Quote from Fordman :

Our Scavier, who Sim is heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kYoto come.
Thy will be done,
In Aston as it is in Westhill.
Give us this day our daily Patch.
And forgive us our Turn 1 Accidents,
As we forgive those who hit against us.
And lead us in the BF1,
But deliver us from the pitlane.
For LFS is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Hallelujah, praise the Ford...man

Quote from Woz :

Dont believe a word of it. Debug/crack tools now allow huge control over execution. Also machine code is not that bad if you know what you are looking for/at. All code has to call the various windows API's to do anything and these API calls leave signatures that are simple to spot. This makes it easy to find where sound, gfx etc are done. You can even get debug tools that allow you to break an app when it calls different API calls to make it easier. Its more a case now that people coming into development now have not had to work in machine code/assembler, like us oldies , so are not used to reading it.

If the code is encrypted and then decrypted on load then breaking on API calls means the code is in memory decrypted so can be dumped so it can be pulled apart. The war becomes trying to spot debug tools before you decrypt code so you can halt execution if you want to protect against debugging but that is hard if you rootkit the debug tools so you hide them from task list and directory structure, Sony know all about this one lol.

Also compilers translate similar code in similar ways so as long as you know the compiler used you can find out how it structures that code when converted from source to MC.

Just make a search on Warez to see how much cracked/hacked apps there are out there. Most of these would have involved someone pulling apart machine code to see what is going on so they can patch the code.

So if someone wanted to see how it worked they could find out. And with the budgets for games today the cost of adding a dev resource to pull apart another product for a year is cheap in comparision.

As for general hacking of LFS to allow warez version you will find reason that LFS is not hacked like other games is that it has an online part of the code. LFS World is very tightly coupled with LFS so unless the hacker can hack LFS World people can't play online which is what LFS is about. The same happened with Q3, hacks that allowed offline were available but nobody hacked master server so could not use online until iD disabled master server checking later in the product life.

The real problem for someone who tried to reverse engineer LFS wouldn't be getting past encryption, or tracing windows api calls.

I would have thought that the big difficulty is that the one thing that you really want - the physics engine - is also by far the most difficult to translate from machine code back to a human readable form.
The problem is that the maths involved are extremely challenging even with fully annotated source code, reams of documents and reference literature
The original source code will be structured in such a way as to clarify which parts of the calculations apply to which attributes of the physics - tyres, aero, temps, wear, forces.. etc. Taking optimized machine code and analysing it to the point where you could seperate these math based components in a way that would allow you to maintain or update them seperately seems like a huge task to me ?

Basically, its not 'machine code --> c++' thats the biggest difficulty, its 'machine code --> math'. Thats a much higher level of abstraction, and there won't be 'WAREZ TOOLZ' to help you with it either

col

Live for Speed - Race for Life

"wanna race ?" Live for speed

LFS S2 - Bigger Faster Stronger


LFS - 9 out of 10 owners say their wheels prefer it

LFS: Vorsprung durch Technic - as they say in Twickenham

LFS: refreshes the parts other sims cannot reach

LFS: "Hand-built by robots"

Last edited by col, Fri 28 Oct 2005, 17:49.

Fantastic job. Seriously impressive!

I particularly like the picture on the final page

vrooom!

Col