AGDI Birthday Competition!!!

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Pidgeot · #51 Post by **Pidgeot** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:27 pm

He means people who aren't fooled, because they "cheat" by looking at the text stored in the file, thus seeing that it's not possible without having to try.

Additionally, I'm not sure you can use that technique in AGS. Of course, even if you can, it's very complicated to do so.

Peter Swinkels · #52 Post by **Peter Swinkels** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:39 pm

Complicated? If you mean it's clumsy to enter/edit strings in the fashion I described above, I used a simple Quick Basic program that I wrote in about 30 minutes to convert an ordinary string into that series of Chr$ functions. Also, it would probably best to only obscure those strings that contain text that shouldn't be viewed when the program is finished. It might also be a good idea to include comments that tell what the string contains. Also, to me at least, there's nothing complicated about turning an executable into a self extracting compressed executable using a utility for that purpose.

dosuser · #53 Post by **dosuser** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:44 pm

Actually, in AGS the global messages and room messages are automatically encrypted, whereas strings used in the scripts are not. Thus, that april fools message could have been put in a global message to prevent it being so easy to see.

But still, maybe I should modify AGS to encrypt all strings in the game :P

#54 Post by **Erpy** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:46 pm

Actually, in retro-spect, it would have been best to simply make the displayed text a sprite that gets displayed. That would have made it pretty much impossible to retrieve it by any means.

He means people who aren't fooled, because they "cheat" by looking at the text stored in the file, thus seeing that it's not possible without having to try.

By "cheating", I think Adeyke referred to a possible motivation to start looking into the file to begin with. There's two main motivations: suspicion or just trying to see if it's possible to figure out the supposed code without needing to win the slot game for it.

Ironically, adventure games often encourage these kinds of practices as means of solving puzzles. And then they say FPS's give the bad example to kids.

PotatoSlayer · #55 Post by **PotatoSlayer** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 8:39 pm

hey could you put the URL for the game back, i want to play even if i can't win im sooo bored

#56 Post by **Erpy** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 8:48 pm

Sorry. It was never intended to be something playable. The thing was 1 MB in total, so I'd like to conserve bandwidth if possible.

PotatoSlayer · #57 Post by **PotatoSlayer** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 8:54 pm

O ok...i'll go do something else then

DennisBergkamp · #58 Post by **DennisBergkamp** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 9:11 pm

Using sprites to hide these messages still doesn't prevent anyone from just overriding the value in the memory address corresponding to the amount of rolls performed :p

#59 Post by **Erpy** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 6:41 am

Normal slot machines aren't about how many turns are taken, but how much the sum of those individual winnings paid off. So why would anybody want to up the total amount of turns taken?

DennisBergkamp · #60 Post by **DennisBergkamp** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 4:04 am

Because that's exactly what triggered the message (and the code) showing up in this case. Of course, I initially tried overriding the address containing the amount of dinars. But changing it to 15,000 didn't do anything. Changing it to higher than 15,000 just crashed the program with an index out of bounds exception. Then I tried changing it to 14,999 and gambling with 1 dinar each time, which failed every time, of course.
I then thought maybe there was something in the program checking the amount of rolls (since it shouldn't really be possible to get to 15,000 in 2 rolls). So I changed the amount of spins to a really really high number (10,000+ or so) and this actually made the message and code (which was 04 01 05 by the way) appear.

What I'm saying is, character "encryption" and/or hiding using sprites (as suggested on this thread) never prevents people from doing evil stuff. When you go down to a low enough level, all a computer is is a stupid entity storing numbers in little frames. It's a piece of cake to get to this information and change it.

Radiant · #61 Post by **Radiant** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 7:40 am

It may never prevent this but it can certainly make it a lot harder. I'm sure not everybody here could have duplicated what you did (because otherwise, they would have)

dosuser · #62 Post by **dosuser** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 6:27 pm

Exactly, there's a certain amount of reasonable effort that you go to with these things.

Perhaps 30% of people playing the game would be clever enough to load the exe into notepad or a hex editor to read the text, so that's probably worth protecting against.

However, I would guess that about 0.001% of people playing the game would have the skills and know-how to load it up into a debugger and find the right memory address for the data that they were after.

In the end, if someone with the skills is determined to hack software, it's impossible to stop them. Firms spend millions on copy-protecting their software, yet it always gets cracked.

Parhelion · #63 Post by **Parhelion** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 6:35 pm

I don't know. I was able to use Artmoney, which is easier than using notepad or a hex editor, to find the spin counter and the score.

Gronagor · #64 Post by **Gronagor** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 7:32 am

Ok. I think the point is... why bother going overboard with a April Fools joke.

#65 Post by **navynuke04** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 12:06 pm

Gronagor wrote:Ok. I think the point is... why bother going overboard with a April Fools joke.

I seriously hope you were trying to be funny, mister SSS.

Gronagor · #66 Post by **Gronagor** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 12:37 pm

What? SSS was a joke??? Nobody ever tells me anything!

Broomie · #67 Post by **Broomie** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 12:56 pm

Oh yeah, Gronagor SSS was an extended prank.

We forgot to tell you about the big meeting we had.

Blackthorne519 · #68 Post by **Blackthorne519** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 1:05 pm

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Bt

Alias · #69 Post by **Alias** » Fri Apr 08, 2005 1:42 pm

Gronagor> :lol