[Wine] Petition for PunkBuster Support/Version for WINE in Linux

[Chris MacKay]

First, let me state that I refuse to sign anything that harvests my name and email address.

Secondly, let me explain why some programs work with PB, and others don't.

As I understand it, those games which come with PB (and have a linux clients, such as Americas Army) utilise a modified version of the original PB, which does not require the same API calls that the "base" version does. Ie, they have a workaround of sorts built into them (intentional or otherwise).

Anything that installs PB as a third party application will use the standard PB, with the standard PB checks. These versions fail after a short while because they detect you are not running a standard Windoze OS. Well, I hate to tell you this, but that's in the province of the coders who created PB, and it's part of what it's SUPPOSED to do. Punkbuster is designed to make sure you're not messing with anything (including systems DLLs, etc) and not spoofing any API calls, so when it receives a non-standard response from Wine, it assumes you're a Punk (cheater) and busts you. No surprise there.

If you want to petition anyone, it would probably be more productive to petition the PB developers, rather than the Wine coders, since if you're looking for Linux support, they'll need to change the application itself. No Wine-bsaed workaround will provide true Linux support. The best it can do is pretend to be Windows more accurately, and, as I said, it's PBs job to detect and prevent that.

> From: wineforum-user at winehq.org
> Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:25:25 -0500
> To: wine-users at winehq.org
> Subject: [Wine] Re: Petition for PunkBuster Support/Version for WINE in Linux
> 
> 
> Devine wrote:
> > Greetings,
> > I started this petition the other day.
> > http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/PunkBusterforWINE
> > 
> > 
> > As legitimate owner of a game, regardless of platform (providing that it will actually run) - one should be entitled to the online experience attached to the game.
> > 
> > Sadly, for many Windows(tm) games under WINE this cannot be done because of the PunkBuster Anti-Cheat protection which does not allow those using a WINE based API to access a PunkBuster protected server.
> > 
> > There is PunkBuster support for Linux game servers, so there is already in-house knowledge of Linux at Even Balance. CodeWeavers and Transgaming are distributors of commercial branches of WINE who would work with Even Balance to support their largest demographic. (the gamers!)
> > 
> > Anything that is which allows WINE users to access PunkBuster protected servers will be appreciated. (full implementation or not!)
> > 
> > This petition is to show community and market support to the parties who will be involved in providing PunkBuster support for community and commercial WINE based products.
> > 
> > Also, for those who want to criticize the way I have approached this, I don't care (unless you really do have a better idea which I might take on board)..
> 
> 
> Please learn how to write Wine
> 
> http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-8b4fbbe473bd0d51d936bcf298f5b7f0e8d25f2e
> 
> second, just who are you petitioning?  it's not clear from the link...
> 
> I think you should have researched this better, PunkBuster works for some games but not for others, I can attest to it working fine for me after applying two patches that are on bugzilla.  
> 
> I recall someone saying that some PB enabled games like Americas Army (linux client) is shipped with PB, so support in some form already exists which could be used in a similar manner by EvenBalance without any action on Wine's behalf since they could probably ship something which accesses the linux native library.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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