Wolfire Games Forums

Is it actually that hard? I did a quick search, and I could find plenty of Half-Life 2 releases. From what I've seen it didn't take my friend too long either. Please take note, I'm not purporting that I've done this myself. It was a friend who actually did it. Not me. But the steam process was indeed neccessary, unless you wish to be caught, and then you will have failed. Anyhoo, believable or not, I gather that most people usually say they have cracked a game themselves? And from my experiences, in rather poor language.

It was a crack for the game by itself anyhow, it was not a crack for Steam. If you remove all the requests for Steam verification then it should run perfectly, aka without online play, patches or mods.

And cracks are illegal in most countries, so I assumed they were illegal in yours. Do you live in Sweden? Or another country where the copyright laws are more relaxed.

According to the site you gave me only one of them does PC games. And unfortunately I don't live in America, so I can't avail of them. Even if they did deliver to other countries the delay would be too long.

Anyhow, my point was that people will crack games for fun. Not just because they want them for free. Lugaru however, from a quick observation I made generates the activation code from the characters you use in your username? Not particularly secure, but then it would get cracked anyway. I'm perfectly comfortable with the demo myself, seeing as I don't have the cash to pay for the game, and I'm unwilling to crack it.

Is it actually that hard?

Yeah, pretty much. Writing a crack requires a lot of experience with the x86 assembly language, specialized debugging software, and a ton of time and ingenuity. In a game like Half Life, the code is going to be heavily obfuscated both intentionally to thwart people like your friend and inadvertently through compiler level optimizations. The piracy checks are going to end up being randomly strewn about the executable with no real identifiable signature.

Well, I thought about HL2+Steam cracking. It should be insanely difficult. Dunno about standalone HL2 though, I didn't even know you could play HL2 without Steam, but that may be so.

Cracking Lugaru is a piece of cake (no offense). You should buy it nevertheless, you'd support an uprising indie company, that'll be one more step away from hell if you go ahead and buy it.

The demo is just a small part of the whole experience, but I suppose you know that if you read the forums.

And cracks are illegal in most countries, so I assumed they were illegal in yours.

It's quite the opposite - cracks are legal or there are no laws against it (grey zone) in most countries. But what you said is a common legend.

And even if it were illegal, it would be a civil case, not a criminal case. So you'd have to have a specific case where the publisher or its lawyers sue you. It doesn't work like 'police busts apartment, guy goes to jail'. It's more like 'guy downloads cracked exe, software publisher's agents monitor it, file a case, guy gets sued, guy pays fine if publisher is lucky'.
I don't want to say that there are a lot of if's in there (which is the case), my point is that there's a long and costy way before this gets to court. Because it doesn't really suit the purpose, there are no cases worldwide that went like this.

Draw you own conclusions.

No you're not meant to be able to play Half Life 2 without Steam. That's why the requesting verification commands were removed.

I know cracking Lugaru would be a piece of cake, but as I said, I'm unwilling to do so. :p I'll wait for Lugaru 2 to shell out cash, something I happen to be short of. :p

How can you have a working knowledge of x86 assembler, compilers, and debugging, but you can't figure out how to make $19.95?

honestly? Lugaru isn't that hard to crack; (I've done it for fun). But, I haven't seen any on the net, so....

mach_override is the best hacking tool on macosx

I never said I had a working knowledge of them. It's my friend who does. I posess the littlest knowledge of them possible. :p Read my posts!

So what do we propose to stop hackers getting it?

Saranalos wrote:I posess the littlest knowledge of them possible. :p Read my posts!

Well, you kept saying that it was a piece of cake and that you were just too lazy to do it, so....

Colicedus wrote:So what do we propose to stop hackers getting it?

Hacking is the word for positive usage of in-depth knowledge of computers.

I think there should be no stopping of getting some tool to manipulate executables. It's good that such stuff is out there.

Yes; hacking is GOOD (see wikipedia's definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%28technology%29)

Colicedus wrote:So what do we propose to stop hackers getting it?

Piracy can't really be stopped. As I mentioned earlier, the best thing that you can do is have online services like multiplayer and a wolfire.net kind of online bonus system that can't really be cracked since it relies on an external server. While someone can always torrent the single player portion, you won't be able to pirate a wolfire.net account.

Why don't you just sell a "Cracking Lugaru For Dummies" manual for $19.95?

Hehe, yeah, but you can only download a trial version and to fully activate it, you'd have to buy the full version of the manual via PayPal.

But there's a crack manual for the crack manual, of which you can download the trial version... and so on.