So let's talk about Planet Coaster's so called "Offline" capability.

[Hobbes]

First, a couple of core facts to put on the table.

Source 1 : https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=333

"Will I still be able to play offline?

Yes! After you have installed Planet Coaster via Steam and run it at least once you will then be able to use Steam's offline mode. You can find details about offline mode on Steam's support site here."

Source 2 : http://store.steampowered.com/app/493340/

"Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Antitamper"

Source 3 : http://www.game-debate.com/news/19209/denuvo-anti-tamper-drm-to-be-used-for-far-cry-primal-and-rise-of-the-tomb-raider?&page=4 (other news sites also carry the same wording in various flavours)

"Denuvo also has to phone home to authenticate itself every so often, so it’s going to need a working internet connection and access to the Denuvo servers. Should Denuvo cease to exist, access to your game ceases to exist. It’s also known that Denuvo carries with it a slight overhead that does in fact hamper performance in games."

-----

So, Frontier, are you pulling an Elite : Dangerous here? Is your supposed offline capability actually going to be much like your other game, promised but not delivered, because if you keep Denuvo in your game, you won't be able to deliver on the ability for the game to run in offline mode, and that means anyone who purchases the game, or already HAS purchased the game under the impression they might be able to play it on their laptop is going to get a very rude awakening soon enough.

I take it you -do- have an answer to this, yes?

Or are you going to hedge like you did on Elite Dangerous and much like in November then go "Oh, it's always online because you need to be connected for reasons"

Over to you Frontier.

EDIT : Derp, title brainfart. And I needed to stuff a smug emote in (yes, I own it)

[tango777]

I knew it had some kind of dmr when I got the alpha . My antivirus kept atlerting me that something was trying to connect to the internet without my permission . After some fiddling around I found the culperate . I have since been amle to partly disable this cuperate .

[Space Coward]

R3sistance a écrit :

I'd say parkitect is the successor to RCT1 & 2 where this game is the successor to RCT 3.

Pretty much. Comparing them is like X-COM Apocalypse vs XCOM 2. RCT World's XCOM equivalent is Enforcer.

[Dark Phoenix]

tango777 a écrit :

I knew it had some kind of dmr when I got the alpha . My antivirus kept atlerting me that something was trying to connect to the internet without my permission . After some fiddling around I found the culperate . I have since been amle to partly disable this cuperate .

If that was the case, the game wouldn't work. Denuvo needs to check in every so often, but it doesn't do it that often. Let it do it's thing, it pretty much keeps to itself.

[RiO]

Liandri a écrit :

- StarForce needs a driver, Denuvo doesn't.
- Denuvo increase system requirements more than StarForce does.
- Denuvo creates possibility of abusive black market, StarForce doesn't.
- Denuvo is not being straight about its presence, unlike StarForce.

Oh yes, the infamous Starforce filter driver for optical drives.

A driver that was installed on all optical drives without ever asking for permission and which caused havoc with many of them. Vendor-specific driver components no longer operating within tolerance values or operating correctly at all, disc-burning capabilities being compromised, etc.

Moreover, the way Starforce worked was that the filter driver was designed specifically to bypass all sanity and security checks in your optical drive's own driver, by falling back on a (not always correctly supported) lower level API to force the drive to read certain disc sectors that resided in an area of the disc that had its topology intentionally compromised to not be correctly readable. It would then match what it got back to a predetermined set of partially read 'malformed' data and would give you the all clear if you passed the check.

Howeer, most optical drives, when failing to read a disc's topology like that a few times, would enter a special mode where they would recalibrate the drive's laser system. This is rather sane, because as a drive ages it can experience minor drift and need to be reseated.

Ofcourse, consumer grade drives were only ever rated to perform that kind of operation a few times over the effective lifespan of the drive. And not continuously as normal operating procedure, the way Starforce forced it to operate.

And thus, you'd get drives that would be physically worn down and wrecked within the span of a year, instead of the normal 10 to 20 years they were supposed to last.

Denuvo doesn't actually do anything near as malicious as that.


Also; Starforce's driver was, iirc, sensitive to several permission elevation exploits that could let user-mode code run in kernel-mode. So uh; you might want to rethink the point you're raising regarding "possibility of abusive black market".

Liandri a écrit :

Streaming Phoenix a écrit :

Erm...no...it wouldn't. The pirates would need to first breach the encryption on the exe.

Again. Everything that is encrypted is being decrypted on user's machine, thus easily replicated with reverse engineering. You can't sell encrypted product because it wouldn't work without decryption.

There's a big, big difference between decrypting the entire executable and running that natively, and running encrypted code via a special virtual machine which decrypts only small portions of the code as it runs through it and immediately tosses them away.

The latter is what protection schemes such as Denuvo do and Denuvo is actually one of the better behaved ones with regards to security, exploitability by malware and disk writes.

Hobbes a écrit :

Sun Streaker a écrit :

Also I wish some poeople would learn to accept that we no longer own our games, both digital or physical, thanks to the licensing changes made to games over the past decade and a half.

Funny you should mention that, a lot of EU decisions are actually rewinding the more egregious parts of the EULA (which, as a side note has never been actively tested in a court). You can argue we don't "own" the game so much as own a "copy" of the game, but I'll bet if it goes to court and someone asserts they paid good money for a copy of the game as far as consumer rights go, they bought it and are entitled to the protections and rights as if it's like any other item (indeed, there's even specific laws in consumer rights laws now for this very reason).

True. Within several member states of the EU a "boxed" stock digital purchase such as the games distributed on Steam are actually treated by law as a good. And that means it gets all the benefits of warranty and fitness for purpose.

Streaming Phoenix a écrit :

Hobbes a écrit :

Funny you should mention that, a lot of EU decisions are actually rewinding the more egregious parts of the EULA

That's a relief, the uk is leaving the eu at some point anyway, so frontier won't need to abide by that anymore.

Doesn't matter. They're selling their product via the Steam storefront for the EU, which means they are consciously targeting the EU as a market. And that means they must abide by EU law.

Actually; the EU has a good deal more protection than just that. Even if a company would only target a single member state, according to EU law that would still mean they are targeting all member states. (This protects the idea of the internal unified market.) And if any consumer purchases their product, said purchase and all legal matters surrounding it are dictated to fall under the local laws of the member state where said consumer resides.

I.e. if they attempt to sell this in France, a purchase by a resident of Germany will fall under German law.

[Space Coward]

RiO a écrit :

Liandri a écrit :

- StarForce needs a driver, Denuvo doesn't.
- Denuvo increase system requirements more than StarForce does.
- Denuvo creates possibility of abusive black market, StarForce doesn't.
- Denuvo is not being straight about its presence, unlike StarForce.

Oh yes, the Starforce optical drive filter driver.
A driver that was installed on all optical drives without ever asking for permission and which caused havoc with many of them. Vendor-specific driver components no longer operating within tolerance values or operating correctly at all, disc-burning capabilities being compromised, etc.

Moreover, the way Starforce worked was that the filter driver was designed specifically to bypass all sanity and security checks in your optical drive's own driver, by falling back on a (not always correctly supported) lower level API to force the drive to read certain disc sectors that resided in an area of the disc that had its topology intentionally compromised to not be correctly readable. It would then match what it got back to a predetermined set of partially read 'malformed' data and would give you the all clear if you passed the check.

Howeer, most optical drives, when failing to read a disc's topology like that a few times, would enter a special mode where they would recalibrate the drive's laser system. This is rather sane, because as a drive ages it can experience minor drift and need to be reseated.

Ofcourse, consumer grade drives were only ever rated to perform that kind of operation a few times over the effective lifespan of the drive. And not continuously as normal operating procedure, the way Starforce forced it to operate.

And thus, you'd get drives that would be physically worn down and wrecked within the span of a year, instead of the normal 10 to 20 years they were supposed to last.

Denuvo doesn't actually do anything near as malicious as that.


Also; Starforce's driver was, iirc, sensitive to several permission elevation exploits that could let user-mode code run in kernel-mode. So uh; you might want to rethink the point you're raising regarding "possibility of abusive black market".

StarForce wasn't the only culprit there. I strongly believed (and still don't fully believe against) that Denuvo would destroy SSDs as claimed, because of my own experiences with this DRM. Let's go back to 2007, where my life got super crappy and miserable, but HEY! My brother got Spore installed on the computer for his birthday. And? The computer was rekt beyond repair! The disc drive (optical disc, that is) never worked again, it quickly deteriorated in speed and reliability after that game was installed. That meant no more Rollercoaster Tycoon, no more SimCity 4, what little I had left over from a huge move where so much was lost, was confined to their lonely boxes (in this regard, even with awful internet and a horribly broken client, Steam was kind of the best thing ever).

As for StarForce... that's a special breed of awful. Your hard drive itself took some serious wear, and the rootkit-like behavior of StarForce could go as far as to corrupt your OS. But hey, at least it took a year to crack Splinter Cell 3!

[Liandri]

RiO a écrit :

Denuvo doesn't actually do anything near as malicious as that.

Also; Starforce's driver was, iirc, sensitive to several permission elevation exploits that could let user-mode code run in kernel-mode. So uh; you might want to rethink the point you're raising regarding "possibility of abusive black market".

You have no idea what I was talking about, then. Also, StarForce had digital form that did not involve physical media.

RiO a écrit :

There's a big, big difference between decrypting the entire executable and running that natively, and running encrypted code via a special virtual machine which decrypts only small portions of the code as it runs through it and immediately tosses them away.

So you actually know how small those portions of the code are? You don't even know raw numbers data amounts Denuvo uses. Nobody here seem to realize how huge those numbers should be for any particular game to remain uncracked.

RiO a écrit :

Denuvo is actually one of the better behaved ones with regards to security, exploitability by malware and disk writes.

Tell me about it, try to compare it with any other DRM under these 3 effects. As soon as you understand how it works, you'll realize how useless these arguments are.

[RiO]

Liandri a écrit :

RiO a écrit :

Denuvo doesn't actually do anything near as malicious as that.

Also; Starforce's driver was, iirc, sensitive to several permission elevation exploits that could let user-mode code run in kernel-mode. So uh; you might want to rethink the point you're raising regarding "possibility of abusive black market".

You have no idea what I was talking about, then. Also, StarForce had digital form that did not involve physical media.

You opened this discussion when you brought StarForce's filter driver into the equation, which is only installed for implementations of StarForce that handle physical media.

And just what do you mean with "abusive black market" if you're not referring to the potential to be exploited by malware?

Liandri a écrit :

RiO a écrit :

There's a big, big difference between decrypting the entire executable and running that natively, and running encrypted code via a special virtual machine which decrypts only small portions of the code as it runs through it and immediately tosses them away.

So you actually know how small those portions of the code are? You don't even know raw numbers data amounts Denuvo uses. Nobody here seem to realize how huge those numbers should be for any particular game to remain uncracked.

And you do know?

Anyway; those chunks of code could easily go as small as the method level. That's actually how modern programming languages like C# have their runtime environment work; compiling a method's bytecode before first access and then hookin the compiled version of the code into place by swapping out a few pointer references. It's a large part of how the optimizing compilers in modern JavaScript engines work as well.

Really, depending on what Denuvo's VM is actually doing, the parts of code that at any one time exist in decrypted form in memory may be many times smaller. Maybe even a few CPU instructions at a time.

(And yes; if you combine that with scrambling the code with many jumps and clever redirection tricks, it would definitely make it impossible or atleast really, really hard for anyone to use decompilation or debugging tools and get a beat on the total picture of what the code is actually doing.)

Liandri a écrit :

RiO a écrit :

Denuvo is actually one of the better behaved ones with regards to security, exploitability by malware and disk writes.

Tell me about it, try to compare it with any other DRM under these 3 effects. As soon as you understand how it works, you'll realize how useless these arguments are.

There's atleast one bit of anti-tamperware which is much worse than Denuvo.

It continuously writes small DLLs to the current user's temporary files folder from which it pick them up and executes them. Many times it has issues when run without full administrative permissions granted via UAC.

This means you have to open up administrative permissions to this anti-tamperware. It also means that any malware can trigger a race condition and inject its own malicious payload into the DLLs that reside in the user account temp folder (since writing there does not require administrative permissions) and get that payload to run with full administrative permissions, achieving privilige escalation.

Said anti-tamperware is also permanently (as in; explicitly notified that it will not be removed) on the blacklist of several anti-virus vendors, since it is known to circulate on the black market as a means to mask malware payloads from anti-virus protection.

It used to protect the PC/Steam port of Tales of Symphonia and was actually removed after a lot of backlash. I'll leave it to you to look up the name.

[Liandri]

RiO a écrit :

You opened this discussion when you brought StarForce's filter driver into the equation, which is only installed for implementations of StarForce that handle physical media.

Digital version required a driver too.

RiO a écrit :

And just what do you mean with "abusive black market" if you're not referring to the potential to be exploited by malware?

Again - I can't exactly describe this because it's against Steam forum rules. Find serious discussions elsewhere and you'll see.

RiO a écrit :

Really, depending on what Denuvo's VM is actually doing, the parts of code that at one time exist in decrypted form in memory may be many times smaller. Maybe even a few CPU instructions at a time.

(And yes; if you combine that with scrambling the code with many jumps and clever redirection tricks, it would definitely make it impossible or atleast really, really hard for anyone to use decompilation or debugging tools and get a beat on the total picture of what the code is actually doing.)

Either your knowledge about reverse engineering is limited to ~10 years old methods and tools or you don't care. The smaller chucks of code you protect, the easier for crackers to solve it. Those who think that Denuvo is doing so little are being deceived by their marketing and transparency strategy (the absense of it).

RiO a écrit :

which it executes them.

Are you sure? I don't see why something would need to load and execute continously-written DLL files. I'd say if they were indeed continously written, they might not be library files that you could load in memory.

RiO a écrit :

This means you have to open up administrative permissions to this anti-tamperware. It also means that any malware can trigger a race condition and inject its own malicious payload into the DLLs that reside in the user account temp folder (since writing there does not require administrative permissions) and get that payload to run with full administrative permissions, achieving privilige escalation.

When you approve any application through UAC, it gets permision to load any accessible library. It doesn't matter under which account the DLL files were written into the TEMP folder. It only matters when approved application gets access to them. Which means you'd still need to manually approve some virus application before it could load some modified DLL from the TEMP folder.

And I'm pretty sure the DRM has protection against loading modified DLL files if it creates them by itself.

RiO a écrit :

Said anti-tamperware is also permanently (as in; explicitly notified that it will not be removed) on the blacklist of several anti-virus vendors, since it is known to circulate on the black market as a means to mask malware payloads from anti-virus protection.

That's not a black market. There is no money involved in distributing cracked copies of DRM suites.

RiO a écrit :

It used to protect the PC/Steam port of Tales of Symphonia and was actually removed after a lot of backlash. I'll leave it to you to look up the name.

How about you choose a better example of DRM, like some that was massively used on games? I only know literally about just 2 somewhat representative games with VMProtect. The fact that it was bad doesn't make Denuvo any better than any other DRM.

[Solorvox]

Yeah, was ready to buy this until I saw Denuvo. Refuse to buy any products with Denuvo after past experiences with it via MadMax/etc. with on-line checks. Just adding you lost yet another sale due to this.

[abletudu]

It seems to me that the most outspoken people against DRM such as Denuvo are the very ones that might have the most to gain from games not having any protection at all.

[Dark Phoenix]

abletudu a écrit :

It seems to me that the most outspoken people against DRM such as Denuvo are the very ones that might have the most to gain from games not having any protection at all.

Its a bit of a split issue. Starforce was nasty, and i can understand if people are against drm based off that. But yes, there will be people out there claiming that all data should be free, but also want to be paid for the work that *they* do.

[VerboseLamp]

It seems to me that the most outspoken people against DRM such as Denuvo are the very ones that might have the most to gain from games not having any protection at all

I'm a software developer, I've been a gaming enthusiast for 25 years, and I happily (and legally) own a collection of thousands of titles, nearly 400 of which are here on steam.

I hate Denuvo because it takes away my right to own the product I'm purchasing and limits what I can do with it and, more importantly, endangers my ability to go back and revisit the title in the future when Frontier and Denuvo may or may not still exist. It would hardly be the first game in my library that I've lost to this issue.

Your move.

[Space Coward]

Streaming Phoenix a écrit :

abletudu a écrit :

It seems to me that the most outspoken people against DRM such as Denuvo are the very ones that might have the most to gain from games not having any protection at all.

Its a bit of a split issue. Starforce was nasty, and i can understand if people are against drm based off that. But yes, there will be people out there claiming that all data should be free, but also want to be paid for the work that *they* do.

SecuROM is hated, too. It not only limited your installations but for many (including myself), it actually corrupted your disc drive making it unreadable; this was a nightmare back in 2007, though I guess it's not nearly as much of a big deal now that it's so easy to reset your PC or even just stick to digital.

[TheGreenman]

Doom just had an update recently that removed Denuvo. Here's hoping that more games follow.

[Dark Phoenix]

TheGreenman a écrit :

Doom just had an update recently that removed Denuvo. Here's hoping that more games follow.

Probably because it's job had been done, and the game had been finally cracked. By now, anyone who wanted to play it will have bought it.