Re: dominions copy protection
 

The harder you make a game to play illegally, the harder people will work to break through your anti-piracy setup.
It's probably best not to try, because all trying does is waste trouble and usually make things more annoying for people who bought the game, while just providing more challenging practice to the software pirates.

They're pretty through too...I know people that know about that sort of thing...and I'm pretty sure there was even a warez Version of Dominions I. Although it's really sad if anybody got that...
Traitors to Illwinter! Destroy them all!

Re: dominions copy protection
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Most of them arent efforts to stop the pirates. Its efforts to stop the copiers. Casual copys by good buddies are the big target. Pirates are just a side game.

Re: dominions copy protection
 

Yeah...foolish me. I read down to your post after posting that...that does make a certain amount of sense too. But depending on how causual they are it really doesnt take much to stop casual copiers.
Cd-check requirements are especially annoying...they dont really stop anybody with a cd burner and they require actually keeping the cd accesible.

Re: dominions copy protection
 

Hmm. It's too bad though to not be able to, say, play a LAN game with several computers using one CD-key.

The network host thing is a good solution for network games. Doesn't work for single-player. However, you can check whether more than one user is using the host network at the same time, and then deactivate that key.

Ah well.

PvK

dominions copy protection
 

The Shrapnel official policy is to not have a too strong copy protection scheme in their games, to not bother honests customers. What would you prefer to see?

[ October 13, 2003, 12:30: Message edited by: Pocus ]

Re: dominions copy protection
 

The option 'need to enter a cd key upon DL a patch' imply that the patch upgrade your Doms Version on the fly, and is not a stand alone patch.

Otherwise, it would be too easy to get a copy of the patch, then distribute it on the internet...

(this is the Galciv scheme)

[ October 13, 2003, 12:31: Message edited by: Pocus ]

Re: dominions copy protection
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well all you need to do is make a copy of the files before the patch and then make a binary differance with the patched files and make a deltapatch of it. So i wouldent be suprised if you where finding incremental patches on wares sites or P2P servers.

/Morkul