this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 267 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I love the implication here, that they don't have the proper source (or skills left in the company) such that they can remove the DRM which doesn't play nice themselves so they rely on a cracked copy of the game instead. Been quite a bit of news lately about how game companies have failed to keep the original source code for their games. Diablo 2, the Transformers games etc and those from active companies, there's bound to be 1000s of games where the source is lost due to publishers closing down studios.

[–] Teppic@kbin.social 117 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?

[–] VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca 65 points 2 years ago

I mean, they didn't even bother to remove the signature!

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[–] lemann@lemmy.one 98 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's a complete crapshow IMO.

I still have the source code for the simple stuff I developed over 12 years ago, but these organisations don't think it's important to hang on to source code and assets for something they plan to make money from?

Really telling about the attitudes towards software outside of the FOSS space and datahoarder communities, and more importantly how little the management/publishers actually care about the product.

Although to counter that, I'm aware of at least one situation where the opposite has happened. One of my simulation games for example is really buggy and isn't able to receive more updates because the studio behind it voluntarily disbanded, leaving the publisher without access to the source code (I believe the publisher Aerosoft has tried to get a copy of the source to provide further game fixes, but the individuals behind the disbanded studio could not come to an agreement on this)

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've had teams not bother to keep proper history when moving from subversion to git and I've also had a DevOps team entirely wipe the history of a new project just because cloning took a long time (and refused to attempt shallow cloning).

So the idea that a company just lets their code "rot" to the point of not even having it anymore because it's just some legacy thing from over a decade ago is totally unsurprising to me.

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[–] SeedyOne@lemmy.ca 215 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Remember that time a random player DRAMATICALLY decreased load times for GTA online after finding bad code that preloaded TONS of game assets? After like, a decade?

Pepperidge Farm remembers...

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 60 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I believe it was a CSV file of every item in all of the shops (comma separated values) and it was being read and stored into memory single threaded so it was maxing out a single core on the CPU.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 55 points 2 years ago (3 children)

JSON, and it had more to do with how they were checking string lengths. But yeah, the general story is that a random dude fixed massive problems with the text parsing.

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 31 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Found an article that details it again since it was a fun read at the time. Looks like it was 10MB json file and the method to read the lines used the expensive length function you mentioned. It also had other simple optimizations too.

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[–] seang96@spgrn.com 7 points 2 years ago

Yeah json actually sounds better. Unfortunately it's still a text file that they were importing the entire thing into memory. Probably worse than CSV since they were probably serializing each item from string into objects. They definitely did it in one of the most laziest ways possible though I bet it worked at the time of development and the vendors probably had very few items.

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 36 points 2 years ago

Are you talking about the guy that found a bug in the JSON parsing?

[–] cordlesslamp@lemmy.today 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Are you saying the INSANE GTA Online load time is fixed now?

Back in the old day, I literally just throw my hands up and said "I can't wait for this shit anymore, I don't have all day" then rage quit and delete the game.

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[–] XEAL@lemm.ee 69 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)
[–] wallmenis@lemmy.one 59 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 36 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] lemann@lemmy.one 27 points 2 years ago

I'll just stick to 🏴‍☠️ old games with DRM, why should I give a company 🤑 for redistributing a cracker's hard work?

[–] XEAL@lemm.ee 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You gotta do a workaround [url](url) when the URL breaks like that.

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[–] Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 years ago (15 children)
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[–] Ganbat@lemmyonline.com 53 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Better than their in-house attempts to remove anti-piracy measures. The Steam release of Manhunt has had all of its bullshit triggered for over ten years now. It's literally impossible to play without community patches.

Edit: Lol, as it turns out, Silent's discovery of this was triggered by the recent revelation of this about Manhunt!

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[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 42 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 31 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It's not really a crack, it's the corporate activation script. But yeah, MS don't care about sales anymore, they're all about stealing your data.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 18 points 2 years ago

The information the OS collects is not worth more than keeping you in the ecosystem itself. That's the more lucrative reasoning. Can't easily sell other products if they're not in Windows. The information collection is just gravy.

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[–] ours@lemmy.film 24 points 2 years ago

Or Ubisoft. A colleague of mine was super hyped for Far Cry 2, both the collector's edition but it wouldn't start on his PC. He contacted Ubisoft support and they gave him an actual scene crack. There were other reported cases of Ubisoft support handing out scene cracks to go around their shitty DRM.

"A" for effort for the support people in finding ways for customers to be happy and play the games they paid for. But a Steam release for a humongous corporation just straight up using the crack and releasing it as is, that's a new low.

[–] SternburgExport@feddit.de 32 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Doesn't even surprise me anymore. Rockstar has gone to shit.

[–] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 28 points 2 years ago (5 children)

cant even play their legitly purchased SINGLEPLAYER games without internet connection.
I fucking hate rockstar

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[–] cloud@lazysoci.al 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What i'm looking at? What is this from?

[–] wahming@monyet.cc 38 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hidden text within the app code from the steam folder

[–] cloud@lazysoci.al 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

So the official files contains a razor 1911 line? This look sus af

[–] u202307011927@feddit.de 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Anyone know what RAZOR 1911 stands for or means, anyways?

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

1911 which translates to 777 in hexadecimal.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 24 points 2 years ago

In Unix's chmod, change-access-mode command, the octal value 777 grants all file-access permissions to all user types in a file.

[–] wahming@monyet.cc 8 points 2 years ago

In what sense? Incompetence, dodginess, or fake screenshot?

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Within the binary of the file *

[–] wahming@monyet.cc 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yes, I was trying to keep it to a non-technical ELI5

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[–] Damage@feddit.it 14 points 2 years ago

Vestigial DNA

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 13 points 2 years ago

Not the first time, won't be the last.

[–] tun@lemm.ee 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It means cracker fixed the issue for the developer, right?

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[–] balls_expert@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Imagine if they distributed one of those that contained a strange bind syscall somewhere with a reverse shell.

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[–] quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 years ago

Or its just a piracy check...

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