If conversion becomes a problem and/or is impossible, I will end up doing the same thing. It's not a bad thing by any means, I'm sure there will be plenty of peeps that will still download and play our Fo3 mods, and if nothing else it puts our work out in the community to be judged and recognized. I'm definitely not going to "scrap" all this work!

Miax

It anonymises the data. You cannot be identified from it.

Please remember you've already installed Securom on your computer in order to play FO3. It's doing exactly the same stuff, except hidden in the background. It can't be closed, it's more invasive, and on top of that it contributes nothing save DRM. So even if you never use Steam's facilities to buy games 75% off on sale days, to update without hassle, or to redownload your games to every computer you use, it's still preferable to Securom/Starforce/other DRM software.

Exactly. I wouldnt scrap my 9 months of work, an epic story, and some pretty awsome level design. Plus, conversion to NV is not an option for me, too much of the story is worked into the DC area. So I would have to rewrite a large portion of it, which isnt exactly impossible, but would add a long time to the finish date. Plus, I will have some loose sequals in NV. But all much smaller than my current mod.

And completely futile. Civ 5 uses Steam as well and there was a pirate version available within 3 days of release. Now the average consumer will have to go through that extra layer of inconvenience in order to install their game and it prevented nothing. The same thing will happen with New Vegas. Rather than deter the pirates, the developers/publishers are simply making things more difficult for the average consumer who respects their copyright and goes out and buys the game. I agree that DRM is necessary in order to prevent the average consumer from simply copying their newly bought game and passing it along to their distant cousins. But nothing more than a simple copy protection scheme is needed. No matter how elaborate your system is, the pirates are going to figure it out and break it. Assassin's Creed had one of the most elaborate systems devised yet, with players being forced to be online to play it, and it was broken within 3 weeks. So it's time that the software companies just learned to live with that fact and stopped further inconveniencing the general public.

I can understand where these things make the whole thing look alright to you. My knowledge of this issue comes from having 12 years experience in IP/network security/abuse administration/similar. The things I could say about my experiences with this are way "off topic" for a video game forum.

I really wanted to see NV. It would hurt not to get to. I will try to think of a way to make this initial 'steam' thing be within my comfort zone. I have an idea which maybe could work but it is a tremendous pain in the ass just for one video game, it would require a seperately registered copy of my OS for example, and a separate disk (not just partition). I know how to work with the problem email introduces at least.

I'm not supposed to have to treat a video game install like a virus infection. Not fair. Seriously.

Not only would that be hugely financially irresponsible (how many people would pre-order if they knew a crack would be out immediately), the simple fact is that the companies have a responsibility to their shareholders to attempt the best DRM they can. Even if the developers felt as you did, I strongly suspect the lawyers wouldn't let them release it without a decent DRM attempt.


You're not. You're treating it like any other commercial software installation in the last ten years.

If you can't then you're out of luck. Your choice.

SecuROM's got 2 basic configurations for the software distributor, one is a disk check only and one is an online register component. I had believed that Fallout 3 was only using the disk check?

http://www.securom.com/support_faq.asp#how

Also seeing on the web for example:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_4.html which talks about it.

It would be no more irresponsible than what already exists, and wouldn't deter the honest consumer from pre-ordering one bit. We all know that all anti-privacy attempts so far have been totally ineffective, so what''s to stop anyone from waiting until the pirates have released their versions? If Civ 5 can be cracked within 3 days of release, the same will hold true for New Vegas since the two will be using the same basic DRM system. If the game companies want to deter piracy, they'd be better off fostering goodwill with their customers so that they don't mind spending money and supporting the company, rather than continually adding new layers of inconvenience for the general public to endure.

I was not planning to go down to Gamestop to purchase some $1000 'commercial' software product with which I will make gobs of money, and a 1 user license for it. All I wanted was to buy a video game. When the time comes that a video game has to be purchased, licensed, and managed like serious commercial software, I will be rolling my eyes and wondering what to do with my time. That would be a WHOLE lot of potential undesired exposure of personal data, if I tried to own many of those games.

I do have a machine sitting in the closet behind me that can run Windows 98. There's always Sim City 3000, I guess. Too bad it won't run on XP.

Yep, and Securom will still be running in the background, checking for virtual drives, often rejecting to run the game outright if you've got any (whether you're using them or not). Sure it can run without online authentication, but the rootkit stuff will be running whatever. The 'you must go online to install' part of steam is hardly an issue; everyone has internet access on their PCs, particularly gamers.
It's pretty excessive to make a new partition for Steam when it only gathers stats when you're playing games, only runs when you want it to; if you haven't made one for other DRMs, it's going to be an irrational response to the DRM being honest and visible this time rather than hiding itself.

W.r.t. the license issue; it works in the gamer's favour. You can redownload the game to as many computers as you want, whenever, no questions asked. I prefer the switch from 'here is box, you own one disk, you must use it to play' to 'you have this game now, you can play it whenever whereever'. No rustling in boxes, no lengthy reinstalls faffing with CD keys and disks on new PCs (just download steam and select the games you want to install and go browse the internet whilst it happens). Account-based ownership makes a heck of a lot more sense in a world where you change PC often, use multiple PCs regularly (desktop/laptop or home/work or whatever) and so on.

You and I are not disturbed by the same things, here. SecurROM screwing up and making my game malfunction would be annoying junk, for sure. Insulting. But anything involving a transfer of information gathered from my PC to a third party is a different realm of trouble.

The trouble is, SecurROM does it too.

I don't believe it does when it is deployed in cd-check mode only, which is what I believe fallout 3 is?

Also - - even if it had - - and I had somehow allowed SecurROM to connect to some 3rd party and offload data - it wouldn't change that it's one's goal to minimize the number of times this happens. Having it happen once doesn't mean you let it happen 10 more times.

It doesn't report your hardware unless you join in the Hardware Survey that pops up once or twice a year, it just tracks play stats. That's par for the course these days (trend started with Halo) and is only really useful for balance/game design feedback- things like Bungie's Halo deathmaps plotting who died where to what weapons on each map allowed for better understanding of map design.
Valve at least make sure they're anonymised, and I'd be pretty surprised if it sent any gameplay data beyond hours spent/achievements got for NV. NV's singleplayer so it doesn't need Team Fortress-2-esque full feedback, and given how FO3 didn't have any functionality beyond that, I'd be surprised if Obsidian had put it in.

This is an extremely good argument. My good friend at work Mike has also told me a ton of good things about steam as well.

The thing about being old is that change svcks. I don't know that I would be willing to do it for any other game, but for FNV? No choice.

The need for DRM makes all kinds of sense, and I understand the need for it. At the same time I feel as though I've lived through so many viruses/malware/adware/blahware in my years that I have grown to mistrust anything running on my computer that I don't directly want there. In my experience the majority of it takes more from my system/identity/activity than I would wish them to, so it is somewhat difficult to now openly embrace such programs. I'll deal with it, I just don't enjoy the idea of it.

I took a look at this - - - there was in fact something I didn't expect to see.

When I started fallout3.exe (no mods loaded), and had not loaded a save at that point, I saw my machine do a DNS lookup for the hostname go.micrsoft.com. This returned IP address 64.4.11.160. A TCP connection was then made on port 80 to that machine and a URL was requested. Netstat showed that fallout3.exe was responsible for this connection.

I was able to see the URL that fallout3.exe had loaded, and I gave it a try myself. That URL seems to cause the microsoft web server to attempt a redirect or similar to www.us.steinberg.net, which is a CNAME for another host - us.steinberg.net - - and that host doesn't have DNS right now. It looks like the same result when you do this from either Europe or USA.

I note though that the company which has this domain (steinberg.net) has some stuff to check out on their site, and info about the types of services they provide ( http://www.steinberg.net ). Seems to be in Germany.

I did this several times, and saw the same result. I will guess that fallout3.exe was set to send something to the steinberg network, but I don't have the greatest understanding of what windows apps like this might be up to.

I took my character out (no mods still) and got it killed by an enclave squad 2 times, and at least from that, I did not see any new traffic go out. Fallout3.exe did not seem interested in sending information about my character's deaths.

Interesting things, here.

I'm going to be watching these games more carefully in the future, and I'll restrict this stuff a bit more on my LAN I think. I'm glad you said something.

Very interesting indeed - and one of the reasons why I don't trust these programs either.

It is very hard in fact to restrict outbound traffic on common ports unless you restrict the IP ranges your PC can communicate with. Realistically though if you watch it do it's evilness once or twice and capture the destination port/IPs as you have (nice work BTW), then we could block those IPs on our outbound and mute the snitch.

If companies were open and honest about what they are doing, the data they send and did so in the clear for all to see, I wouldn't be worried. But they don't work this way.

Thanks for sniffing around Tarrant.

Personally my plan is to play yhe base game right through, then play through side-quests. If i can play after the main quest then great, if not you can guess the first thing i'm changing then i going work on some tweaks for myself and finally when something like FOMM comes out that can make .esms from .esps i'm gonna start on a project i've already laid the base plans for.

Sometimes that initial connection is one connection too many. Best way to mitigate something serious is to disconnect the machine's ethernet cable from the network before running the app with the problem. Thing is, with trying to block IPs and connections and such, when someone else puts code into your machine, you can't predict what it's going to try to do unless you've got the source code to read (that happens sometimes, tho). You don't even necessarily know what executable you are going to see be the bad guy. For example, about a month ago, I saw an infected vserver where, the trojan process was created by the hacker causing the machine to connect to the interwebz and svck a perl script straight into the perl interpreter. So, your 'trojan' executable was the perl system binary running as apache with no local copy of the script being held or ever having been written. yay. I was able to collect the perl script in that case and knew which IPs to block while the vulnerability was located, but that's not always how it goes.

A somewhat-fix for this particular thing I saw last night would be making the DNS on your LAN point 'go.microsoft.com' to, say, 127.0.0.1 or somewhere similarly dead, but I only know this because I saw what it did (which is kinda like the horse already getting out of the gate, except in this case the horse had gotten outside the gate and didn't know where to go). Not all trojans will use your network's nameserver to do anything important.

Games for Windows Live, while annoying, is hardly a trojan.

For one thing it's written on the box.

anyway. we've digressed really bad here.. so umm yeah... I'm gonna try and re-rail this train wreck and see if we can get it moving again. now what if the nif file format and model formats change, wouldn't we have to wait for a new nifscape and such to come out, hopefully 3ds max 2011 can open it though, I have a copy at least

A nif file format change would be problematic, but the Nifskope team seems to be pretty good about updating it quickly.

Be nice if Bethesda could release any changes themselves, but there must be a reason why they don't.

I'm really curious to see how they handle the weapon modifications. Seems to me that a nif with nodes that can be turned on and off via script would be the best solution, but replacement models is likely easier to implement.

Well it may work like this You use the weapon mod - the weapon gets deleted from your inventory, it's replaced by the new version, giving the appearance it's the same one but modified.

steinberg.net =! (Microsoft.com | Windows Live). The URL that the .exe accessed at microsoft didn't immedietely strike me as being Live related, but I couldn't swear on that.

It remains the fact though, that at the time I saw fallout3.exe connect to the internet, it did not deliver a payload to a 3rd party network such as steinberg.net. It's a different situation than if I'd seen something go out. It was a broken connection attempt (no DNS on the host).

There is some evidence that the hostname this is trying to access may have only worked for a 1 year period between 2002 and 2003. So, whatever function this may have had, there is the possibility that it never worked for Fallout 3. Wikipedia says that Bethesda's been around since the late 80s, and I've heard that some of the code in Fallout 3 was brought forward from earlier games. One possibility is that its a relatively harmless, defunct function which maybe shoulda been deleted so it doesn't look silly when someone notices it. I prefer to think that's what it was. But I don't know obviously.

His point was that data collection has been used for good, not that every game collects data.

You apparently see Steam as some kind of shifty program that will steal all your information and set your computer on fire. Considering Valve's history, I'd say that's rather unwarranted, but you did get your information from a Wikipedia article...
Either way, you're taking what Steam does the entirely wrong way. You're seeing the glass half-empty when it's really three-quarters full. For instance, automatic patching. Despite what the Wikipedia page says, you can disable Steam's automatic updating - and you can even play the games, too, if they're single-player. Besides, I think it's fair to assume that Obsidian would have learned from Bethesda's mistakes with the Fallout 3 patches, so even then it shouldn't be much of a big deal.
Secondly - statistic collection. Is that really such a big deal? Practically everything nowadays collects information from you - browsers, programs, Windows itself... is the way you use Steam really such a big deal? If you were concerned about privacy that much, you probably wouldn't even want to connect to the internet without a bunch of proxies between you and the 'web. Of course, considering how you really got into finding out the truth behind what is probably a misspelling of Microsoft...

As to Steam as DRM - Steam is probably the best digital rights management system right now. Not because it has the very best protection, but because it's the easiest and safest to use - and even has benefits, too. Plus, unlike SecuROM or uPlay, Steam doesn't force you to have an immortal internet connection, or install annoying junk that clogs up your system.