I love the implication here, that they don’t have the proper source (or skills left in the company) such that they can remove the DRM which doesn’t play nice themselves so they rely on a cracked copy of the game instead. Been quite a bit of news lately about how game companies have failed to keep the original source code for their games. Diablo 2, the Transformers games etc and those from active companies, there’s bound to be 1000s of games where the source is lost due to publishers closing down studios.
Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?
I mean, they didn’t even bother to remove the signature!
The crack might not actually be protected by copyright, unless there’s substantial new code added.
It’s a complete crapshow IMO.
I still have the source code for the simple stuff I developed over 12 years ago, but these organisations don’t think it’s important to hang on to source code and assets for something they plan to make money from?
Really telling about the attitudes towards software outside of the FOSS space and datahoarder communities, and more importantly how little the management/publishers actually care about the product.
Although to counter that, I’m aware of at least one situation where the opposite has happened. One of my simulation games for example is really buggy and isn’t able to receive more updates because the studio behind it voluntarily disbanded, leaving the publisher without access to the source code (I believe the publisher Aerosoft has tried to get a copy of the source to provide further game fixes, but the individuals behind the disbanded studio could not come to an agreement on this)
I’ve had teams not bother to keep proper history when moving from subversion to git and I’ve also had a DevOps team entirely wipe the history of a new project just because cloning took a long time (and refused to attempt shallow cloning).
So the idea that a company just lets their code “rot” to the point of not even having it anymore because it’s just some legacy thing from over a decade ago is totally unsurprising to me.
Just to pile on. I’ve seen devs throw out the entire git history when moving between repos for ongoing projects.
Even if they have the source, they may not have all the build tools anymore.
Or they have the build tools but the wizard that set up the build system back in the day no longer works there.
Or they have the build system archived and documented but it doesn’t run because some license expired, and the tool vender doesn’t sell that version anymore.
In the near future, there will be another possibility - SaaS cloud tools that are impossible to preserve so they are forever lost.
Very true, and even if they could replace/remove libraries and dependencies that muck up the build process there are no guarantees that it’ll play the same. So many games rely on strange quirks to function the way they do that would be nigh impossible to replicate purposely.
I’d say they probably still have the source. It looks like they did the same thing for Manhunt and Max Payne, but then pulled older, pre-SecuROM exes from their archives when they got busted.
I don’t know about Diablo 2, but Blizzard is so shady and messed up nowadays that I wouldn’t be surprised that they “lost the source code” to prevent modders being able to port games, etc.
As for transformers, it was never lost (PCGamer, if you don’t like Xfire). Hasbro claimed they wanted to provide access to legacy games, but completely made up that the source was lost. Now that we know that the source is still available… well, Hasbro clearly hasn’t tried to rerelease those games.
(note: I know this is the same company, Activision Blizzard in both cases. For anyone reading who doesn’t know, they were not the same company for the release of Diablo II, and a good amount of time afterwards.)
Remember that time a random player DRAMATICALLY decreased load times for GTA online after finding bad code that preloaded TONS of game assets? After like, a decade?
Pepperidge Farm remembers…
I believe it was a CSV file of every item in all of the shops (comma separated values) and it was being read and stored into memory single threaded so it was maxing out a single core on the CPU.
JSON, and it had more to do with how they were checking string lengths. But yeah, the general story is that a random dude fixed massive problems with the text parsing.
Found an article that details it again since it was a fun read at the time. Looks like it was 10MB json file and the method to read the lines used the expensive length function you mentioned. It also had other simple optimizations too.
Pretty funny that because of all their microtransactions being stored in a JSON file being loaded into memory, that ended up making their game more slow and annoying and frustrating to play.
I am super curious if the devs knew about this issue but it just wasn’t fixed because it wasn’t given priority by management, or if the devs genuinely had no clue about this?
The even weirder and funnier thing is I’ve worked with larger JSON files day to day at my job with a much smaller scale than Rockstar/GTA, although I guess it depends on how you work with the files and the fact they were checking string lengths for literally every single piece of data etc.
The library used to read the line does the string length check, so my guess, whoever wrote it initially didn’t know about it and tested with a small sunset of items without issue; I assume the games items grew in size over the years too. They also released an official patch with it and paid the modder $10k
Edit fixed typo
Lol, in the meantime see what Nintendo does to modders who fix stuff for them
Yeah json actually sounds better. Unfortunately it’s still a text file that they were importing the entire thing into memory. Probably worse than CSV since they were probably serializing each item from string into objects. They definitely did it in one of the most laziest ways possible though I bet it worked at the time of development and the vendors probably had very few items.
Not worth to assign a dev to find a bug if the player can just do a toilet break and keeps on generating memes which are free publicity.
Are you talking about the guy that found a bug in the JSON parsing?
Good on R* for fixing the bug and paying the bounty. Nintendo would’ve given him the middle finger and a cease and desist.
Rockstar also has a pair of middle fingers:
That’s the one! Thanks for the link.
Are you saying the INSANE GTA Online load time is fixed now?
Back in the old day, I literally just throw my hands up and said “I can’t wait for this shit anymore, I don’t have all day” then rage quit and delete the game.
Rockstar paid the guy like 50K or something for discovering it, and then it was apparently implemented into GTA online. Too bad I quit playing that time black hole years ago.
I watched a YT video about this and they said the guy was paid 10K (way too low imo), a Google search shows different numbers everywhere so it’s hard to confirm. But at least the guy got paid, for sure.
As far as I’m understanding it, the game was using a single threading process to load every single items in the game one by one (over 10 thousands in total), then checking again for duplicate.
Yep. I’d long quit the game when they finally figured it out.
deleted by creator
The initial source (or at least the one linked to in the reddit post) is the vastly inferior microblogging version of xvideos though, so skipping reddit would have been even worse 🤷
enshittification all the way down
Yup!
True, every time I click one of those links it tries to make me make an account
I technically have an account, but I haven’t logged into it since a month or so after Musk started destroying it.
The final straw was getting banned for a full week for “hate speech” just for pointing out that Bill Burr probably wouldn’t want to participate in a Tucker Carlson “special report” about how “humor isn’t allowed anymore”, nor give permission for clips of him to be included in a promo for it 🤦
I would be content with a screenshot of that xvideos microblog
Make it a screenshot from the xvideos microblog posted on reddit and then screenshotted again.
Wahhhhhh
Better than their in-house attempts to remove anti-piracy measures. The Steam release of Manhunt has had all of its bullshit triggered for over ten years now. It’s literally impossible to play without community patches.
Edit: Lol, as it turns out, Silent’s discovery of this was triggered by the recent revelation of this about Manhunt!
I spent hours trying to get that fucking game to work…
Sad fact is, Rockstar doesn’t give a shit. They got busted using a cracked EXE in the Steam release, so they just tried to cover their asses by using an old EXE without SecuROM. I expect the same thing from this game before long.
Couple lucky things for the players, though. First off, the Razor 1911 crack is still in the files, they just renamed it to testapp. Second, old RS games have a dedicated community that give way more of a shit about them than Rockstar ever will. Silent and Fire Head have both released major patches for Manhunt that not only get it running right, but fix a bunch of other broken shit that Rockstar never cared enough to deal with.
How about Microsoft pirating Windows for you?
It’s not really a crack, it’s the corporate activation script. But yeah, MS don’t care about sales anymore, they’re all about stealing your data.
The information the OS collects is not worth more than keeping you in the ecosystem itself. That’s the more lucrative reasoning. Can’t easily sell other products if they’re not in Windows. The information collection is just gravy.
They just want everyone to have Windows at home, so that it keeps being the “normal” OS for corporations. They make so much money… Windows+ CALs, Office, Exchange, Sharepoint, M365, Azure… it’s easier to keep paying them, than to change vendors.
So counter point. Active directory is a god send for managing endpoints, user accounts, endpoints, etc.
No you don’t let windows act as a dns server outside the ad subdomain, no you don’t use windows to admin your root private ca, and for all you hold dear do not enable that God forsaken web server. But for what it does well, it’s the best solution out there.
Or Ubisoft. A colleague of mine was super hyped for Far Cry 2, both the collector’s edition but it wouldn’t start on his PC. He contacted Ubisoft support and they gave him an actual scene crack. There were other reported cases of Ubisoft support handing out scene cracks to go around their shitty DRM.
“A” for effort for the support people in finding ways for customers to be happy and play the games they paid for. But a Steam release for a humongous corporation just straight up using the crack and releasing it as is, that’s a new low.
Doesn’t even surprise me anymore. Rockstar has gone to shit.
cant even play their legitly purchased SINGLEPLAYER games without internet connection.
I fucking hate rockstarSometimes there is a trick that allows to play offline (I guess to bypass tags and restrictions), things like adding a line of text to a file, always a hassle and poorly documented.
Btw, I feel like telling that I deleted my rockstar account quite a while ago, they asked and re-asked nonsense, waiting from weeks to over a month between email and email, and the worst thing is that sometimes they were in chinese. It took me more than half a year to delete that crap.
Sometimes there is a trick that allows to play offline (I guess to bypass tags and restrictions), things like adding a line of text to a file, always a hassle and poorly documented.
Pirating the game is a lot easier. The people getting punished are the ones who give Rockstar their money
Wait… WHAT?
Fucking bsI’m already angry enough that they don’t let me spawn certain vehicles in singleplayer but this is too much. Time to get a cracked version and uninstall that Rockstar Launcher crap.
What i’m looking at? What is this from?
Hidden text within the app code from the steam folder
So the official files contains a razor 1911 line? This look sus af
In what sense? Incompetence, dodginess, or fake screenshot?
Anyone know what
RAZOR 1911stands for or means, anyways?It’s a group that cracks stuff for 🏴☠️
What a fucking nostalgia bomb. Haven’t been a part of the scene for a very long time, so seeing RAZOR 1911 in the hex triggered a flashback. They were huge back when I was running a “warez” BBS as a kid in the 90s.
Good old dos game cracks bundles with funky demos.
1911 which translates to 777 in hexadecimal.
In Unix’s chmod, change-access-mode command, the octal value 777 grants all file-access permissions to all user types in a file.
Within the binary of the file *
Yes, I was trying to keep it to a non-technical ELI5
Let’s educate the world 🌍🎉
To be fair, if you don’t know what that is at a glance you probably don’t know what the binary of a file is either
When you view or edit a text (.txt) file in a text editor like Notepad, you’re most often opening a file in ASCII encoding that uses the ASCII binary values for common letters, numbers and punctuation. The only values allowed in that kind of file are lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation.
You can also view or edit binary files, like executables (.exe), but you typically need a hex editor. If you tried to open a binary file in a plain text editor it wouldn’t know how to handle all the binary values that are not part of the standard ASCII set of letters, numbers and punctuation.
Hex editors show the data in hexadecimal format. They convert the binary data to numbers from 0 to 15 where the numbers 10 to 15 are replaced by the letters A to F. Often to make it clear people are talking about the hex number they add “0x” in front of the number. So, 0 becomes 0x0, 9 becomes 0x9, 15 becomes 0xF, 16 becomes 0x10, and 255 becomes 0xFF. This is an efficient way for people to work with binary data because 16 is 24 or 222*2.
Within binary files, there will still be a lot of sections that are in ASCII. For example, any error messages that have to be printed out for the user to see, like “this program cannot be operated in DOS mode”.
Razor 1911 is an infamous cracker group that has been around for decades. They often “sign” the programs they crack by putting “Razor 1911” inside the files, in a way where you can see it if you open it with a hex editor, but so it doesn’t affect the program.
So, what this is suggesting is that a program that Rockstar has released on Steam is not something they built themselves, but they’re actually distributing a cracked version that was released by Razor 1911.
Not the first time, won’t be the last.
Vestigial DNA
It means cracker fixed the issue for the developer, right?
It means the publisher was too lazy/greedy to remove their ancient DRM themselves and just nabbed the work someone else did, slapped Steam Stub on top and sold it.
Imagine if they distributed one of those that contained a strange bind syscall somewhere with a reverse shell.
They probably already do
Empress for sure at least.
Or its just a piracy check…
no breath
Or the crack was an in-house job and they are just using the in-house patch to get around it.
