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how to protect the mission from theft?

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Could you maybe be a little more specific?

I want encrypt mission his

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how to protect the mission from theft?

Don't release it...

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Don't release it...

 

I agree on that. If people find the way how to secure a mission, that is fine, but you do not have to share it with everybody. in 99% of the cases, owners like me of an altis life server, try to secure their missions, as stealing is the daily business of all little servers, tring to steal conent from the big ones.

 

Oher gamemodes, or mission do not need to be encrypted in any way, as arma community conent should stay public ... I am agains the idea of everybody taking his or her conent private. I had to secure my mission in many ways, as all the other crappy altis life server took my and the other developers content, from your server nearly daily. 

 

It is a pitty that we even have to think about something like that in the arma community ... well in arma 3 at least. Good old "care about others" arma and arma 2 ...

 

Regards Arkensor

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Make your mission and code public, release it and encourage other mission makers (specially beginners) to look at the mission and how you made it, so they might learn from you.

THAN and only THAN is your mission really protected from theft!

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It is a pitty that we even have to think about something like that in the arma community ... well in arma 3 at least. Good old "care about others" arma and arma 2 ...

 

 

That's the downside of Arma 3 becoming more popular. More players -> more retards.

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Make your mission and code public, release it and encourage other mission makers (specially beginners) to look at the mission and how you made it, so they might learn from you.

THAN and only THAN is your mission really protected from theft!

 

I sort-of disagree,

 

While its content may seem as an inspiration (or an example to learn), it may also encourage them to use it in their missions, addons or mods, The most appropriate and responsible thing to do is release sample content (with a license or given terms) on a website such as on the BIS forums. If they want to learn from you, then they are to PM or ask you directly for guidance and/or help.

 

 

how to protect the mission from theft?

 

If you have got it on steam, set it to Private or Friends Only. Else otherwise, you must state your Terms & Conditions for your mission, addon or mod. If you see anything suspicious that resembles your work, you must contact a BIS moderator for help.

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Run the scenario on your own server and keep the code files on the server machine. Can also obfuscate + encrypt the code itself.

 

Of course nothing is 100% secure. From my experience there are ways to do just about anything with A3. Usually breaches of server files are done via 'trusted' users who have access who leak/steal a copy. Or from virtual service providers with dodgy employees, who go poking around in their clients services.

 

At some point you just have to make peace with the fact if you make anything of value and release it on the internet, that pirates will attempt to steal and de-credit your work, for their own financial/ego goals, due to the fact there is no significant risk of civil/criminal liability.

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Make your mission and code public, release it and encourage other mission makers (specially beginners) to look at the mission and how you made it, so they might learn from you.

THAN and only THAN is your mission really protected from theft!

You're missing the point. He wants to make money, not community.

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I agree and disagree. I think like me im working on a big mission and it would be cool to protect from some code theft but only in the begining of missions releise . ... And i think 99% of the time if you ask to use a code ( no one has ever said no to me). ..

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I want to earn money making missions. But I think BIS forbids it, at least the sales guy from BIS told me so.

 

If I could, I would ask for couple euros for Antistasi Tanoa, as took me near a year and a half of no little dedication and thousands of people are having fun on their weekends thanks to that.

 

Is ok if I have to give it for free, but it's more than ok if I could pay some beers from doing it.

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A balance is good.

 

I have a number of public mods, but also some protected stuff as well.

 

On that note, does anybody know of a good A3 variable name obfuscator program? Manual obfuscation with an excel spreadsheet and n++ ctrlH is a bit tedious for ~3000 line files.

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I for one, have never been into this business of scripting for money, it's a game, I have fun playing it, I have fun coding it. I've gotten offers of payment for code, or simply helping people along, turning them down just because I don't need money for this. I believe that if someone "steals" your content and goes off and make money, you can take it as a complement, why, because it means your shit is what they would consider top of the line and worth stealing, that for me is payment enough. Time to time I'll search through missions and such, to find out I'm in the credit lines, that to me is more fulfilling than a few dollars everytime someone wants to use my content.

And side note to the whole A3 being popular thanks to Youtubers, yea...., pretty sure it was thanks to the DayZ mod in A2 that expanded the base of this community from wholehearted military simulators to that plus PvPers, which has brought to life KoTH, DayZ Standalone, A3 Life, and other gamemodes of similar note. If the code for any of these were to leak out, would it hurt, no not really, it would hurt Egos, not the community, cause guess what players do if they join a server that has one of these modes on it and it's not up to snuff, they leave it and join another until they find what they are looking for, no one cares about the author anymore, except the author, and we the true community members. Welcome to the real world, cut-throat and unforgiving.

To make this post a bit more on topic, the missions file itself is really unprotectable, as everyone that joins gets it, so that means everything you want secured needs to be ran from your server, not the mission, then simply give no one access to anything and hope no one gets bored and hacks your server for the info.

PPS: Guess what some original content authors get, that the little stealing f*cks don't, job offers.

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Totally agree,

 

"Original content" is allways the priority for commoner player as the newest stuff, bug fix, new features etc.. comes from the guys that made it.

 

If someone copies "original content" and has more player base, it is for sure not the same thing than the one from which they strated. Something like MySpace and Facebook...

 

But anyway I think allowing content creators to earn a bit of money from their content would be a nice step forward the sandboxy thing and encourage a lot of people on makin finer and bigger works.

 

The MANW was a good initiative, yes, but profitable only for 10 people :)

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I guess i have no worries. I left all my scripts ( realy belong to KaRRiLLioN) as sqs. .. So anyone can have fun and copy paste and fix, then ill steal them back.lol.

But trufuly KaRR made his mission for the public and so will I.

It is the way it is and should be. I never saw these issues in ofp. Bis should charge a % of$$$$ to all servers charging $$$.

Another thought. What would we do if cup and rhs started charging , or some of the other have to have mods.

Good greef i hope bis fixes this mess ...

Ban servers is my vote.

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And side note to the whole A3 being popular thanks to Youtubers, yea...., pretty sure it was thanks to the DayZ mod in A2 that expanded the base of this community from wholehearted military simulators to that plus PvPers, which has brought to life KoTH, DayZ Standalone, A3 Life, and other gamemodes of similar note.

A side note to side note: It was the life missions and Berzerk (KOTH) that substantially changed the community in 2007, years before Dayz mod.  ;)  Of course, Dayz was the biggest avalanche though.

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A side note to side note: It was the life missions and Berzerk (KOTH) that substantially changed the community in 2007, years before Dayz mod. ;) Of course, Dayz was the biggest avalanche though.

I didn't even know Arma was in existence at that point :p (as in I know it was around, yet I didn't even have a gaming PC), sorry for the slight misinfo :). I'm at coder not a history buff.

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Take donations and give freely to the community... this is what makes this community special.

There will always be dbags that steal crap...

Money + people = endless bullshit.

Just look at how some families deal with a will.

"It's not about money, it's about sending a message. Everything buurrnns..."

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I have released all but one of my scripts and projects for free. I only ask that my author watermark stay intact. I was paid for one project, and my client actually came to me with the preposition, which I accepted since what he wanted was exactly something I already wanted to create. I did let him know that I may eventually release it for free, however at this time it is unreleased. I don't mind people taking donations for a mission in which some of my content has been used. All I want is a donation of my own (I realize that at this time I don't have a donation link anywhere, I will add it when it is time).

 

Anyway, I've fooled around with a way to make scripts theft-proof. The basic idea is that the scripts are stored in the game root folder, loaded and compiled, then sent to clients with publicVariable.

if (isServer) then
{
	//server sends functions
	SCRIPT1 = compileFinal preProcessFileLineNumbers "\myMission\Script1.sqf";
	publicVariable "SCRIPT1";
	SCRIPT2 = compileFinal preProcessFileLineNumbers "\myMission\Script2.sqf";
	publicVariable "SCRIPT2";
	SCRIPT3 = compileFinal preProcessFileLineNumbers "\myMission\Script3.sqf";
	publicVariable "SCRIPT3";
} else
{
	//client validation
	_startTime = time;
	waitUntil {!isNil "SCRIPT1" || {time > _startTime + 20}};
	_startTime = time;
	waitUntil {!isNil "SCRIPT2" || {time > _startTime + 20}};
	_startTime = time;
	waitUntil {!isNil "SCRIPT3" || {time > _startTime + 20}};
};

_result = _args call SCRIPT1;
_result = _args call SCRIPT2;
_result = _args call SCRIPT3;

Unless something changed with the preProcess command, this method will work. Having the backslash(\) in front is the key to the whole operation. This is what tells the game to look in the game root folder (\\steam\steamapps\common\Arma 3) for scripts. Obviously, you can change SCRIPT1 to something more appropriate like DE_fnc_SCRIPT1 if you want to make it look like you used the functions library.

 

This is not completely theft-proof. Someone that knows what they are doing can still take your scripts. However, this will require them to use an sqf injector, which is bannable by battleeye, or the debug box (just don't enable it on your server, bad idea anyway for multiple reasons).

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Yeah sending everything over a public variable is ok, but on larger missions like altis life you will kill the server with that ...

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Yeah sending everything over a public variable is ok, but on larger missions like altis life you will kill the server with that ...

Just gonna have to write better code. Somebody told me once that in life there are a lot of scripts that are exactly the same just with a different name and a different variable. All of those can be condensed down into 1 script

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It is a publicVariable send by the server ... what do I have to explain there ? If you have got around 50 scrip files which you want to stream from the server with a high amount of player, which each has to recive them on connection ... 

Trust me, it is a very bad idea. Maybe not on 50 players, mabye not on 80 but around 100+ players on one server this will kill it

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