What is the best way to secure your game's files?

The same task?? Nope. You have absolutely no idea of technical art and limitations nor strengths of the toolsets you speak to. This totally destroys any credibility you are attempting to prop up with your obtuse arguments. I am not sure because I don't use Blender but just finished a one week ZBrush session, but I challenge you to subdivide your mesh into 24 million polygons and get to sculpting in realtime.

On topic. ZBrush fairly beat the pirates. I bought ZBrush 2 in 2004 or something and to this day I still receive updates for free.

 

what the hell are you guys talking? o . O

 

That's what happens here when a threadstarter disappears xP

 

no, people here are talking about things not related to my question, i know this is general discussion but -.-" but sometimes is too much, this is precisely the reason why i disappear for my own posts after a couple of days (in general discussion)

 

This is an interesting topic, it would great to have some official Unity tool to protect Textures and assets before just being taken from the build and sold somewhere.

 

Why do you think this is something that actually happens with any degree of frequency? Also the moment the game is executed it becomes near trivial to extract that data anyway.

 

It is hilarious how easy it is to turn a built Unity game back into a project.

A little while ago I watched this video:

Spoiler

And it was amusing to see him just... casually use a program that turns a built Unity game back into a usable project.

 

What you're asking for can't be accomplished on PCs due to the way the platform has been designed. Check the spoiler below if you want to see just how easy it is to extract textures from your graphics card while your game is running.

Spoiler

 

That's impossible, unless you host your game on streaming service. If people can't unpack your assets, they'll rip them from GPU, and you can't do a thing about it. If you host the game on streaming service, then they'll use photogrammetry to rebuild your models.

And that's a thing that makes unity games easy to mod. Modding is supposed to be the attractive part of PC platform.

 

Lol there are several ways then

 

It's a tricky topic...
Your best chance are hidden (encoded) watermarks so you can at least sue successfully (or scare them sufficiently) if someone takes it that far that sueing is worth it.

In practice, what's valuable is the community/fanbase though. Not the assets and often not even the game principle. Hence how there are hundreds of clones of Minecraft, Among Us, Fall Guys and all other surprisingly popular games that popped up out there. Those didn't scratch the main game about at all.
So do not worry tooo much.

 

So this has a track record of being used to take legal action, then?

 

Haven't heard of anything like that.

However, I do remember tearing apart some hair mod for a game, only to discover text in unused texture area:
"Reuse prohibited, only to be used <site URL>". And that site URL had nothing to do with the hair mod, meaning somebody ripped the asset ignoring the text warning.

 

Do you mean that you never heard anything about some company taking legal actions? because i think moding gets into this topic

 

I have not heard of a company taking a legal action based on a discovered texture watermark.

Also take note that such watermark is wasted bytes/wasted texture space.

 

Instead of prevention imagine just detecting cheaters and flag the character but have the punishment be gradual over time so you waste a bunch of their time before they realize they're nerfed or keep it gradual enough so it's hard to tell.

So you get flagged for cheating, you take 2% more damage and deal 2% less damage each day for 5 days down to permanent 10% nerf. And maybe your loot generator max roll gets lower and lower over time, and your move speed is just slightly slower, maybe the reaction time after a click/button/key press gets 25ms, 50ms, 75ms delay LOL.

Cheaters put in time grinding a permanently disabled character. If people figure it out you spread FUD around cheating so people don't want to risk it even if it's easy. Non cheating players would be happy since cheaters have less advantage...

 

1. False positives say "hi".
2. The talk was protecting assets from being ripped and reused in other projects, and not about cheaters.

 

Been done, damage the reputation of the game and legit buyer get caught in the fire, and in the grey, people who bought the copy but used the pirated version for various issues.

 

Better than automated bans and you just have to do _something_ in a competitive multiplayer to keep the fun for other players. There are literally whole companies out there nowdays that live off creating cheats!

Unless major companies are involved, would we ever hear of such lawsuits?
Admittedly if I google for this tech, I mainly find offers and not lawsuits, but that's kinda logical since when it comes to hidden watermarks, there isn't much interest in either side of a lawsuit to spread much information.

In every case I was just suggesting a way which is not huge effort (for a studio that has protection-worthy material) and in principle works xP

Interesting find: Apparently WoW used to encode some information into player's screenshots that way:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/zph9s/activision_blizzard_secretly_watermarking_world/

At 200Gb which a game of today has, that really should not be a concern xP And for hidden

 

What's the point if we don't? A threat which nobody knows about is hardly going to stop anyone copying your stuff.

 

The world does not revolve around competitive multiplayer, and in a MP Competetive environment you definitely wouldn't WANT this kind of system, as it gives unfair advantage. If this sort of thing glitches out during a tournament, that'll be a lot of fun negative publicity for the company and their faulty product.

Lack of concern is the reason for such install sizes. Download speed is finite, same goes for drive space.

 

Put Some Virus into The Code when it'll be encrypted..., at least, u can have some relief when their computer will groan out of pain..