lots of progress updates between each other. It was a really fun time. I think LÖVE having no GUI really helped our minds to run free while we learned how powerful computers could be.
Some of my LÖVE projects I remember the most fondly:
- A gravity simulation / art canvas where ships would fly around planets and paint a trail behind them [1].
- An online multiplayer platformer roguelike with full rollback netcode that handles 150ms+ ping (this was a real challenge!) - never completed.
- An online pseudo-rhythm game where you only have one button to use and you have to work with your friends to input in the correct order while a timer keeps ticking down [2].
The last one still lives rent free in my mind. This one still gets downloads today, it's the most popular project I've been a part of. But I suspect most players don't get past the step of needing to forward ports and find 3 friends to play a short 5 minute indie game. I'm proud of the idea behind it, but I don't have a good way to turn it into a full game without ruining the core idea.
LÖVE was my tool of choice for many gamejams, it was a breeze to put together a prototype once I had gotten comfortable. Today I think I have more perspective and wish I could go back in time to see more of my 100+ prototypes to completion, instead of always finding a reason something was imperfect and not worth pursuing. Now I just don't have the same amount of energy when I get home from my software day job, I often need the time just to unwind. Lately I'm trying to push through and make gamedev a habit even if it's hard, to get back some of the joy during the days I was in love with LÖVE.
Great article, thank you for sharing this experience. The part I found most interesting is the section about the aspect ratio and interpolating between the 16:9 and 16:10 views relative to the original, although I'm having some trouble fully understanding the implementation. Why is the game interpolating between them based on the games aspect ratio?
Have the XM3 as well but I use Windows. This is an annoying issue with current Bluetooth headphones. Basically your choice is high quality audio but no microphone, or low quality audio with microphone. When you have the headphones connected it should offer 2 different sound outputs. One for stereo and one for hands free audio. If the stereo output is active then the microphone won't work at all.
The post also goes at length into the kinds of cheats that are used, especially kernel-level cheats.