SecureFile: Attempt to protect AGS games from piracy...

[Dualnames]

http://ledzepforever.googlepages.com/SecureFileTestV1_2.rar

Eh smiley care to tell me how? the version I JUST updated is probably obsolete for I didn't see your post..

[smiley]

A debugger, basic knowledge of assembly and one bottle of beer.

[Snarky]

Now its unbreakable via Hex editor.

I'll add another security check.

That will make the game unpawnable.(trust me)

I think you're just joking (or trying to goad people to crack it), but statements like that sound a bit silly. Uncrackable DRM is fundamentally impossible, at least unless it's running on special tamper-proof hardware or needs to connect to servers under your control to run. You might as well be promising a perpetual motion engine. ("This time it will work!")

The best you can hope for is to make it enough of a hassle to get around that people won't bother. The problem is that crackers are very determined, and really pretty expert at what they do. You might eventually be able to foil whoever hangs out in these forums, but that doesn't mean your scheme would survive ten minutes in the wild. No offense.

[zabnat]

...and by the time you have successfully foiled anyone who hangs out in these forums you got such a horrible monstrosity that no-one will want to play your game because of that. Take StarForce for example. Just google it and you'll find a lot of praise words for it.

[Vince Twelve]

Misj' gave me a fantastic idea in this thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=38388.msg506406#new



An awesome copy protection would be to make your game in 3d!  And ship it with 3d glasses.  If you used colors other than the standard red/blue, then it would be a huge hassle to pirate your game, because even people who happened to have 3d glasses laying around wouldn't be able to play.  They'd have to go down to a craft store and hope to find some clear plastics of the same colors as your anaglyph.  Unless they just played it as is, which would probably give the pirates a nice headache.

The hassle, of course, is that you can't have a download-only option, since you'll have to be shipping glasses to people.  Plus, people who lose their glasses would be screwed...

Still, I would love to play an adventure game in 3d.

[Privateer Puddin']

Vince, can I buy a special 3d edition of Resonance?

[Vince Twelve]

I would love to sell a special 3d edition of Resonance, but when I think about all the reworking I would have to do to make it so...

But now you've got me thinking of a 3d edition of Anna...

[zabnat]

Lucky me, if I wanted to pirate one of those color 3d games, I'd only have to find one matching colored lens since I only have one good eye.
btw. how does this red-green 3d work for people who are red-green color blind? Or color blind in any other way.

[arj0n]

then only crossed polaroid lenses may do the job

[Ryan Timothy B]

I imagine you meant 'polarized' not 'polaroid'.

[arj0n]

Ha, yes, crossed polarized lenses indeed.
They look exactly like these but then totally different-> 8)

[Peder 🚀]

But now you've got me thinking of a 3d edition of Anna...

YES please! .

[Dualnames]

Now its unbreakable via Hex editor.

I'll add another security check.

That will make the game unpawnable.(trust me)

I think you're just joking (or trying to goad people to crack it), but statements like that sound a bit silly. Uncrackable DRM is fundamentally impossible, at least unless it's running on special tamper-proof hardware or needs to connect to servers under your control to run. You might as well be promising a perpetual motion engine. ("This time it will work!")

The best you can hope for is to make it enough of a hassle to get around that people won't bother. The problem is that crackers are very determined, and really pretty expert at what they do. You might eventually be able to foil whoever hangs out in these forums, but that doesn't mean your scheme would survive ten minutes in the wild. No offense.

There goes the man that takes the bad thing out of everything..

No, I'm not trying to make an uncrackable protection system, for none of the already existing protection systems has worked 100%, I'm trying to see when I can give up. I don;t think that crackers can be stopped. In fact it's like having a room filled with infinite monkeys hoping that they will not write a novel.

I'm just doing this for the hell of it people. Statements like its unbreakable are apparently supposed to sound like a manical laughter.

In fact I made a version that can;t be breaked via Smiley's way now, but I think I started working on a game so my interest in this is quite lost..

In fact even if it became unbreakable, who the hell would use it? I wouldn't for one.

I'm just doing this whole thing for fun purposes and to see whether it CAN be done, creating a non-annoying yet cracksafe system.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Well, speaking from personal experience, you'll hit a boundary where on one end the software is relatively easy to crack and beyond it the software will be too unwieldy and punishing to legitimate consumers.  Take TAGES, for instance.  Cursory cracking of TAGES can result in 'glitches' being introduced in the software.  There was one game where a group thought they'd cracked it but TAGES was still active and glitched several key areas of the game, changing prices to unmanageable levels or breaking areas completely.  TAGES is a very insidious protection method, and as a result, sometimes affects legitimate owners as well.  The same is true with SECUROM, though the protection seems to be less intrusive now (unless you're completely against installing the SECUROM software, which is your right).  I've gotten a couple SECUROM games lately that don't care that I have alcohol 120% installed for virtual drives, for instance, but it wasn't always that way.

I'm just saying that at some point you'll make the trade off between something a crack group can solve easily or something that will bother legitimate consumers.  It's the top conundrum facing the software security industry right now.  I think what you're doing is good and if nothing else gives you some good coding practice.

I think we should all just go back to code wheels with silly faces on them ^_^.

[ThreeOhFour]

I think we should all just go back to code wheels with silly faces on them ^_^.

Hear hear! 

[Dualnames]

Okay boys new version is up.


http://ledzepforever.googlepages.com/SecureFileTestV1_3.rar

[Scorpiorus]

Hello!

So, what's the meaning of life?

[smiley]

Okay boys new version is up.
http://ledzepforever.googlepages.com/SecureFileTestV1_3.rar

Just adding QuitGame is a bit cheap.
http://ueberlicht.googlepages.com/CopyofHHGTG3.zip

(and no, fading-in instead of quitting is totally on purpose, and not a glitch caused by a quick and dirty crack  )

[Akatosh]

Yeah, just one security precaution like that isn't going to work. You need to make a function crash the game that can't be 'replaced' if the game is to still work properly. Like, calling the Display function in a way that causes an error, or inserting a loop that never finishes... or, going the more sneaky way, making the game unwinnable by removing a critical item.

[Stee]

And marking the cracked save file so it won't work with a genuine release and they have to start again from scratch.