Piracy protection is a Scam

I firmly and wholeheartedly believe that piracy protection in games are a scam, that takes advantage of gullible publishers by prying on their fears. No sales person wants to lose potential revenue, with some exceptions. The idea is sound and sensible. If someone can make an illegal copy of the game that other people can download for free, no money is made, so in order to prevent this dastardly deed from occurring a sinister software is added to authenticate the product upon start up, or in the background while the software is running. Lets use Monster hunter world as an example, Capcom, has implemented a software from a company called Denuvo which uses precious system resources to see if the game is legit. Since this occurs the only one punished are legit owners like me playing it on Steam. Because the software uses a lot of cpu, which causes some lag, long loading times and general instability. A friend of mine has it even worse, Denuvo causes too much stress on the processor and it causes the computer to reboot. This happens despite his ability to run the game without any problem. Due to the piracy protection causing problems for the service it causes a general loss of revenue, due to people demanding a refund because the game runs like crap and to add insult to injury, buying the license from the company itself cost money, that could have been earned through legit sales.

In fact, games are cracked in less than a week after launch, be it an online or offline game, this has been going on since digital entertainment has been around. It never works and it is a pain in the buttocks to deal with. One of the most vile and old examples I can recall is a nefarious software known as Starforce. It came with a couple of games among them was Worms Mayhem. Starforce is generally known to throttle and destroy disc drives inside the computer. Install that worms game along with the malicious software and suddenly out of the blue the cdrom drive is not working anymore or just runs very slowly.

If I where to go further back, the Amiga 500, a wonderful pc with many great games that run on noisy and slow booting floppy drives also had pirate protection. To prevent users from copying the content onto another floppy and thereby ending up with an extra copy of the game.

Since space was limited, developers usually added key words into the manual, such as in Monkey Island, where I had to look up what grog was made of in the manual to get past the first screen. Hackers cracked this the moment they got a hold of a legit game copy. Pirate copies was apparetnly very easy to aquire even back then and the service providers often included a fancy animated logo with a custom sound track, proudly proclaiming that they are the ones that hacked the game. Every now and then they even added a trainer to make the game easier to complete. In the end the only one punished was anyone without the manual, that actually spent money on the game.

To summarize: A game developer uses money to buy piracy protection. 

Hackers break the protection in a couple of days.

Legit owners get the shaft.

The developer and publisher loses sales.

Only the piracy protection software provider wins.

Zaceron signing out

And have a look see, I’m writing a fantasy story

https://wordpress.com/view/shardworld.home.blog

https://tinyurl.com/y4xzh684

Tactical Strike Terrain troubles - Dev Blog 1

I have come to the concussion that I shall make a game and start a company, but for now I’m working on the sales pitch and how to assemble the assets and picking the right engine.

I grew up on a game series known as Strike published by EA, before they become a company killer and money grubber. It’s a series of games where the player control various vehicles seen from an isometric perspective, that was until the PlayStation ear, where they become full 3d, with a very irritating camera. The presentation and the story is brilliant though, even if it is hard as nails.

A very big issue I had with the original is the way the games handle collision detection. Seriously in the first three games the helicopter was incapable of flying over buildings. It always ended in a loud smack and being thrown backwards and thus taking damage. The two on PlayStation fixed this by having the player fly at a set height, yet you can collide with other helicopters, a surprisingly rare enemy all things considered.

Another thing that can clearly be improved is the terrain, which was very bare bones and boring in the original trilogy and turned into a google earth style satellite image on PlayStation. Personally I know I can do better, I have the skills, I have the technology and the will, plus a design document. Now I just need a sales pitch for potential investors.

I’m a great big fan of strategy games, but I really loathe the style of terrain where the environment is a wavy and very smooth plain, with no tunnels and cliffs at all. At the same time I also enjoy a solid collision detection. Therefor my idea is very simple. I have to make a grid, where one square is 1/1 in size and no cliff is taller than 2 squares. In total the terrain will ideally be 4 squares height where the bottom is at sea level. I have already experimented with 3d assets, but I’ve yet to find out how to deal with such a setup in Unity.

A matrix grid is a good thing, since I will save a lot of resources by just adding square collision detection to the terrain. That being said, I’m still pondering over how to most efficiency assemble the terrain. One way is to make all the assets at once, then import the elements into Unity, or the classic world builder approach where I just make a tileset and import it into the software instead. Either way works, it simply depends on how well I can snap it to the grid. First of all I will plan out the map by assembling a square grid to tell where cliffs, water and ground is along with some ramp. Naturally I have planned pretty much all of this on paper and in a text document. The brain is very good at forgetting things, I figured out the secret though. Carry a notebook and a pencil anywhere I go, it’s good for sketches and writing down those quirky ideas.

Anyhow that is it for now and feel free to drop by my stream.

https://twitch.tv/zaceron

Zaceron