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Unity Games are hackable

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Johnyyyy, Apr 19, 2015.

?

What do you think about this?

  1. Unity must take a step.

    32.2%
  2. It doesn't matter

    67.8%
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  1. Johnyyyy

    Johnyyyy

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    Hi everyone
    I am working on Unity since 2012, and now i am near the days of releasing my game.
    In this thread i am going to talk about something very important, so please everyone find time to read this post.

    While i was working, i found on the net an application which hacks any game made with unity. Any game:

    So I have downloaded this application and opened my game's apk using 7zip and then opened it in this program.
    What happened? It opened my game, fully.
    Textures, Audioclips, and Shaders. All opened, possible to export.

    Not enough, it also opens the first scene with all the hierarchy.
    I have read on their forum, and there is written that they are working to extract models.
    On that forum there are requests to open the scripts.





    As you have seen this is what they are talking about.
    This is worst for the developers. I have worked 3 years on my game, and i will be very angry if someone will touch my game assets, audioclips, shaders and etc.....
    I hope and request Unity to develop something stronger, that it can not be opened, or extracted. Putting compressions, encryptions, and all possible solutions, please make Unity a safe game engine, protect the developers.


    Please comment and share this topic as much as possible, this is important for all us.

    _________________________________________________________________________
    Edit: 20 april 2014
    On demand of several people, I have deleted the links to the application.
    Some people pm me saying I am spammer, some other said that it doesn't matter.
    Of course I look a spammer because I am trying to fight the piracy.
    What I have done to look like a spammer? Did I sent you links of my game? Did i sent you advertisement? Did i requested to give me your bank account?

    Not let's read a bit more:
    If I am creating something for example a car's engine or transmission, ..., and when i have finished, i sell it and i get my money. But if someone stills it, the Government will punish him in Jail, right?
    I am working on my game from 3 years. My team is me, and my graphic designer. 2 persons, It has been done all by us.
    I have wrote all codes, my graphic designer has made all meshes, textures, and he also recorded audio files.
    Isn't easy doing all these.
    It just looks a simple thing, but when you will work on AAA titles, you will understand it.
    Now someone come and takes my code, for example my character script, or my AI script. Wow it s awesome right? Wow what a wonderfull thing?
    People says that they will use my script for just learning. I am not teaching some one, if someone wants to learn, please join a game dev school or a university. There you will pay to learn, here you are robbering, and then saying i was just learning.
    If someone stills my engine (coming back to the car' s engine example) and then in the court he says I did it only to learn how he made it. I don't think they won't execute him.
    How can I understand someone stilled my mesh? For example I have made a car (3d model), example a Ford Flex. All ford flex looks similar, because they are similar, they are products of the same project. How can I understand if he made his own Ford Flex or stilled mine? May he had take my model, and changed the texture, and vuoalaaaaaa, he has got a Ford Flex, by just doing nothing and taking my asset.
    What if he takes my shader? He changes the value of the material and vuolaaaa, he got a shader, he got my rendering! WTF?
    What if he takes my script? just changing the parameters the script will behave differently, like an AI will change the behaviour. Wow he also has my AI, and I am not sure if that is the mine, or is his own, it just does a little bit different behaviour, but it s the same script. It's my code.



    If you can't stop hack, make it soo hard, that they can't find the time for it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2015
    LeleUnity, Crossway and jpthek9 like this.
  2. Yippie

    Yippie

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    well this is sad, you shouldn't share the link though.
     
    Crossway and angrypenguin like this.
  3. Johnyyyy

    Johnyyyy

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    Why i shouldn't share the link? Sorry i didn't understand.
    I did this post because it s bad for we developers.
    We have worked on our games, and somebody else come and takes our stuff.
     
    LeleUnity likes this.
  4. tswalk

    tswalk

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    it's been going on for a while now.. not really new news though.
     
  5. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    It has always been like this. This isn't the first tool to do this either.

    If unity modifies the format to break it, someone will write another tool for the new format. That's part of using a popular engine with a common format for thousands of games, someone will want to mod a game and the tool works for all others too.

    There's no reason to freak out here just because a few kids are messing with your game. You'll only waste your time trying to prevent it.
     
  6. Johnyyyy

    Johnyyyy

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    ya, that thread is going from 2014
     
  7. Johnyyyy

    Johnyyyy

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    that's true, but I don't like that somebody takes my assets (textures, ...) and then make a game to compete with you as they can also get your shaders.
     
  8. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    Copyright your stuff and then you'll be hoping to see it get leaked & re-implemented everywhere so you can become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams while sending other people into a hell of debts that will plunge them into a 3rd world life style (starvation, homelessness, etc).
     
  9. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    If someone steals your assets and publishes a clone, then you file a dmca takedown request and forget it. People will most likely use those for learning purposes only anyways.
     
  10. tswalk

    tswalk

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    lol... only if you're the "lawyer" though :D
     
    Ryiah likes this.
  11. Ostwind

    Ostwind

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    Yeah nothing new here really and it has been happening for several years with various tools. The code can also be easily decompiled to see all logic.
     
  12. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    Pff, I have a lot of Jewish friends. And what does that mean? It's just shorthand stereotyping so that I don't have to go on to elaborate how they're involved in business management, banks, lawyers and the uncle of one is a judge. Working together they are my super team of legal and financial advice!

    I wonder what would happen if someone did this to hearthstone and tried to reuse any of it lol.
     
  13. zombiegorilla

    zombiegorilla

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    It happens to ALL games. Nothing new, and not specific to Unity.
     
    computertech, Jither, Trexug and 2 others like this.
  14. darkhog

    darkhog

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    It isn't Unity's job to protect your game assets. Unity's format was designed to load games with best possible performance first and security later. If you want to make your assets secure, it's your job.

    Here are some ways you can do that:

    - Obfuscation of scripts. It would deter all but most persistent hackers. There are tools that would do it for you.
    - Steganography for sounds and even models. Just hide your music/sound inside textures and any other data you need. That has downside of not being able to use JPG compressed textures as lossy compression would mess up with steganographed data (PNG is fine though) and that you need to write your own extraction routines as well as tool to encode it (in case of models, you'll also have to build all the models at runtime after decoding from stego'd image).

    Of course if you'll do steganography for other than image assets, you won't be able to hide textures, but let's be honest - textures are never something really unique.
     
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  15. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    Why? The game code would have to contain the decryption algorithm, and a determined hacker will simply use it himself.
     
  16. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    You must have a game worthy of a Nobel peace prize if that's your worry. Somehow I don't think your game is going to end war forever, so the likelihood that someone is bored enough on a Tuesday to reverse-engineer the steganography is probably the least of anyone's concerns. I have to imagine "making a good game" is a bit higher of a priority.
     
    darkhog likes this.
  17. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    That's part of the reason I love it.

    That sounds like a game I want to make. A dream simulator that would be so enjoyable to experience that it would completely mellow out a population, ending all wars and providing everyone with affordable access to the best possible life where life is defined as your experiences and memories.

    Some rich guy who owns 30% of the country's wealth can't have a better experience than any other individual, thus greed disappears within a few generations while anyone who can afford the <$2000 hardware setup can enjoy the experience while greed still exists in their lifetime.

    Who is going to go out of their way to waste the time to cause hardship for everyone if everyone has access to their own personalized paradise?
     
  18. Zeblote

    Zeblote

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    So how is
    part of
    and not a massive waste of time? Especially if
    ?
     
  19. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    We're not hiding anything. If people want to mod our games and enjoy them further - that's fine. If they want to sell or use any assets, then well, we use the same lawyers as MS and EA use. They're not too expensive either, very reasonable rates, and we're not afraid to use them, as we have done so in the past :) Unfortunately, we will go after anyone using them, as should any developer big or small as ripping and republishing titles is alarmingly common on android etc.

    If it's just for modding though, isn't it a sign of your game's popularity?

    AFAIK IL2CPP prevents anyone just reverse engineering to pure C# and will require much more hardcore reverse engineering. Graphics, models, shaders are up for grabs but only for their private use.

    Also, don't mass-invite people to a conversation then link your thread again, there's no point.
     
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  20. ShilohGames

    ShilohGames

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    Code obfuscation is usually a terrible idea. It makes it harder to develop and debug your own code. It is a better idea to write clean code, and just not worry about people decompiling your work.
     
  21. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    It's a terrible idea, IL2CPP should make it redundant as well. Not sure about WebGL but the whole web is pretty much open season, and those are the risks.
     
    Tomnnn likes this.
  22. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    No, I'm pretty certain it really isn't important to all of us. You cannot completely protect your assets.

    Only if you obfuscate the original. The only people likely to do that though are the same ones who never use version control software or make any form of backups.
     
  23. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    To sum up the topic thus far:

    You can't stop people from doing certain things so you should arm yourself with a lawyer and other protection in order to ward off attackers. This thread is starting to sound like a firearm ownership & regulation debate and @hippocoder and myself are both present :eek:

    This thread is not long for this world. *that is not a threat
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2015
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  24. JamesLeeNZ

    JamesLeeNZ

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    I do think Unity should take a step..

    ban your account.
     
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  25. Fuzzy

    Fuzzy

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    going by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_copyright_treaties
    I'd say slap a "(c) *year* by name" on everything you do and if you see your content used otherwise ask a friendly lawyer to make you some money. ;)

    The only issue I see is noticing unrightful use of your content.
     
  26. Jither

    Jither

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    Just to emphasize that point:

    • You can extract assets from e.g. Bioshock Infinite
    • You can extract assets from any Scimitar/Anvil/AnvilNext/Disrupt game (from Assassin's Creed to Watch_Dogs)
    • You can extract assets from any Bethesda RPG (using their own tools)
    • In the distant past, I've personally written utilities to extract assets from most LucasArts games
    • You can open assets from any game... almost. Given either a finished utility or some basic reverse engineering skills, depending on the game's or engine's popularity.
    The one thing you can't open assets from at the moment is games exclusive to the current generation consoles, due to encryption of anything that ends up on them - encryption for which no-one has found the key. That's basically only because the encryption is partially hardware based.

    Unity can't do anything to solve that - and shouldn't spend time or engine efficiency on trying to.
     
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  27. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    There have been utilities around since the very early days of computer games that allowed people to hack games, steal graphics, sound, music, code and so forth.

    Your post makes it sound like this is some flaw found only in Unity and that is certainly not the case. For example, I did a quick 5 minute search and found these:

    Unreal Engine Resource Viewer

    Java Decompiler

    Oh No! Game Maker Games Can Be Hacked!

    Just as the others said you cannot stop this stuff. There will always be people spending loads of their free time to crack games, file formats, whatever. The only way to really deal with it is through legal action.

    Even then I'd say as soon as you take 3 people down for hacking, 3 more will spring up to take their place. Most of the time these people will probably not do anything with your graphics and other files. I mean they probably won't actually use them to make a game. That would be too much effort. They will however feel a lot of satisfaction knowing your graphics, sounds and music files have been extracted and are now sitting on their hard drives. Of course, I am sure many times they probably post them online on shady sites for free as well.

    It's best to just not focus so much on this type of thing. The criminally-minded have always been around and they always will be. There are a lot of people who simply "get their kicks" doing things they know they shouldn't be doing. The people using such programs and visiting such sites sharing resources from games are not your target market. Your target market will not even know this stuff exists. If they find out most will realize it is wrong and take no part in it. The important people to focus on are your customers, your target market not all of the hackers out there.
     
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  28. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Don't mind hacking and modding at all, do mind using assets for a publicly available game free or otherwise.
     
  29. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    I wish diablo 3 was easier to hack and mod :(

    I'm happy that Mooege exists... but I want more!
     
  30. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    Because you're sharing a link to a piracy/hacking tool on the forum of the software it exploits, and making it easier for people to find it, and potentially informing people who didn't previously know about it. In short, you're advertising for them.
     
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  31. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    I haven't chimed in yet. But the reason pretty much every system is vulnerable to decompiling is that at some point you have to convert your assets from encrypted form to a usable form. No matter what you do a model must still be convertible to a model by the end user. And since there is a way to do this, it can be reverse engineered.

    The problem is better demonstrated in video media, no matter what happens a pirate can always intercept the raw pixels from the screen. But the same principle applies to games.

    So do a few tricks to stop bored ten year olds. But don't waste any more time on it after that.
     
  32. larku

    larku

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    Two words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
     
  33. jpthek9

    jpthek9

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    The larger something gets, the easier it is to spot and eliminate - kind of like bacteria. If you make 1 strand of bacteria thrive then suddenly introduce an agent that kills that bacteria especially well, you'll have eliminated nearly all strands of bacteria since the one that thrived killed the other strands by taking their resources.

    Sorry for the bad metaphor. Thanks for releasing that link, OP. If enough people use it, the Unity team will create a defense and bring Unity one step closer to perfection.

    After all, necessity drives progress.
     
  34. Johnyyyy

    Johnyyyy

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    On demand of several people, I have deleted the links to the application.
    Some people pm me saying I am spammer, some other said that it doesn't matter.
    Of course I look a spammer because I am trying to fight the piracy.
    What I have done to look like a spammer? Did I sent you links of my game? Did i sent you advertisement? Did i requested to give me your bank account?

    Not let's read a bit more:
    If I am creating something for example a car's engine or transmission, ..., and when i have finished, i sell it and i get my money. But if someone stills it, the Government will punish him in Jail, right?
    I am working on my game from 3 years. My team is me, and my graphic designer. 2 persons, It has been done all by us.
    I have wrote all codes, my graphic designer has made all meshes, textures, and he also recorded audio files.
    Isn't easy doing all these.
    It just looks a simple thing, but when you will work on AAA titles, you will understand it.
    Now someone come and takes my code, for example my character script, or my AI script. Wow it s awesome right? Wow what a wonderfull thing?
    People says that they will use my script for just learning. I am not teaching some one, if someone wants to learn, please join a game dev school or a university. There you will pay to learn, here you are robbering, and then saying i was just learning.
    If someone stills my engine (coming back to the car' s engine example) and then in the court he says I did it only to learn how he made it. I don't think they won't execute him.
    How can I understand someone stilled my mesh? For example I have made a car (3d model), example a Ford Flex. All ford flex looks similar, because they are similar, they are products of the same project. How can I understand if he made his own Ford Flex or stilled mine? May he had take my model, and changed the texture, and vuoalaaaaaa, he has got a Ford Flex, by just doing nothing and taking my asset.
    What if he takes my shader? He changes the value of the material and vuolaaaa, he got a shader, he got my rendering! WTF?
    What if he takes my script? just changing the parameters the script will behave differently, like an AI will change the behaviour. Wow he also has my AI, and I am not sure if that is the mine, or is his own, it just does a little bit different behaviour, but it s the same script. It's my code.



    If you can't stop hack, make it soo hard, that they can't find the time for it.
     
    LeleUnity likes this.
  35. Johnyyyy

    Johnyyyy

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    This is what will happen if you don't make it impossible to hack.


    If you can't stop hack, make it soo hard, that they can't find the time for it.
     
  36. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    Still probably not worth it. Hackers and pirates are generally not your target market. If a person into pirating games can't get a copy of yours, they don't pay you for it, they move onto another game.

    If a developer pulls apart your assets, its to see how they work. Consider it flattery, you can't actually protect the IP on how your game is put together legally. Nothing illegal about reverse engineering in most jurisdictions.

    If your game gets really massive and some kid pulls assets from it and tries to sell them as their own, well, that's what lawyers are for.

    At no point does it make sense to spend a lot of effort on this. Sure, put in some basic stuff, but there is little point doing anything beyond that. You'll end up penalising paying players more then pirates.
     
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  37. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    Put as much logic as you can on your server, and stop outdated clients connecting to it.
    Problem solved!

    But seriously, there's little you can do to stop local resources being extracted, and it's not a Unity thing, it's a computer thing.
     
    Johnyyyy likes this.
  38. Jither

    Jither

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    And you can't make it impossible to hack. So it will happen.

    (Well, the part about the guy making an - actual, releasable - game from them is more questionable).

    Also, you're not going to make it "so hard they can't find the time for it". Safe for a closed hardware system (again, like the consoles), we're talking the difference between a few hours and a few days at most, with the most sophisticated software-based asset protection scheme you can come up with. Ripping "protected" assets is a whole lot easier than breaking most copy protection - and copy protection itself is futile. Don't bother with some server based scheme - in the end, to display the game on your screen, the assets will be on your computer, and they will be rippable.

    While all the games I mentioned earlier were "unprotected" standard assets (well, except for LucasArts, who tended to use a very rudimentary "encryption" and proprietary in-house formats for almost all assets), plenty have tried to protect their game assets by encryption etc. All of those protections, when anyone could be bothered to look for the assets, have failed - and failed fast - because they will, by definition.

    One example that comes to mind is Telltale. Blowfish based asset encryption scheme that the developers spent a fair amount of time on - took someone a few hours to break when the first game was released. Surprise: Almost a decade later, I believe - but I may be wrong - that Telltale still haven't seen anyone sell their assets, in game form or otherwise. Same goes for all the other games quoted earlier, for that matter.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2015
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  39. Fuzzy

    Fuzzy

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    Quite a bad example for that topic. ;)
    If you modelled a Ford Flex you would've stolen that car design. I think you need a license for that.
    Aswell as guns in games, official gun designs are copyrighted. A lot of people don't think about that.

    This one is difficult, probably if it's some real freaky and complex shader that miiight be a legal issue. And to achieve certain effects there are often only single really effective ways to do so and a few people probably unintentionally coded an identical to some other shader with the exact same code all over the world already.
     
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  40. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Uh, I honestly doubt anyone cares about your shader. Ripping shaders is pointless. Far easier for them to just pirate the original shader, whatever it may be. Likely for most people it's the default shaders that come with Unity Personal.

    And as IL2CPP would render reverse engineering impractical for re-use, I do not think this topic is that important.

    Duh.
     
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  41. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    The most they can do is revoke your access to the product if you did obtain it legally & there is some DRM system in place.

    Pff, that's because it wasn't my shader. I took the default shader and added 2 entire lines of code for this amazing effect I'm doing... lol
     
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  42. LaneFox

    LaneFox

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    This happens in every industry, everywhere, all the time.

    Apply a moderate amount of effort to protect your product and move on. Its going to happen whether you like it or not so you're better off spending your time working on something productive.
     
  43. Gekigengar

    Gekigengar

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    You know, most AAA Devs don't even care if they extracted assets from their games?
    You aren't even on the level to making AAA games yet. (At least, not with just a party of 2)

    They do not sue their fans for taking stuff out of their work, that's just childish.

    As a matter of fact, I directly asked a staff member of company "C" (Lets use initials, to avoid troubles),
    and he willingly give me the information I required to actually learn from what they have made.
    (And even a few parts of their asset!)

    They even said they'd look forward to what I will be making with the help they supported me with.

    Now, that's the real hero right there that truly loves the game industry.
    That's the kind of company that will develop and innovate great games!

    This has made me really respect them for a long term since then. :D

    Never limit your view to be small and sad.
    Never let yourself be cramped in your own little world of ego.

    If all developers have the same kind of view as you do,
    No games will ever be released to the world to play!
    No games will be innovative with their own unique ideas released for the world to see!

    If you are truly a developer capable of making a great game,
    Even if people will steal your code/ideas (Which I say, a game that can easily be stolen and copied/replicated, are games with no real "unique" charm.)
    I believe you will be able to make even a better one that outperform your stolen ideas.:)
     
  44. enishii

    enishii

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    They cant do much, hackers will look after another way to decompile it.
     
  45. I am da bawss

    I am da bawss

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    .





    YOU CAN'T STOP PEOPLE FROM HACKING AND EXTRACTING ASSETS FROM YOUR GAME.





    It is as simple as that. I have live long enough to know this has happened since there was Pong! Every game can be hacked and data be reverse engineered and extracted. Popular games are especially quick to be extracted. There is no way you can stop people from doing it. This problem has been known in Unity community for a while now since early days of Unity, but before that, it was known in the game dev community.

    You might say - "Hey Jackass, I have invented this super procedural algorithm that generates everything at runtime so these hax0r can't hack my game and extract my assets because everything is procedurally generated there is no data format to reverse!" Well I got news for you - the graphics API that every game engine middleware built on - OpenGL, DirectX has to talk to the video card somehow - and guess what? People have invented tools to grab data straight from the video buffer!

    Its called 3D Ripper DX for the DirectX version and OGLE for the OpenGL version. They simply grabs whatever was on screen at the time (that sits in the video card's buffer) and reconstruct it to a readable file format for you to use. Your procedural generated game is no match for this method. Even if you put super whopper encryption eventually everything has to be decrypted to the video card and BAM! You are still one click from getting your asset extracted.

    My suggestion to you is to forget about it. The old adage "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" - this is what John Carmack faced when they found out their game WOLFENSTEIN was being hacked and people were extracting and modifying their game - you know what he did? He made it easier for people to extract and modify his following game DOOM and even publish instruction on the file formats and how to extract them. And that's how MOD community started and made the ID game even more popular and a resounding success and started the whole indie game revolution (a lot of indie / game developers started their careers by being a Modder).

    Remember, don't be a lemon. Make lemonade!
     
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  46. Fuzzy

    Fuzzy

    Joined:
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    Posts:
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    I agree with the "there's nothing you can really do", but extracting and modding are two different things.
    When people extract things and use them in their own 'projects' they can make profit with your work and you get nothing off of it, may it just be ads on a site where people can play it for free. They generate revenue with your work.
    When people mod your game they still need to get the original to apply the mod. People still need to buy your game.
    These tools seem to just extract content and not inject new content into your game and that is somewhat of an issue. But nothing you can or should excessively prevent.
     
  47. Whippets

    Whippets

    Joined:
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    Posts:
    1,775
    I believe CERN is one big physics hacking device

    (everything is hackable, including reality it seems)
     
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  48. Fuzzy

    Fuzzy

    Joined:
    Feb 11, 2011
    Posts:
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    Reality may be hackable, but not by us.
    That would be like a game hacking itself. ... Well okay I think I have seen something like this before where they used pokemon or super mario world to reprogram the cardridge through the game itself. Quite awesome.

    (but that's kinda OT, isn't it? sorry)
     
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  49. Alf203

    Alf203

    Joined:
    Dec 7, 2012
    Posts:
    461
    Exactly, you are not teaching anyone...As far as I know, no one hired you... So if someone uses your script, they are learning by themselves, right ? Hopefully you're not teaching them on top of that, otherwise you'd be teaching robbers !

    Back in the days the still engine was popular in 1920's in trains....but no one cares now. I've built many piston still engines and don't see the problem. And what country is this you're talking about where "stilling" an engine gets you executed ? Also this may not be right forum you're posting in...

    I stilled many meshes in the past. You can do it in any 3D modelling package, its so easy and there's nothing wrong in doing that. Here are the steps: 1. Take your skinned mesh, make sure its animated and it moves. 2. Remove any bones and the skinning. 3. Voila, you have a mesh that is "still" or "stilled" as it stays still and doesn't move anymore. Oh and don't be coy, I'm sure you stilled Ford Flex anyway!

    Well, I hope he didn't steal your grammar too.

    Someone ripped my shader once and I haven't been the same since. Its like part of me was missing... part of my soul was gone... That robber "stilled" my rendering. He took it from me...without my consent...and how can I prove it in court ? MY rendering....MY shader....ALL MINE....MY PRECIOUS.... One shader to rule them all ! :p

    PS: Oh by the way, my shader was the standard Unity shader. Better get to suing everyone now... Also many people are clearly using my "default cube" but that's another story...

    "All your scripts are belong to us" !

    ---
    Conclusion
    :

    Sorry for that...just having fun....but seriously this thread should just be deleted. I had no idea about it but now I know. All it did was inform me (and numerous people no doubt) that there is a tool to hack unity games.

    The post could have read : "Here a link to hack Unity games, happy hacking!" and the result would have been the exact same....

    Also given the screenshots it makes the tool easy to find.
     
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  50. Whippets

    Whippets

    Joined:
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    You best not be using my default cube...
     
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