Protecting my images

[Shuya]

Hello dear programmers,
i'm making my own rpg, i've found a guy realy cool at drawing we are working togheter for the superior good, BUT now i've the pictures in a stupid folder called "pictures", all png files.
The question is: how i can protect my precious images from being stolen from all over the world the day that i decide to release the free demo?
Can't sleep at night thinking at my pours images

[LuX]

You could resource the images directly into the exe, though clever enough people still could fetch them out of there. If you're really hard core you could simply crypt the files and resource them. Nobody gonna steal that shit then.

Realistically, just resourcing them should be enough, but using a simple crypt algorithm shouldn't be that hard to implement either.

[Shuya]

resourcing in the exe sounds good, any one know a good tutorial to do it?

[DeitusPrime]

Note: If using VS (any 'Express' edition) you won't be able to use .rc files, (you'd have to look into compressing\"compiling" them into a .res file with an external editior\third party software that would allow editing .rc files), then 'Express' would accept the .rc file (in the .res format) /redundant_sentence

Basically, (it's been a while for me, since the previous 'purchased copy of VS' is Visual Studio 6 Pro...so I don't use .rc...and I despise "MFC" based projects, lol.) you'd want to create a "new file\add new item", make it a .rc file, then inside that (right-click it) add new item\"insert resource", select 'image file', load your image with that, and give it a name such as IDD_IMAGE001, and in your code you can reference to that name(in that case IDD_IMAGE001).

Edit: almost forgot, .rc files won't appear in the 'add new item' list if using VS Express.

In any event, read up on Resource Files.

However, if that's a no-no(using VS Express and\or don't want to use a third party program to .res it) look into Loading a Texture From a Zip File in DirectX 9

I haven't gone through it yet, but it should be easily adaptable for password-able or encrypted files. (was going to do the same thing myself when I get my game going)

Hope this helped in some way.

[Shuya]

Reading images from a zip sounds intresting, but your link do not work

[engi]

Everything can be reverse engineered, that being said if you use your own file format it's much more difficult, just keep in mind that since your game will need to load these assets, it doesn't matter what method you choose to use, if someone really wants to crack it, they will be able to, eventually.

After all, your .exe or .dll will still contain all the logic you implement to decode the assets, so anyone with a disassembler and knowledge in assembly will be able to reverse engineer your code and write their own loader for it.

So I recommend you just add some basic protection and leave it at that, it will also prevent someone from simply copy pasting it.

My 2 cents

[LuX]

Here's an old topic about resourcing: http://www.planetchili.net/forum/viewto ... f=3&t=1338 it has all the info and downloads you need.