Live for Speed Forum - Weitere S1 Infos von Scawen

Zitat:

Pleased you all like look of the RB4, no doubt Eric's happy about that too.

Mr Widdowmaker : Yes that is the plan, a downloadable version which contains the data, encrypted and waiting to be unlocked with an internet connection and a valid username and password. This way, we can get locked S1 versions in various places ready for download, and for example on magazine CDs, playable only in demo form until unlocked. The easiest way to get the full version is then, go online, pay, unlock and there you have it.

I'm certain that hackers will figure out how to unlock the versions to race in single player mode and make them available on websites in certain countries that don't respect copyright law, as they have with every single other game as far as i know, no-one has yet managed to protect against hackers - many games that go through a publisher are available in hacked form even before they are released, now that's bad!!

The alternative plan that springs to mind would be to allow people to download only after they had paid. But we have eliminated this idea because that would mean that S1 was only available from one place. So some other sites that might have liked to host the locked version might simply obtain a hacked version and host that instead (because there would be no such thing as a locked version). So it appears that the downloadable locked version is in fact safer, because there might be more legal locked versions than illegal hacked versions.

Note that people who download a hacked version are for a start taking a risk with their computer's security (personally i wouldn't like to run an exe that i downloaded from a hacker). And there's a big issue that they wouldn't be able to race online in the LFS community being linked by master servers, have statistics stored on the website, or be part of any of the online competition systems that we'll be adding over time. That's probably the best protection we have.

For the single player hack protection i will do my best in not a very long time period, starting on Monday i hope, and making sure it's not just a simple task of unlocking it then copying it to another pc - it wouldn't work in that case. But as people have pointed out, protection against the hardcore hacker is basically impossible, so its not worth spending too much time on the case.

Dolemite : about the connection between demo test and S1 versions, it probably won't happen, i did like that idea at first but it would be more complicated to set up and has this other problem that S1 online racers will be enjoying this protection against wreckers, wrong way drivers and so on. It's hard to imagine how the licensed racers would want to be racing against the unlicensed people. Apart from that, i'd imagine that Blackwood would be the least used track for a time as most people are quite bored of it already! Also i think the tracks will be really "locked" until they are unlocked, completely encrypted and so not available even for spectating.

Please be patient with us on this final stage, there are sure to be some issues and difficulties we haven't thought of yet, nasty bugs that take out a whole day here and there, and so on. But we'll get there, at least it's nice to know that this the only code section left to do.

As we've said before, don't worry that there are plenty of code features small and large, subtle or obvious that just won't be there yet in the S1 release, but the development goes on... while Eric is making tracks and cars for S2, i'll be working towards S2 as well and most features will arrive over time in S1 patches.

Scawen