EDIT: it was during mission 11 that it occurred not mission 12

had a weird crash just now.

the game just stalled without any warning and I couldnt close it without entering sleep mode

one thing i should mention is that prior to the game crashing, it tried to connect to the internet, which i denied because i saw no reason for it to do so (it also minimized my game while i was playing it, which also influenced my decision to deny it that time).
it tried again later from that point to connect to the internet, at which point i decided to permanently prevent it from connecting to the internet. (using Zone Alarm, since thats what i keep it around for)



after that the next event was the crash.

this post inquires into 2 things:

1) Why did the game crash (it was mission 11 during one of the final stages of the mission when the Carrier folded into the path of my team's capital ships)

2) Why is this game connecting to the internet (at all)

i can only speculate that:

- the game crash was caused my decision to permanently prevent the game from connecting to the internet, but then that would imply that the game STILL has DRM on it,

- a fatal bug causes the game to crash when it cannot connect to the internet (something similar to an over filling glass, if that makes sense at all); a coding bug

1. The game is slightly unstable for whatever reason. I had a crash immediately when I finished mission 5, and it didn't save.
2. I don't remember if the game actually tried to connect. Either it didn't or I perma-blocked it. I guess it really depends. It could be the game loading a signed DLL, which (done by the OS) would pull the root certificate online and verify it. At least that's the behavior I observed for most programs. Whether or not the signature is invalid doesn't seem to matter.

BTW, talking about DRM, the Steam version uses Steamworks, and probably nothing else. In that case the DRM is simply a case of "can I talk to Steam? is this game owned by the current user?" Some games don't even care about Steam, though they use the Steamworks API. E.g. Psychonauts, which actually still runs even if Steam is not started, and does not attempt to start Steam either.

I can assure you there is no DRM in this version whatsoever. As for it connecting to the internet, that is bizarre, are you sure it was connecting or just opening a port? We support some peripherals that actually require a RPC like API for them to function. . we open a socket so that they can query for game specific information (. score / kills) for display on integrated displays.

I'll look into this for you later today.