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Securing assets


freyk

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Is there a way to encrypt pk4s? Because it would be a really great option if they could be.

Bikerdude

Nope, as the engine would then have no way of opening them. That and all resources used by the mode are covered by CC, which is the equivalent to opensource.

 

 

04 Jun

nbohr1more

Interesting question though. We integrated different zip libraries in the internal builds so there might be some sorta support for reading encrypted files but there's no API interface for passing the credentials. If encrypting will bring in more content creators (etc) I'm not implicitly apposed to it but it's on pretty shaky ground...

Sotha's Photo

05 Jun

 

Sotha

"I am not selling TDM FMs. I am distributing the .pk4s freely, but you gotta pay for the decryption key!"

:(

 

 

05 Jun

freyk

There is always a way. But why? Everyone should play fms and not selected few.

 

Epifire's Photo

05 Jun

Epifire

Well the engine would have the required libraries to run the pk4s without a hitch. The encryption would prevent direct access and tampering of data within the directory itself.

 

 

05 Jun

freyk

Give us the freedom of modding, patching, improving your and our fms/stuff. an encrypted fm-pk4 crashed my tdm instantly, as predicted

 

 

05 Jun

Judith

It's not necessarily about selling FMs. If someone's making a lot of custom stuff, and just wants people to play the mission, without tampering with their stuff, there's no such option so far.

 

 

05 Jun

nbohr1more

Another justification. "I want to sell my new model on an asset market like Unity Store but I also want to show if off in a TDM mission I am building. I don't want people to unpack my mission and grab my model for free." If we allow mappers to encrypt, it may encourage pros to release more high-quality content knowing it can act as a platform to advertise their works.

 

 

05 Jun

kano

Encryption is one of, if not the worst things to happen to single player gaming. Games with encrypted assets prevent the player from learning, experimenting, improving, or otherwise getting more use out of the game than the time that it takes to complete said game. Locked down games that can't be modified or extended are why I won't spend more than 10 bucks on mainstream games anymore.

 

And encrypting game assets is kind of pointless, because at some point they must be decrypted to be displayed. And with determined users, there are programs to "rip" them from the video memory, like 3DRipperDX.

 

 

05 Jun

MoroseTroll

Epifire: What about checking the hash of your own PK4(s)? This could provide some integrity for you data, if I get you right.

Also, you could provide your own PK4(s) with intentially broken headers, and fix them on the run.

 

 

06 Jun

Judith

Kano, that's the problem: when you're an author, you don't want your stuff to be modified without your knowledge, and IMO Thief community is notorious for grabbing everything that's downloadable and doing whatever can be done with it (see Object repository thread on TTLG), so at least some control over your assets would be appreciated. Fortunately 3d ripper dx worked with DX9 games only.

 

 

06 Jun

Epifire

Well it certainly is a worth notion for content protection. Interesting discussion nonetheless.

 

 

06 Jun

Obsttorte

Well, the licence TDM is under already states that everyone can do anything with it. I think the assets fall under same licence, not sure. However, if you are releasing something for free anyways, why do you care what others do with it?

 

 

06 Jun

Judith

I'm not saying what we do is art, but compare it to exhibiting a painting and letting everyone paint over it and display it in other galleries as well. Some authors may not like it.

Other more complicated cases include e.g. using paid textures as base (you can't distribute your work as an image, even if such paid texture is used as a layer in Gimp / just a component of your texture).

 

 

06 Jun

Obsttorte

I don't hink the comparision with the painting suits here. As said, the whole point of modding is 'modifying' things. In addition, you normally don't destroy the original source, but work with a copy. Regarding your second point, we avoid using assets that are protected. This includeds everything you have to pay for.

 

 

06 Jun

Judith

Does modding means zero control over the stuff you made? I don't think so. Maybe such disagreements over what modding is why engines like Unreal introduced packages.

That discussion deserves its own thread, IMO.

 

 

06 Jun

AluminumHaste

 

This mod is open source, Creative Commons. Anything created for it is no longer yours, it is then in public domain for ANYONE to use as they see fit.

You have to understand this BEFORE you make and release something for the MOD.

 

If you cannot live with this then don't create anything.

 

If you make a clock tower I can then use it to make clock tower chess boards, and you don't like it, then it's too bad.

Anderson's Photo

06 Jun

Anderson

 

I don't see how CC is a problem for the author later reusing this in any professional field. It's not like anyone will plow TDM to find material to sue anyone. Take it easy.

Any open source project is non profit and therefore profit is the last thing to think of unless getting experience or something to write in a CV about. That's it.

Judith's Photo

06 Jun

Judith

 

In Unreal engines you can use all the assets the way you want, but you can't export models or textures outside the editor to modify them. That's the kind of author's control I'm talking about, and I believe that might have been the reason for Epi's question.

Anderson's Photo

06 Jun

Anderson

 

Understood.

Well, Unreal is a specific thing. Most people here have jobs and for them TDM is quite a hobby. So if you want to you can find a way to do something similar if you can argument your position to implement this (for Epifire).

Judith's Photo

06 Jun

Judith

 

It's not about money, more like sense of authorship. I don't want people to edit my photos or publish them without captions/proper credit) either, this is absolutely normal.

Anderson's Photo

06 Jun

Anderson

 

Well, if they are contributed to a project, it is reasonable enough to expect them to be adjusted/modified/improved? After all it is in common interest, especially if the author no longer shows up and goes AWOL. For example the account is terminated/forgot password/the author dies.

 

Photos are also a personal thing, while various art assets, sfx, voiceovers are sort of a contribution. If it's made for the project, their existence is tied to the project. It's for the public i...

Judith's Photo

06 Jun

Judith

 

That's a fair point. Although locking assets this way isn't bad either. You can improve things ad infinitum, and this way you have to take responsibility and submit something finished, not counting on others to do additional work.

Anderson's Photo

06 Jun

Anderson

 

True as well. But realistically it's better to have the chance of someone picking up something old and abandoned.

AluminumHaste's Photo

06 Jun

AluminumHaste

 

Okay, wasn't trying to hurt anyone's feeling, just pointing out the reality of this project in particular and how it works.

 

Regardless of how other projects work, whether it's other indie projects or UT/Epic etc, The Dark Mod (which includes everything that comes with the mod, and anything added later) is under CC.

 

Maintaining control over something you've given to TDM is not how it works.

 

Not sure what Epifire is needing in particular as he...

AluminumHaste's Photo

06 Jun

AluminumHaste

 

okay lol, this needs a thread, can't fit replies in.

Bikerdude's Photo

06 Jun

Bikerdude

 

<Sigh>

Anderson's Photo

07 Jun

Anderson

 

<Sigh intensifies>

Judith's Photo

07 Jun

Judith

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

jaredmitchell's Photo

07 Jun

jaredmitchell

 

Not to re-stir the hornet's nest here, but as far as I know the license from the source code in idTech specifies that only code, not assets, are required to be released. Does the license under The Dark Mod go further?

stumpy's Photo

07 Jun

stumpy

 

I've had loads of things nicked and no credit for being the originator, it something you have to live with and lump it.

Judith's Photo

07 Jun

Judith

 

Most of my stuff is properly unwrapped anyway, so you can't do much with these textures unless you really know what you're doing. That should discourage most people. I'm more afraid about models being used outside the mod.

nbohr1more's Photo

07 Jun

nbohr1more

 

Our asset license is BY-NC-SA. This is mainly because we use assets that are "free" but are contractually bound for non-commercial distribution. (1)

nbohr1more's Photo

07 Jun

nbohr1more

 

I don't see a problem with FM authors including their own non-free assets in missions. The questionable area is "selling an FM". It technically doesn't break the rules but it definitely could cause some sorta legal concern because the asset owners could conflate the FM authors with the TDM team.

nbohr1more's Photo

07 Jun

nbohr1more

 

(Asset owners for 3rd party assets we include in TDM)

Judith's Photo

08 Jun

Judith

 

Is it possible to add your own clauses to that, like "you may not use these assets outside TDM without author's permission / please contact me"?

nbohr1more's Photo

08 Jun

nbohr1more

 

Yes, you can add any license stipulations you want to your readme just as with the original Doom 3 SDK.

Springheel's Photo

08 Jun

Springheel

 

Holy crap, 39 comments? That's got to be a record.

Nobody wants to make this a thread?

 

freyk

done.

Edited by freyk

Info: My portfolio and darkmod graphical installer
Amnesty for Bikerdude!

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As I take it, we could possibly make some content protection setup for authors by using the encryption hooks in our zip libraries.

To what degree we would cater to that is hard to say but I am on the side of making it easier for semi-pros or professionals to release

TDM missions without fear of losing their assets to the community. That said, missions can include distribution clauses in the readme

so you can still legally enforce your ownership of custom assets in your pk4 pack. Obviously we would need to carefully review the

license terms if the mission author wanted us to include these non-free assets in the core mod but if their request is that only TDM

can use the assets then that's no different than the many commercial texture assets we include that have non-commercial clauses

that don't allow TDM to simply offer them as a Texture Pack (etc).

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Haven't we had missions that include custom music licensed only to the map author?

 

Yes that would be me, and I wrote the creators to ask for permission to release it to the core (music from Accountant 2 falls under this category). However my current WIP has music that i've licensed from artists that cannot be used by others (as no permission was granted, or I have not reached out to them yet). For this though I will include a disclaimer of what is ok to use and what isn't.

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I think Moonbo's missions also have non-free music assets?

 

Yes they do. Both FM's. But in The Requeim there is also some tracks that are public domain from Vox Vulgaris (maybe only one, I think it's La Suite Meurtriere in the tavern at the start of the FM).

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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"I am not selling TDM FMs. I am distributing the .pk4s freely, but you gotta pay for the decryption key!"

 

This was probably posted as a joke, but the problem is that people who want to share the missions will then just (obviously) share the keys to decrypt them. You would need a way to generate new unique keys for every download/purchase of the mission to prevent the above. And this would involve creating a much more complex DRM scheme. And since TDM is open source, there would be nothing stopping somebody from modifying the way TDM works to behave differently, like altering the renderer to dump textures or geometry to disk.

 

I suppose you could incorporate code into the protected mission which checks the SHA1 sum of TDM to ensure that the mission is only running on an unmodified, official version of TDM. But there are ways around things like this too...

Edited by kano
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IMO the best option would be to be able to launch missions and use assets under DR, without entering any passwords or keys, but without being able to extract assets from pk4 package. Players can play missions as usual, mappers can use assets too, and they can ask the author to send them source models or textures, if they want to modify them. This way authors have a bit of control over how their work is distributed and used.

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I think it would be extremely ironic to realease a mission with your own locked content, all the while basing it on a mountain of TDM assets (art, music, code) that was produced by countless people with a completely different state of mind and vison of what open art and community work means.

Edited by RPGista
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Hmm.

 

If we were to have an asset extraction lock it would need to hide the encryption keys from our source code releases

which would mean that anyone compiling from source wouldn't be able to play missions with locked assets.

Ideologically, you'd probably have users who'd never touch the locked content on principle.

The ven-diagram of "source compilers" who "don't object to locked content" is probably a pretty small sliver.

 

I guess we could feed the keys to TDM and DR via some network backend to get around that.

Not a big fan of network controlled content though.

Not as bad as always-on DRM since we could issue the keys as a one-time event but still pretty yucky...

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I think it would be extremely ironic to realease a mission with your own locked content, all the while basing it on a mountain of TDM assets (art, music, code) that was produced by countless people with a completely different state of mind and vison of what open art and community work means.

Amen.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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I can see both sides of this issue.

 

I can understand, as a content creator, it can be irksome to have people modify your artistic creations in certain ways, especially without your permission. There is, for example, nothing in the TDM license that stops someone from taking one of my missions, changing some of the textures here and there, and releasing it under their name, all without asking. Basic courtesy would probably keep that from happening, but you can't always bank on that. This is a free project, so the only reward content creators get from the untold hours of work they do is the recognition they receive, and the pleasure of watching people enjoy their work. Anything we can do to protect the recognition content creators get for the work they do is probably a good thing, as it makes the work more enjoyable.

 

On the other hand, TDM is a project that celebrates what is best about modding--the creativity of individuals and groups to build on the work of others to create new and amazing things. Locking down assets directly contravenes that principle. On that point alone, I don't think I could endorse it, even if I understand what might drive someone to consider it.

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There is, for example, nothing in the TDM license that stops someone from taking one of my missions, changing some of the textures here and there, and releasing it under their name, all without asking. Basic courtesy would probably keep that from happening, but you can't always bank on that.

This is true obviously. But (1) it never happened thus far and (2) the community (or at least the team) would hardly tolerate that as far as I can judge it. We already have a strict policy when it comes to copyright protected stuff. If someone would use something from someone else, even if not in such an extreme way as in your example, and does not react to the original authors protest, wouldn't we refuse distribution anyways?

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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This is true obviously. But (1) it never happened thus far and (2) the community (or at least the team) would hardly tolerate that as far as I can judge it. We already have a strict policy when it comes to copyright protected stuff. If someone would use something from someone else, even if not in such an extreme way as in your example, and does not react to the original authors protest, wouldn't we refuse distribution anyways?

 

You're right, that was a fairly extreme example, just to make the point. But the same could be done with smaller assets, like individual models or textures, and it would be equally annoying (on a smaller scale). It's not so clear that the team would step in to protest that either.

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I can understand, as a content creator, it can be irksome to have people modify your artistic creations in certain ways, especially without your permission. There is, for example, nothing in the TDM license that stops someone from taking one of my missions, changing some of the textures here and there, and releasing it under their name, all without asking. Basic courtesy would probably keep that from happening, but you can't always bank on that.

What's stopping me from buying a decryption key and then doing all that?

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What's stopping me from buying a decryption key and then doing all that?

 

I don't know what that has to do with me. I didn't say anything about encryption.

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This community will clearly ostracize anybody who tries to do this. You could probably get away with your own scheme where you distribute encrypted pk4s and give a key or keys to Patreon backers and have that person decrypt manually. Or just send each person a pk4 without encrypting at any point. This won't prevent them from leaking the mission elsewhere.

 

Here's another question: can the Zip compression in pk4 be replaced with a different method?

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We discussed this some time ago. While methods like PPMd are much more efficient than standard deflate, they're also super slow to decompress. Since we already have very long initial loading times, it's not a good idea to implement this yet.

Edited by Judith
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IMO i think this is a bad idea and personally i will never play any mission from anyone:

 

One charging money to unzip a TDM mission, is not only that in very bad taste is also very suspicious in my book.

 

Two anyone locking their content (among plenty of others that is not his or hers) so other mission makers can't see, play and learn from them, specially when those are making or made free missions and are sharing or shared their work openly. IMO a healthy community is a sharing community.

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I could not endorse locking down assets. It opposes the spirit of what has been built here.

+1,

 

Anything added to or used by TDM mod should be made available under the CC licence, not doing so is potentially asking for trouble down the road.

 

Up untill I read this thread I wasn't fully aware we had missions that have resources that arent covered by CC

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You can't both distribute something for consumption and lock it away so people can't access it. If people can play your mission, they will be able to steal your content. Piracy wouldn't be a thing if encryption, compression or any other form of obstruction was an impassible barrier to theft.

 

I suggest "signing" your assets and maintaining a portfolio or blog. You can prove you are the author when this kind of thing happens if the copy you distribute contains hidden data that is revealed by comparing it to an unaltered version you never distribute.

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FYI, Unreal, CryEngine, Unity etc. engines all have been using asset packs for years, for both AAA and free projects, and their communities do pretty well, regardless of free spirits and their sense of irony ;)

 

That said, if you work with quality content, or use hi-res commercial textures as part of your materials, you can always scale the whole thing down to make it less attractive for asset flippers and all the like. I have a "proof of concept" which uses 2k textures everywhere, but I could always scale that to 512 upon release. People with older hardware would probably appreciate that.

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Speaking as a user, I refuse point blank to play games with DRM in them, so I play very few games, I would hate to lose TDM from that list.

 

The thought that TDM might incorporate DRM on some selected FM's even if it's totally transparent & free to play, is abhorrent to me and I would not knowingly play those particular FM's.

 

I'm all for authors & content creators getting credit for their creations so perhaps a way of adding an author tag to assets so the author can be identified easily to generate a credit list for closing titles would be a way to go.

 

Digitally sign that by all means, say use a hash as a signature & keep a central register of hash = author somewhere, anyone generating a random hash wouldn't be on the list & the asset would be suspect & could be looked at to see if it's been ripped.

 

Just a thought

 

--EDIT--

 

beaten to the punch by rich_is_bored, sorry didn't see your post

Edited by esme
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This community will clearly ostracize anybody who tries to do this. You could probably get away with your own scheme where you distribute encrypted pk4s and give a key or keys to Patreon backers and have that person decrypt manually. Or just send each person a pk4 without encrypting at any point. This won't prevent them from leaking the mission elsewhere.

 

Here's another question: can the Zip compression in pk4 be replaced with a different method?

 

It's not about a witch hunt against heretics of TDM canon gospel. You can do it if you think it's right but at it's your own risk of presenting it properly for the audience and to do the packaging/encrypting properly. There's nothing wrong with it essentially if it doesn't hurt how the mission loads, what would it be performance wise.

 

But as it's not an established practice, nobody will do it on the main team as it's not in plans. At your own discretion starting from the CC clauses and know clearly where the limits are.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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