Easy Anti-Cheat

[xHybred]

343i sadly confirmed Easy Anti-Cheat will becoming to the game soon. What is the future of this tool in light of that?

[Connor-jt]

no one is quite sure what the EAC implementation is going to look like, so, unsure

campaign support was basically deprecated with the like season 4/5 update, so IRTV will likely still work with the campaign

and for multiplayer, i suspect you will still beable to use IRTV with those locally hosted server instances for custom games, although that means you wouldn't beable to use the tool for any cosmetic/local changes, but mainly for stuff like swapping gun projectiles and that stuff
(this is because locally hosted servers run on separate game processes/instances that likely wont be protected by EAC)

but for online multiplayer i would say that you'd be fairly out of luck with using IRTV after the EAC update
which i guess is the point of the EAC implementation, supposedly 343 employees had discussed in the past explicitly blocking this tool & it seems like they're finally getting around to that

theres potentially a chance that 343 wont add file integrity checks for the game data files, as the game opens like 30 gb of files to run, which would definitely hurt the load times
which would allow us to just make edits to the game files instead of runtime edits
but it would be pretty silly of them not to do that if they're going all out with EAC

and then of course theres always a chance they do a terrible EAC implementation that you could easily work around with one of the many eac bypass things that are floating around
i have no doubt that any cheaters still left playing the game are definitely going to use exploits like those

if my assumptions are correct, then the outcome really isn't that bad, i think most people who use this tool use it just to play around with stuff in customs & the campaign, so the tool should maintain most of its functionality still

although of course there were a few guys that used this to do some quality of life changes for online gameplay like tweaking visual settings & some ui like crosshairs and that stuff, but realistically you should never have been able to do that in the first place

[Connor-jt]

so to answer your inferred question, yeah the anti-aliasing thing that that guy posted the other day will pretty much not be possible (but maybe only for halo infinite multiplayer)

[xHybred]

so to answer your inferred question, yeah the anti-aliasing thing that that guy posted the other day will pretty much not be possible (but maybe only for halo infinite multiplayer)

Thanks for answering what I was interested in despite not saying it. I literally haven't played Halo Infinite since launch because the AA triggers my motion sickness, so this tool is basically required for me to play the game.

So do you think their would/could be an alternative method to getting it disabled?

[Connor-jt]

wow thats incredibly unfortunate, and sounds like a pretty serious accessibility issue that was completely overlooked by 343

im not really sure what the work arounds would be until the time comes, although i probably wont be reinstalling halo infinite in a very very long time
so i'll likely only ever really beable to speculate how to work around it

if no workarounds are available, then my only real suggestion would be to try and reach out and make 343 aware of the issue so that they can fix it on their end, it seems like a relatively easy fix based on the process described from that reddit post

you could try making halo waypoint tickets (basically pointless) or mentioning people on twitter like unyshek, mint blitz or forgelord or whoever gives the time of day for that game anymore

i've definitely had my fair share of accessibility issues with this game, and yeah its pretty bleak man
best of luck if you do try and get someones attention about it, you are for sure going to need it

[xHybred]

343i has been made aware of this issue, they've had multiple posts over the years on Reddit from time to time with hundreds of upvotes, there was alot during the beta - S1 then it picked up again recently within the last month due to a viral video I made

Plus reputable sources like Digital Foundry in their tech analysis of the game mentioned its poor anti-aliasing, and John from DF on multiple occasions said its ruining the games graphics for him.

So yeah, somethings wrong with 343i, they're acting very stubborn around this issue, maybe we just need a bit more noise made and I have plans to do that because if its forced in this Halo there's a 99% chance it will be forced going forward which means I won't ever be able to enjoy another Halo game again. So its more bleak than it seems

[Connor-jt]

i dont really have anything constructive to add to that but,

just from a brief look at the r/halo reddit, it seems those posts made way back did not reach hundreds of upvotes, i could only find one notable post on there, which was competing with a lot of other complaint/feedback posts that had significantly more upvotes on the same day (im not quite sure i got the timestamp correct, but you'll get the point)

so there is definitely a fair chance that they hadn't actually seen that feedback, or noted it down or whatever

as for being forced going forwards, there are a lot of claims that the next halo games are going to be built with unreal engine, which would probably make it easier for the user to manually resolve the problem
although it feels like a lot of those rumors/leaks and whatnot are greatly exaggerated from a slight truth, so who knows

as a random note: from seeing all your guys' comparisons, i'd suggest you give theatre mode a go
that should allow you to line up the comparisons a lot better

[Connor-jt]

EAC confirmed to be added to halo infinite on March 19th

its been a long time coming, so i dont think i'd mind taking the time to do a couple of tests and checking it out or whatever

or maybe someone will end up making a video on it

im thinking they will do somewhat of a mod friendly implementation (potentially only restricting players from online matchmaking if EAC detected something suspicious), but we'll have to wait for further details

[Connor-jt]

my conclusions after some testing

IRTV no longer works (haven't checked the exact cause, but most likely memory access protection)

Halo Infinite's runtime memory is protected or something, so you need something like a kernel driver to access the game's runtime mem
(i have no idea how its done, but i recall that there were tools for MCC that solved this problem)

IRTV also doesn't seem to work for dedicated/lan servers, although the memory is not protected for these so it would be possible to fix IRTV for them

file integrity checks dont seem to be performed, i altered the assumed checksum value of each any/multi & pc/multi modules at 0x38 to -1 (0xffffffff)
and i was still able to load into and play a full game of super fiesta

i shall do more testing to see if i can demonstrate the lack of file integrity checks

as for IRTV, we just need a way to launch the game without EAC to let it work again i think
whether its just using a launch parameter or the developers adding in the option to disable it on launch
otherwise IRTV cannot be used at all with halo infinite's multiplayer

[Connor-jt]

forgot to post the update, yeah there is no file integrity checks

heres a basic demonstration https://youtu.be/h9gsZcvrF48

[Nighterlev]

@Connor-jt @xHybred
You can bypass the EAC stuff by simply using an older HaloInfinite.exe that existed before EAC existed. This completely disables Multiplayer ofc, but Custom Games still work (custom games browser does not).
The custom games menu does noticeably take a long time to load for unknown reasons.
Campaign has always worked.
The exe I'm using comes from a steam build directly before EAC got added, don't notice any issues either. Supposedly you can also just modify the exe directly to ignore eac entirely but I'm not sure how to do that method.

If any interest is left in reviving the project or at the very least fixing some bugs / issues IRTV had with Infinite before, you can use this knowledge to get it working again.

[Connor-jt]

nah defo no interest left, i think i did hear someone mention something about swapping out the the files to revert to the old anti cheat (which is incredibly funny that it even works)

i know there isn't, but for anyone left interested in modding tool stuff, i'd just stick to the tools that edit the map files themselves (i mentioned a list here: #140 (comment) )
especially cause we already have partial model importing and whatever with module editing, which would be more worthwhile working on as opposed to fixing up IRTV,

although then again there really isn't much interest in halo infinite modding outside of just playing with random things with IRTV pretty much

[matty45]

You can also use the method inside https://github.com/Surasia/InfiniteExt as that works. Matchmaking won't be available though.