Plutonium VM Support
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Hi there,
Apologies if this is in the wrong place. I want to start by thanking all the Plutonium staff for everything you guys have done to bring some awesome features to the best era of CoD.
I used to have a 2015 MacBook Pro on which I ran Plutonium through a Windows Bootcamp partition. That computer has unfortunately ceased to function and has been replaced with an M1 MacBook Pro. I've replaced the Bootcamp partition I had for gaming with a Parallels Windows 11 VM, with quite a bit of success (e.g. IW4x with controller support & Bot Warfare runs fantastically at full graphics settings on it) but I can't get anything on Plutonium to load.
Doing some searching on the forum has revealed that Plutonium flat-out won't run on VMs, ostensibly related to anti-cheat issues. I guess this is where I have a few questions:
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If Plutonium won't launch on a VM strictly because of anti-cheat reasons, why can't I launch the game in LAN mode (anti-cheat disabled) on a VM? Are VMs allowed to run the game in LAN mode–in other words, is this something I'm doing wrong, or an M1 chipset issue? While I would like the ability to play online with my dad, who lives in another state, I'd at least like to be able to run the game offline again on my Mac.
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Are there any plans for VM support in the future? Many Mac users will migrate to M1 machines in the future and it's not looking like Bootcamp is going to be an option any time soon–I am sure I speak for a lot of users who would like to be able to take advantage of the graphics power in the M1 Macs to run older games. Again (and I am probably missing something here), it seems like allowing VMs to only run the game in LAN mode would be a great compromise here.
Thanks again for all the work you guys have done and I hope that I'll get a chance to run Pluto on my M1 Mac in the future. If there's anything I can do as a coding-illiterate bystander to help support getting the game to run on M1 Macs, please let me know.
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The anticheat blocks the VM because some cheaters run programs on the host machine which can read/write the memory of any process without being detected on the VM so basically it give the host machine the control of the whole VM which will allow cheating so easily and any one will be able to bypass the ban detection so I don't think this will get supported at all because nothing good will get out of it
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Tifosi 92 I’m pretty sure also that Linux, Mac, and Windows 7 and under is not supported.
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coder x64 Thanks for the explanation. If I understand correctly, this sounds like only allowing LAN mode in the VM also won’t work because you could launch the game in LAN mode and then alter the memory to allow it to believe it should be online.
But if the memory read/write is as limitless as it sounds, what’s to stop cheaters from telling Pluto it’s not loaded on a VM in the first place? Is the VM detection done server-side? If so, would it be possible to create a LAN-only fork of the game for VMs that could be detected server-side were someone to take it online?
Again, I have no practical coding experience outside making a few Doom mods, so I’m just trying to understand how all this works. I’ve been a Mac gamer for a long time now (mainly through Bootcamp) and was really excited to use the graphical leap afforded by the M1 Pro to play WaW, MW2, MW3, and BO2 in LAN parties before I found out only MW2 would work via IW4x (a great game, but it’s still fun to change it up a bit from time to time). In the event Windows won’t ever work outside of VMs on the M1 Macs, might there be a way other than Pluto to play these games over LAN in a VM?
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Unless Bootcamp supports M1 I think you won't be able to run Plutonium.
We don't plan on supporting VMs so you're best bet is to wait for Bootcamp (if it ever happens, it might not) or get a Windows/Linux PC (preferably Windows so that it works out of the box)Macs are not made for games and this is another barrier you encounter when trying to play games with it sadly
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Tifosi 92 There is limits for server-side checks unfortunately like if you want to check the player health/cooldown/speed/position/rotation all of this happen in the server code so its nearly impossible for a hacker to edit the server-side code only if there was a bad coding on it from the client coding which could lead to an exploits so all of this have no problem for now but if you want to check if the player is running on VM or not here is the problem when you connect to a server you will send your IP to the server which is going to manage everything for you in the server-side but if you want to check if the machine is VM in server-side its useless because this check first will occur in the client-side and then it will be sent to the server-side which can be manipulated so easily by changing the result before it will pbe sent to the server-side and plutonium bootstrapper which is responsible to launch the game is packed (obfuscated) so nobody can decompile and read the code of the client to read the code you need to debug the client which plutonium have anticheat to prevent but in VM you can run your debugger from the host machine which will allow you to read the code and even if they just support LAN mode then a hacker will read the game code in VM and develop a way to cheat in online without being detected all of this is reasons of why should VM stay unsupported because as I said nothing good will get out of it.
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Thanks for the really detailed responses, everyone. I guess I’ll stick to IW4x until Bootcamp is released, if ever.
