Quoting: scaine

Quoting: BeamboomI experience ZERO restrictions on Steam. Zero. Never ever in my 16 years on Steam have I experienced any kind of hindrance. I play anytime anywhere on whatever computer I may have had over the course of these years.
Quite the contrary, what I experience is a free cloud save of all my savegames forever, and a free storage of my entire library of games, ready and available to be installed on new machines whenever, wherever. This service is something I'd PAY for, gladly.

Nothing to add about anything else you said, but c'mon. I'm a staunch Steam defender, but even I've had rubbish experiences with it. I used to travel a lot, so just firing up games on my laptop would often fail if I hadn't launched in the two weeks prior to that travel. I had to do this stupid "launch the game" dance any time I was faced with 5 hours on a train.

Not to mention that if Steam is down these days, a lot of your games are down too. Offline modes works for some of them, but not all.

Yes, Steam's DRM is very low-impact. But it's still, ultimately, anti-consumer. You are paying for it. The data they collect on your gaming habits is how they justify charging devs 30% for their platform. If a product is "free" (Steam itself, is free), then you're the product. I'll still use it, but I won't stick my head in the sand about what it's costing, just like I use an Android phone - you weigh up the convenience against the loss of your privacy. Sometimes it's worth it (Steam), sometimes it's not (Denuvo).

On Steam it depends on game, some don't bother how you play them, some constantly check Internet and refuse to play offline even being SP-only, some refuse being played not in country you bought it in (i.e. no hotel fooling on business trips), some add online requirement, Denuvo, EAC, and custom DRM together to SP game (having some coop PvE) and you constantly have trouble with it doing nothing remotely unintended. So depending on your taste you might have very different experience.

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Ah, moron lawers at that again. Also there is no judicial decision about even starting the processing of the case which looks wacky at beast. But I guess they could win in corrupt system of corporate kindergarten there. Any bets? Will greed + stupidity + money win again?

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Well, the only multiplayer game I played recently is Conan Exiles and it allows disabling EAC. Also I truly believe that if games' "netcode" were designed by engineers it would not require EAC in the first place. Currenly most SP games require constant Internet access to play, also add EAC and Denuvo on top just in case, you can't have too much paranoia, do you?

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Yeah, anti-cheat is most important program to have, now all game companies will start make Linux native ports of games (unlikely).

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Quoting: DaiKaiser93

Quoting: slaapliedjeExclusivity only happens because $Company pays $Publisher enough to not let others play their game. At least back in the day there was some sort of 'well this platform is more capable and that's why we published it there, as the experience of the game will be crap on other systems...' We no longer have that barrier at all!

Nowadays the only excuse they should have for exclusives is if X company owns the studio, but they'll continue to do it as long as studios accept the deals.

Exclusivity deals are easy money now, while game itself might or might not be successful. You can't get all the money they say, so lets go a safe route... Zero-risks opportunity...

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: GustyGhost

it complains how the code now runs on platforms it was never released for where the "Defendants have sought to exploit a potential market that belongs exclusively to Take-Two"

I am fluent in tyrant speak. The English translation of this line is: "We want to continue to exclusively deny access to our games to punish users who use platforms that we don't like".

The complaint states something about exploiting markets, but the key thing to note here is that THEY HAVE FAILED TO 'EXPLOIT' THIS MARKET so they have no grounds to be upset when somebody else comes along and does the job instead.

I have saved the repo to my own storage just to be sure any take down requests amount to a game of slashy hydra head.

So I'm curious what people would start thinking if things like this were Linux (or Mac) exclusive. Basically when an open source engine comes along for a commercial game that was normally available only on Windows, if the engine port didn't run on Windows, if it'd 'hide' better from such dipshittery.

But yeah, 'OMG, those dirty Linux neckbeards are able to play our game now!' sounds like some reactions I've read on Steam discussions...

I remember shit storms every time some game which was console-exclusive gets published on Steam. People are really that strange. So people get mad when games work on Linux. And some such people are in establishment and work on high positions in big corporations. But I really hope these people will lose this time.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slapin

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slapin

Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:

28. Papenhoff has admitted that the source code developed via the re3 and reVC
projects is not original, but rather is (and was intended to be) a copy of the original. In fact,
Defendants have bragged that their derivative source code was created by working backwards
from Take-Two’s final “machine” code to re-create the human-readable code in which GTA was
programmed:

“GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming
language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in
machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to
C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but
over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this
process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the
decompiler and massage it back into readable C++.” Id.

If this is true and it appears to be so, then this is in fact copyright infringement and not something that any of us really can defend.

This shows that plaintif and you did not understand what reverse engineers say:
1. GTA code was written in C++
2. They managed to create their own code in C++ working in the same way as GTA code.
If you read they took original GTA code, you need to check your sight.

That is not what they did, what they did is:

1. GTA code was written in C++
2. They used a decompiler to turn the GTA binary into fully working C++ code
3. They did changes to the generated C++ code to implement the changes they wanted to make

T2 owns the copyright to the C++ code of the game, but they also of course owns the copyright to the compiled binary so when you use a decompiler to turn the copyrighted binary machine code into autogenerated C++ code then you have just made a 1:1 transformation of the copyrighted code, so this step does not remove any copyrights.

Had they instead used a disassembler to look at how the game engine worked and then wrote their own C++ code based on that observation then what you said would be true, but that is not what they did according to their own wording. Hence why they will have a very hard time making a defense here. But then I'm not a lawyer, not do I play one on TV.

IIRC there is no decompiled code in re3 source. Also they explained they used dll injection process which would be totally meaningless if they had just decompiled it.

We were lucky that we had symbols from PS2 gta3 and the android games. other than that it was a lot of reading code in IDA and massaging it back into c++. I made a little video about part of the process [1] but i never did part 2.

The strategy for gta3 was to replace function by function of the game until we had everything replaced. for VC we evolved our existing code base by, again, reversing function by function until we had everything done. Just not by dll injection this time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22BeuOOERLo [External Link]

You can also read whole discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26130320 [External Link]

Well I do hope for their sake that you are correct and they can prove it, because the T2 lawyers have the main Re3 dev quoted as having written: "So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++"

edit: He have also made a YouTube video where it's quite clear that he cleans up autogenerated decompiler c++ code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22BeuOOERLo&t=48s [External Link]

It looks like you never seen a line of code in your life. They get "decompiled" junk which is mostly useless, and look at assembler output to guess what that is really doing and implement particular piece of code. No "decompiled" "code" remains in the process. Because that code is useless unreadable piece of junk. Usually the "decompile" portion is used to have sense of progress and have easier feel of control flow because disassembly might be too intimidating in large hunks, also compilers add various generated portions of code which can be lots and lots of jumps in there and it is a bit easier to look at these in "decompiled" output because semantic labels are there and some control flow operators and function calls are there. It does not produce useful code however, it is just better disassembly. It does not change the notion of looking at machine code then writing your own code. You should write totally your own code in the end. The decompile part is just to produce aid, it is impossible to use the output directly. And even if you manage to make that decompiled code work in your case, that will be too obvious because it will look like gibberish and there is no such code in re3 as I can tell. So it is safe to assume that reverse engineering was done right and the code produced is not Take-Two's code. All the harm portions are also sound not spectacular. There might be some if somebody would sell these games with assets of original games, but nothing like that happens. I guess Take-Two is the only game company in the world which considers modders as harm to their sales. So I guess the harm of the processing will surpass any harm which ever could be from modding these games.
And they should fail now or else lots of projects now are in danger.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slapin

Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:

28. Papenhoff has admitted that the source code developed via the re3 and reVC
projects is not original, but rather is (and was intended to be) a copy of the original. In fact,
Defendants have bragged that their derivative source code was created by working backwards
from Take-Two’s final “machine” code to re-create the human-readable code in which GTA was
programmed:

“GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming
language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in
machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to
C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but
over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this
process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the
decompiler and massage it back into readable C++.” Id.

If this is true and it appears to be so, then this is in fact copyright infringement and not something that any of us really can defend.

This shows that plaintif and you did not understand what reverse engineers say:
1. GTA code was written in C++
2. They managed to create their own code in C++ working in the same way as GTA code.
If you read they took original GTA code, you need to check your sight.

That is not what they did, what they did is:

1. GTA code was written in C++
2. They used a decompiler to turn the GTA binary into fully working C++ code
3. They did changes to the generated C++ code to implement the changes they wanted to make

T2 owns the copyright to the C++ code of the game, but they also of course owns the copyright to the compiled binary so when you use a decompiler to turn the copyrighted binary machine code into autogenerated C++ code then you have just made a 1:1 transformation of the copyrighted code, so this step does not remove any copyrights.

Had they instead used a disassembler to look at how the game engine worked and then wrote their own C++ code based on that observation then what you said would be true, but that is not what they did according to their own wording. Hence why they will have a very hard time making a defense here. But then I'm not a lawyer, not do I play one on TV.

IIRC there is no decompiled code in re3 source. Also they explained they used dll injection process which would be totally meaningless if they had just decompiled it.

We were lucky that we had symbols from PS2 gta3 and the android games. other than that it was a lot of reading code in IDA and massaging it back into c++. I made a little video about part of the process [1] but i never did part 2.

The strategy for gta3 was to replace function by function of the game until we had everything replaced. for VC we evolved our existing code base by, again, reversing function by function until we had everything done. Just not by dll injection this time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22BeuOOERLo [External Link]

You can also read whole discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26130320 [External Link]

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Also they provide no proof of any of their claims and no actual valid logic behind that, so it is yet to see what the decision will be...

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IIRC as long as their code contains none of decompiled code they are safe in the court. As for market claims it is very unfair power game there which is kind of depends on court bias. I seen courts where such bold claims made judge very angry...

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