Quoting: ricki42Like if you go to the theatre, you'll never have that exact same experience again, but the play still exists.

Hmm, yes, plays or concerts without recordings also rub me the wrong way.

It's just...I feel that these things are all part of our cultures, and not having them available is...wrong. It takes away from our collective knowledge, our collective experience. I want it all available eternally, for everyone. To experience, to critique, to analyze. Also in context of related works and in historical context later.

That's where I'm coming from, if that makes sense. I don't necessarily care that I personally don't get to experience them, it's not that I absolutely want to play this game, listen to that Wu-Tang Clan record, watch all the plays and read all the books. I don't like the idea of it vanishing from the public record. It leaves the world poorer for it.

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Quoting: KelsThere are some interesting questions raised by this comment about feeling entitled to access to a creative product.

That's...kinda my point, yeah.

I do think I'm entitled access to this creative product. And not just me, not just this creative product. I think everyone is entitled access to every creative product. For the good of the people.

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Quoting: stssFor starters, they don't have to waste any money on supporting the game after it's finished.

Instead, the people who bought this will have wasted money. As someone invested in several FLOSS projects to make old games playable on modern systems and in a portable manner, I really don't like this.

Just like I really don't like that idea of that one band (Wu-Tang Clan, IIRC) only selling a single copy of an album, withholding it from anybody else. Even though I really don't care about their music.

Quoting: stssPersonally I hope this sort of thing does become popular

If it does, you can bet your life that you'll find me in demonstrations against it.

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Interesting artist concept, but kinda shitty from a player perspective (planned obsolescence gone wild) and from an art preservation perspective (I don't want games, or any artistic work, to vanish just like that).

And I'm going to call it: people will be dicks and just kill themselves as quickly as possible, just to troll. Especially the usual suspects of arseholes will think that, as they say, "top kek".

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Quoting: scaineI take it that no-one at Bioware or who was involved in the coding is willing to share even definitions with you?

Yeah, I don't think they could. And I don't think I could either. That would just spell legal troubles for all involved.

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Quoting: minjAFAIK blowfish is not weak if good keys are used, however ECB mode has an inherent problem with identical plaintext leading to identical cyphertext and is advised against.

Oh, getting the keys for the encrypted ERF archives is not that hard. Dragon Age: Origins keys are very weak, and can be brute-forced easily. And the Dragon Age II keys are cached by the game after querying the server once. But I'm not sure if xoreos should/could include the keys, from a legal standpoint...

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Quoting: AnxiousInfusionHow long do you think you would need to leave cracking software running to get some more of those GDA headers?

The problem is not really the cracking as such, the problem is finding the right dataset. I could run a stupid brute-force on it, and it would thousands of matches for each hash, all false positives. The hash is a CRC of the string in all lower-case, encoded as UTF-16LE, that gives a lot of easy collision.

For example, "bungholebehaviortype_" is a valid match for one of them, but obviously not what I want. As is "skimpilyshowmaterial", which shares a hash with "idtag". The latter is obviously the more correct one.

The way I cracked the one I did find is by taking strings found in the game, strings related to the game and strings found in the Dragon Age: Origins toolset files (which already include headers of most GDA files of Origins), and then combine them with each other and with words from a normal dictionary. I hash those combinations, compare them with the hashes we still need and spit out matches. Then I manually go through all these matches and remove the ones not fitting the game (like "properlyunsmoked", "rareuniquemummifications" and "impressionablyrooftops" ).

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Quoting: Maquis196the fact they have the source code will make it look dodgy

Yes. There's really no way xoreos could knowingly take contributions from someone who has or might have access to the original sources (unless officially sanctioned by the rights holders, of course, but that's...very unlikely).

Quoting: Maquis196KOTOR II native would just mean once less game for xoreos to worry about (but will no doubt support anyway because that's how open source rolls).

No matter whether KotOR II will really come to GNU/Linux, and no matter the methods (native, wine wrapper, eON, ...), that doesn't change anything about xoreos' mission statement.

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Correction, none of the GemRB people work on xoreos. I do have friendly connections to them, though, mostly through the existing history/cross-polination between ScummVM and GemRB. But you probably shouldn't bug them about xoreos. :P

And yes, AFAIK, some GemRB people got hired by Beamdog. Which I think is a bit of a shame, because that means they can't work on GemRB anymore. But if they're okay with that, who am I to judge.

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Quoting: maodzedunGreat news, but they have to find a way to make the community fixes usable in Linux as well.

Unless they change around things a lot, TSLRCM should still work. It doesn't modify the EXE, just the resources. Or rather, for the most part, it doesn't even modify the original resources, but adds new archives that override the old ones (since a "foo.mod" archive apparently overrides a "foo.rim" archive in priority) and new plain files to the override/ directory (which, yes, overrides stuff from the base archives).

Quoting: BillNyeTheBlackGuyI hope we get to see some other obsidian titles come to linux, such as Neverwinter Nights 2

Neverwinter Nights 2 is really quite unlikely to ever come to Linux, at least not without major porting efforts (*). While the first Neverwinter Nights game, and also the two KotOR games, were quite portable from the start, with an OpenGL renderer even, NWN2 is very Windows-y, and the renderer was pretty much rewritten from scratch with Direct3D in mind. There's also various middleware in use that might be problematic. Miles and Bink won't be a problem, but both Granny and SpreedTree might, especially since the versions it uses are nearly 10 years old now.

(*) Well, or xoreos [External Link] :P

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