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.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?
The crack might not actually be protected by copyright, unless there's substantial new code added.
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Even if they have the source, they may not have all the build tools anymore.
Or they have the build tools but the wizard that set up the build system back in the day no longer works there.
Or they have the build system archived and documented but it doesn't run because some license expired, and the tool vender doesn't sell that version anymore.
In the near future, there will be another possibility - SaaS cloud tools that are impossible to preserve so they are forever lost.
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I'd say they probably still have the source. It looks like they did the same thing for Manhunt and Max Payne, but then pulled older, pre-SecuROM exes from their archives when they got busted.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
Pretty funny that because of all their microtransactions being stored in a JSON file being loaded into memory, that ended up making their game more slow and annoying and frustrating to play.
I am super curious if the devs knew about this issue but it just wasn't fixed because it wasn't given priority by management, or if the devs genuinely had no clue about this?
The even weirder and funnier thing is I've worked with larger JSON files day to day at my job with a much smaller scale than Rockstar/GTA, although I guess it depends on how you work with the files and the fact they were checking string lengths for literally every single piece of data etc.
The library used to read the line does the string length check, so my guess, whoever wrote it initially didn't know about it and tested with a small sunset of items without issue; I assume the games items grew in size over the years too. They also released an official patch with it and paid the modder $10k
Edit fixed typo
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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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Are you talking about the guy that found a bug in the JSON parsing?
Good on R* for fixing the bug and paying the bounty. Nintendo would've given him the middle finger and a cease and desist.
Rockstar also has a pair of middle fingers:
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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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Source's source: https://twitter.com/_silent/status/1698345924840296801
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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How about Microsoft pirating Windows for you?
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.
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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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.
Doesn't even surprise me anymore. Rockstar has gone to shit.
cant even play their legitly purchased SINGLEPLAYER games without internet connection.
I fucking hate rockstar
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What i'm looking at? What is this from?
Hidden text within the app code from the steam folder
So the official files contains a razor 1911 line? This look sus af
In what sense? Incompetence, dodginess, or fake screenshot?
Anyone know what RAZOR 1911 stands for or means, anyways?
1911 which translates to 777 in hexadecimal.
In Unix's chmod, change-access-mode command, the octal value 777 grants all file-access permissions to all user types in a file.
Within the binary of the file *
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Vestigial DNA
Not the first time, won't be the last.
Imagine if they distributed one of those that contained a strange bind syscall somewhere with a reverse shell.
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