Copy protection for the most part will only stop the casual pirates, at least until a cracked version is released on a P2P network. It also has the undesirable effect of irritating honest users. Honestly, it's really not worth the time and effort. As agm_ultimatex points out some companies are releasing patches to undo some copy protection, the requiring the CD be in the drive.
ActiveMark is proprietary so Macrovision isn't very fourth coming with it's inner workings. My guess it is raps the game executable and data in encryption and uses an activation/verification scheme with Macrovision's (the parent company of TryMedia which uses ActiveMark) servers.
Copy protection - how do I do?
If this is an online game then protection is a mute point because if it was properly designed then most of the critical features would be server sided in the first place.
If its a single player (be it rpg, fps or w/e) then who is it hurting if people want to make trainers or other hacks for the game. There is a big reason why allot of single player pc games let you type ~console or some version there of in the short cut to launch the game. This lets you basically 'hack' anything in the game you would normally use a trainer for in the first place.
I'll be honest, any time I play a single player game and beat it. I go back and play again with the console. If the game doesn't have a console feature i hack the hell out of it until i have all the features that the console would have given me in the first place.
Why do i do this. Because its fun to put the game on 'nightmare mode' and run trough it in a couple of hours with all weapons, inf ammo and god mode. Why not i bought the game, I beat the game. Why not have fun with it.
The point is i like many people got into programming by reverse engineering other games. I have cracked almost ever 'protection' type out there. Including game guard. And if i could do it when i didn't know jack about programming then what is stopping expert programmers from doing it to your game.
Protect your files (maps, characters, textures etc) by using your own compression or file types. But if people want to get to them they will too. But people don't normally mess with that stuff anyway.
If its a single player (be it rpg, fps or w/e) then who is it hurting if people want to make trainers or other hacks for the game. There is a big reason why allot of single player pc games let you type ~console or some version there of in the short cut to launch the game. This lets you basically 'hack' anything in the game you would normally use a trainer for in the first place.
I'll be honest, any time I play a single player game and beat it. I go back and play again with the console. If the game doesn't have a console feature i hack the hell out of it until i have all the features that the console would have given me in the first place.
Why do i do this. Because its fun to put the game on 'nightmare mode' and run trough it in a couple of hours with all weapons, inf ammo and god mode. Why not i bought the game, I beat the game. Why not have fun with it.
The point is i like many people got into programming by reverse engineering other games. I have cracked almost ever 'protection' type out there. Including game guard. And if i could do it when i didn't know jack about programming then what is stopping expert programmers from doing it to your game.
Protect your files (maps, characters, textures etc) by using your own compression or file types. But if people want to get to them they will too. But people don't normally mess with that stuff anyway.
Quote:Original post by FeralrathWell that's one of the areas I did get in to while I did more reverse engineering and I'd dare to say most custom encryptions are variations of commonly known encryptions in which case they're piece of cake. If people come up with their own it's still easy a) you can see how the code decrypts it b) it probably isn't as good as proven encryptions. All encryptions have weaknesses, the ones that have been around the longest and are still good are good encryption algorithms they're the ones that have stood up to the test of time and still hold their ground.
Protect your files (maps, characters, textures etc) by using your own compression or file types. But if people want to get to them they will too. But people don't normally mess with that stuff anyway.
And yea people do mess with that stuff too if they're required, if they can fool the software to do it for them then no (if we're talking about cracking, people will mess with anything for fun [smile]).
Online verification is good base for copy protection.
MMO's benefits from this, there is no way to crack a mmo, since you really need an online account AND main part of the game (playability) is on the server.
So having only the client won't be enough.
Now, for single player game (or applications), one could adopt the above system and have the users to authenticate against a server. Since people could remove the protection on the client side, you should have some important parts running on the server, then the only way to remove copy protection is to set up a server which simulates the behaviour of the real server.
This is what i did for my application, online authentication and running some critical code parts on the server (loading an encrypted DLL from server into the memory).
So the only working copy protection is to make a hacker's life hard to "break" your protection.
MMO's benefits from this, there is no way to crack a mmo, since you really need an online account AND main part of the game (playability) is on the server.
So having only the client won't be enough.
Now, for single player game (or applications), one could adopt the above system and have the users to authenticate against a server. Since people could remove the protection on the client side, you should have some important parts running on the server, then the only way to remove copy protection is to set up a server which simulates the behaviour of the real server.
This is what i did for my application, online authentication and running some critical code parts on the server (loading an encrypted DLL from server into the memory).
So the only working copy protection is to make a hacker's life hard to "break" your protection.
Quote:Online verification is good base for copy protection.
MMO's benefits from this, there is no way to crack a mmo, since you really need an online account AND main part of the game (playability) is on the server.
So having only the client won't be enough.
This is only true as long as you host the server in a secure environment.
If you don't want to host all servers then it's just a matter of days before cracked server versions shows up. Need I say that it's quite expensive to provide servers for a wide user base.
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