Posted July 02, 2015
Hello folks, most wont know me, especially if you're not around piracy/hacking/modding forums; but I'd like to talk about a piece of software I've been working on for the past year and get the 'no-DRM' crowds opinion on it as well as suggesting similar systems for GoG in general.
So this project came about when I wanted to mod Call of Duty a while ago. Naturally Steams VAC system got a little upset and I didn't want to make a new bypass for it every update so I went ahead and created my own steam_api. The problem with that however was that the game has its own middleware that acts like a DRM. DemonWare. So their servers would verify that the game was started via Steam and Steam could not verify that since I had another API.
So how do we get an always online game to work? Well, emulating the whole middleware system of course. Every server and every micro-service. Not only did this offer a lot more control over how the game worked, it allowed me to unlock a lot of unreleased content. In CoD:AWs case, two new DLC packs. Naturally Activision DMCAd all images and videos but that's a story for another time.
There's two branches of my system for emulation. One using a traditional server approach with plugins for each middleware network and a simple dll that hooks winsock functionallity and passes interesting data to the plugins rather than the internet. Both have their upsides. Replacing the original gameservers with my server is just a simple edit to your systems hostsfile. No changes to the game or anything like that is required. So when Activision shuts down their servers, it takes 30 sec to switch to whomever is hosting my version.
The dll however allows you to play always online games; offline. Maybe it's easier to imagine it as the server being moved into the dll. Thus no network connection is required and each request is serviced in <1ms. Another advantage of that system is that it allowed me to add features such as LAN play and dedicated servers to CoD.
That's enough rambling for now. What I'd like to know is how this community feel about DRM/servers being emulated as opposed to completely removed and if yous think that GoG would ever consider having a similar system for games where the publisher/studio have lost the source code or simply don't care enough to recompile it.
Thank you for reading ^^
So this project came about when I wanted to mod Call of Duty a while ago. Naturally Steams VAC system got a little upset and I didn't want to make a new bypass for it every update so I went ahead and created my own steam_api. The problem with that however was that the game has its own middleware that acts like a DRM. DemonWare. So their servers would verify that the game was started via Steam and Steam could not verify that since I had another API.
So how do we get an always online game to work? Well, emulating the whole middleware system of course. Every server and every micro-service. Not only did this offer a lot more control over how the game worked, it allowed me to unlock a lot of unreleased content. In CoD:AWs case, two new DLC packs. Naturally Activision DMCAd all images and videos but that's a story for another time.
There's two branches of my system for emulation. One using a traditional server approach with plugins for each middleware network and a simple dll that hooks winsock functionallity and passes interesting data to the plugins rather than the internet. Both have their upsides. Replacing the original gameservers with my server is just a simple edit to your systems hostsfile. No changes to the game or anything like that is required. So when Activision shuts down their servers, it takes 30 sec to switch to whomever is hosting my version.
The dll however allows you to play always online games; offline. Maybe it's easier to imagine it as the server being moved into the dll. Thus no network connection is required and each request is serviced in <1ms. Another advantage of that system is that it allowed me to add features such as LAN play and dedicated servers to CoD.
That's enough rambling for now. What I'd like to know is how this community feel about DRM/servers being emulated as opposed to completely removed and if yous think that GoG would ever consider having a similar system for games where the publisher/studio have lost the source code or simply don't care enough to recompile it.
Thank you for reading ^^
Post edited July 02, 2015 by Convery