Developers that want to stop cheaters in their Windows games are getting a little additional system-level help from Microsoft via TruePlay, a new API being rolled out through Windows 10's Fall Creators Update.
The feature, which is now documented on the Windows Dev Center, lets developers easily prioritize a game as a protected process, cutting off some of the most common cheating methods by essentially preventing outside programs from looking at or altering the game's memory. TruePlay also "monitor[s] gaming sessions for behaviors and manipulations that are common in cheating scenarios," looking at usage patterns on a system level to find likely cheaters.
[...] Windows users will have to explicitly opt in to TruePlay monitoring through a system setting, which first showed up in preview builds as "Game Monitor" back in June. Users that don't opt in won't be able to play games with TruePlay implemented, though; as the settings page notes, "turning this off may limit the games you can play."
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:06AM (1 child)
Admin is almost as good as root. I think the idea here is you can't even get at a protected process with admin privs, you can't debug it, etc. But it is all a joke until they turn on the full trusted computing lockdown. If an app / game wants to prevent the user from examining it, don't let them run it. Give them a thin client and run the parts that need to be secure on hardware the app vendor controls. Pretending they control a Windows PC is doomed. Microsoft is still trying to assert total control and so far only having limited success because the steps (see Apple and iOS) needed would drive away too many existing Windows users. Even more than the spyware is doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @09:11AM
And people wonder why the internet is as shite as it is...