The tech giant in its recent Windows 10 Fall Creators update added a couple of cool features to facilitate the users even more. The Mixed reality feature allows you to get to travel in space and time while you are at home (metaphorical sense), whereas there are some improved voice command and other features added to Cortana and much more.
While you get to see and applaud these features visible to you during the use of your PC, there is something that might just not be there in the visual. For the tech giant go sneaky and introduced an anti-cheat feature to the Fall Creators update.
It turns out Microsoft is also arming developers with a new API designed to lock out third-party cheat tools from modifying their games to provide an unfair advantage. Named as TruePlay, the mechanism runs like a police on petrol, allowing games to run as a protected process with minimal access to code.
The policemen (Windows monitoring tools) keep a close watch on cheat tools which try to manipulate or interfere in the game play. Once a title activates TruePlay, it can monitor for weird activity during runtime, log performance and incidents, and report incidents.
Deigned for game developers to combat activity like aimbots or wallhacks, TruePlay provides developers with a new set of tools to combat cheating within their PC games. A game enrolled in TruePlay will run in a protected process, which mitigates a class of common attacks.
Furthermore, a Windows service will watch over the gaming sessions for behaviors and manipulations that are common in cheating cases. This data will be collected, and alerts will be generated only when cheating act appears to be occurring. To ensure and protect customer privacy while preventing false positives, the data is only shared with developers after processing has determined cheating is likely to have occurred, according to Microsoft.
This feature was first revealed by the Tech giant in July during the release of Windows 10 insider built, where the company promised to disclose more information. VG247 reports that Microsoft is now documenting its new “TruePlay” anti-cheat feature, and it’s designed for game developers to combat activity like aimbots or wallhacks.
The feature comes initially disabled in the windows, and the users would have to turn on game monitoring to avail the benefits of the feature. But there is a catch for the Game developers are given the option too to either turn on the feature or not. For if they decide to turn on the feature, the user doesn’t really much have a choice to do otherwise.
What they can do is however play the game having the feature off, but that would only prevent gamers from playing portions of a game that require TruePlay to be turned on. As the Tech Giant stated:
“Developers can then make decisions around which experiences are allowed from within their games,”
“Whatever the decision, use the provided APIs to indicate to the system whether active game monitoring is required.” Microsoft®
Despite this the feature access is limited to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games for now, which is a bit unfortunate because much of the games are not out there in the Microsoft Store as of yet. While the Tech Giant strives to attract developers to do just that, for now only the UWP can benefit from it.
But the feature holds a bright future, for it insures security and privacy of content and once made available to the broader market, the games where cheat codes are excessively, the fair play rule shall truly hail!