Conversions & CD-checks

Shaun (Whata) released Imola 2006 several days ago on rfactorCentral.com. As you may know this track is a conversion, so he had his doubts if he was allowed to publish it. After talking to rfC-Admins several times he got the ok IF he would add a cd-check to the setup so that only owners of SimBin-games which included the original imola-track can install this conversion for rFactor. So he came to me and after some time he convinced me to do the setup-part.

Finally it worked as it was supposed to and he released the track. But it didn’t take much time until some people wrote comments that the cd-checks are stupid and that they would be forced to buy a Simbin-game for using the track for rFactor. STOP! Forced to do? I want to make one point clear: if someone does not have one of the games, he cannot have the track for rFactor. Nobody is forced to do anything!

The idea came up to add a similia check to our patch 1.1 so that only people with rF 1.255F without a crack can install the mod. We thought about that and we are not sure if that would make sense, I want to give you our pro & contras

Pro:

  • we would make it harder for people using a cracked rF to play our mod
  • we would make sure that people have the latest rF-version (1.255F)

Contra:

  • it is not our job to deal with piracy
  • if would force the user to have a clean rF-installation (some people use cracks to avoid cd changes)
  • maybe the user wants to run CTDP 2006 on a different version 1.255F
  • maybe the user wants to install it into a temp-folder and copy it by hand to see what gets changed

So I would like to hear your oppionions about that. As this could be called “copy protection” somehow I want to ask that you focus on the topic and don’t start a general discussion about copy protection-software.

10 thoughts on “Conversions & CD-checks”

  1. I would personally not be happy about copy protection being added to CTDP’s mod. I wouldn’t be able to play as I used a cracked exe because trymedia never replied to my email’s asking for a new activation code.

  2. Speaking for myself, I have a lot of problems with version 1.255F for some reason, so I still use a previous one (I think it’s “something-or-other-D”. not sure though). As awesome as tech support have been in trying to help me, it’s all failed, and the game’ still tremendously unstable.

    If you do this I can always try to have 2 separate installs with different patches, one of them just to use CTDP, but I really wouldn’t like that for two reasons.

    A. disk space. My rFactor folder is over 15Gigs. Having a second one? ouch.

    B. The instability would be there on the CTDP install. Although it doesn’t crash/bug every time, it’d still kill quite a bit of my enjoyment of the mod.

    That said, I fully understand people who advocate this copy protection, as I would if I didn’t have this problem.

    BTW, the Imola track is great. The cars seem a bit too bouncy at the Variante Alta, but it seems realistic enough πŸ™‚

  3. my personal opinion is also to leave it out, it’s not really our concern and it just screams for problems. Games industry has major problems with DRM, why should we jump on it, if we don’t need to …

  4. @issoisso: a second rF installation would take away only some hundred mb on your hard disk, if you use rFactor Lite. πŸ˜‰
    http://www.rfactorcentral.com/rfactor_lite.cfm

    As for the check… I would leave it out from the mod: it’s ok for tracks and converted stuff (it’s a pleasure to finally have a proper and legit Imola to race on), but in this case it would probably create more problems than positive effects. We already have to struggle with games like GTA4 that requires 2 or 3 different programs to be installed on your pc, let’s try to keep at least mods safe from this. πŸ™‚

  5. I think that it not is the solution, and also not is your battle.

    Not exist a anti-piracy system that work, because allways exist somebody smarter than you that will find a way to avoid the anti-piracy system.

  6. Here is the problem with a check.

    Once it is installed. It is simple enough to zip up the files and rehost the content without the check.

    It already happened with Imola and the HistoriX mod.

    No reason to really do it as there is no possible positive solution and people will just start to throw stupid comments towards CTDP, then again some people are juvenile like that i guess.

  7. Oh and issoisso- You do not need to install the tracks twice. Just edit your config file to point to one tracks folder. My Tracks folder is not even installed in a Rfactor Installation.

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