Dirk's Blog Thing

Lastly, there's also some thoughts I had on DRM / copy protection.
Ubisoft and EA are currently trying to get customers to accept being online while playing, even when no internet connection is required for the game experience itself.
Of course, it took the pirates just a few hours to come up with a way to circumvent the DRM by creating a virtual, local server that replies with whatever reply the game expects. So that didn't quite work the way the publishers wanted to.

So, what's the next step?
Something less static, something more dynamic, that is different for every player and changes with each change in game state ...

Let's take a look at the latest C&C. Lots of people complain about the game being dumbed down to a point where every console kiddie can play it successfully. Unit limit means there's never going on too much on the map, and the AI is a joke, as always. It's still cheating to get an initial advantage and then forces the player to react to it instead of vica versa. This way it just builds unit after unit to throw at the player, and never actually tries to analyse the player's behaviour in order to react.

My point here is, that the AI isn't all that complex. It's pretty much scripted to perform a few actions, like attack-moving on the player's crawler, or moving to certain points to defend them. So, what's to stop the developers / publishers from having the AI run on servers instead of players' computers? You'd just need a few high performance servers to do the calculations and you could scale down on complexity during peak hours if you run out of cpu cycles.
Customers getting disconnected would lose their progress, as it is now, but players who pirated the game would be left with zombie enemies, not doing anything, and no sense of accomplishment from beating a level.

And I don't really see an easy way for pirates / crackers to get around this. I guess it's pretty simple to create a virtual server that says "legit" every time it's being asked, but writing entire AI procedures?

Alternatively, instead of doing this with the enemy AI in single player games, you could of course also do this with path finding algorithms. Those aren't exactly trivial to implement, but the input and output of such an algorithm should be easy to transfer via the internet, especially with the unit limit meaning there's never going on too much in a game. The map itself is static and can be stored on the server, so you'd "only" need to transmit the current positions of every unit / structure, and which units were just ordered to go where.

Maybe I should patent those ideas and sue EA when they use them in C&C5 ...

So. Red Alert 3. Coming out soon. I'm playing the beta, and I like what I'm seeing. It's fun.
I just read an article on heise.de though that pointed out that RA3 will have SecuRom + online activation DRM.
Pity. I was actually going to buy the game. But now I'm most likely not.

I'll probably just steal it now, since everyone except game dev execs knows that copy protection doesn't work.