Map Rights

[BigBangTheory]

I asked about this at alliedmoders. My thought was to have a plugin control a spawn logic relay or something like that. Here was the reply:

Hmm, that's possible but anybody could decompile the map or fix it, or someone could just write the same plugin to enable spawns. You could do any number of things like use stripper to remove or to fix entities. You could disable spawns and re-enable them with a plugin. You could start with stripper if you don't want to do any coding..

You may know that voogru's dodgeball maps are protected. Even the ones his community makes. He's developed a program that encrypts the map entities part of his map and then he uses a metamod plugin to decrypt them when the game loads the map. But short of that, anything is going to easily bypassed.

 

[Barracuda]

You may know that voogru's dodgeball maps are protected. Even the ones his community makes. He's developed a program that encrypts the map entities part of his map and then he uses a metamod plugin to decrypt them when the game loads the map. But short of that, anything is going to easily bypassed.

I broke that one. It was fully based around security through obscurity, using a fixed key stored in the program itself, merely protected by Themida. Therefore it was already broken by design.

But you don't even need a plugin to protect a map this way. Instead of encrypting the entity data, simply strip it from the public BSP and distribute the full BSP to trusted server owners only, if one thinks it's worth the hassle.

 

[Mr. Calhoun]

Ah yes. As long as you keep it well documented that YOU are the rightful owner of the map, there is no way anybody can steal your map. A person trying to claim ownership of your work when you have something like a tf2maps thread documenting your progress is in deep shit as soon as the community finds out.

I'm experiencing this problem with my most successful map. Which you might know perhaps. I never explicitly stated authorship on that map, only had a strong cooperation with US and UK based gaming server hosts in order to develop it. Thus a bunch of kids decompiled it, made their modifications and started claiming authorship. You notice a slight difference in artstyle though... Anyways, the first case I experienced ended up into the kid being almost expelled from his clan (there was suspicion about him lying already up before). During the last few months a new case appeared, the new kid does version numbering by himself, puts his name and name of friends as authors on the map and even requests people to to gift him hats for having made the map. Anyways, I'm crack down this this case soon.

Technically it's impossible for anyone to fake authorship on this map. I made various backups of all versions of the map and dropboxxed them in a secure folder, additionally my map sort of has weird references to stuff basically everywhere, almost as if the crazy part of my brain was put online. So unless you are me you probably can't explain everything on this map.

 

[ics]

Technically it's impossible for anyone to fake authorship on this map. I made various backups of all versions of the map and dropboxxed them in a secure folder, additionally my map sort of has weird references to stuff basically everywhere, almost as if the crazy part of my brain was put online. So unless you are me you probably can't explain everything on this map.

I kind of do the same. I have plenty of versions of my 2 maps that i saved up along the way i was doing the maps. First of all they are for future references if i decide to share my thoughts on the maps or simply me wanting to go back and see what place was looking odd and what did i change and why.

Then there are things hidden in the maps that tell who made it, obvious and not-so-obvious things. Someone might find some hints but not all of them.