EvaUnit02 on 27/7/2011 at 16:18
Driver: SF has had a troubled development and this will probably be reflected the press' reviews at the end of the day. But this is besides the point, the Always-on DRM is evil.
They removed the always-on DRM from AC2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction, replacing it with a single online check at start-up. I believe that AC: Brotherhood had a similar fair DRM check out of the box.
sNeaksieGarrett on 27/7/2011 at 19:25
I don't know about a check once at startup thing (? I haven't played AC2 in a while) but as far as I know you must always be connected. The only thing the (
http://www.ubi.com/US/Games/Info.aspx?pId=7731) last patch did (again, unless i'm missing something) was allow you to continue where you left off if you lose connection to their servers, since saves are stored there. It used to be where losing connection meant going back to your last checkpoint.
However in the history of me playing the game, I haven't had any disconnects, so I'm not really a valid test unless I just go and shut off my connection on purpose.
lost_soul on 27/7/2011 at 19:59
"a single online check at start-up."
It really doesn't matter. None of this "online authentication" shit will still be working in a decade or so when the developers have either:
*been bought out
*angered enough customers that they finally go out of business due to lack of sales
*lost the source code to keep their authentication system running, or just don't feel like updating it to work on whatever systems will be common at the time
but at least we can look forward to another 1-star-athon of reviews on sites like Amazon.
june gloom on 27/7/2011 at 21:26
"Angered enough customers" is never going to happen, and "lost the source code" doesn't even fucking make sense.
lost_soul on 27/7/2011 at 22:32
...on losing the source code not making sense:
Tell that to Square/former employees of LGS. Supposedly they thought they had lost the source code too. If they had it and wanted to, they could fix all the bugs affecting Dark engine games with modern systems.
What I'm getting at is that the Ubi people might lose their source code some day and the end product that was sold to "customers" could potentially become unusable if Ubi does not have the means to update their authentication system (or even the technical ability) due to lack of code.
june gloom on 27/7/2011 at 22:57
What the fuck do authentication servers have to do with the source code of anything, you ineffectual loony?
Do you even have any idea how these things work?
lost_soul on 27/7/2011 at 23:14
Who knows what kind of hardware we will have in a decade. It may be necessary for them to re-compile or update their authentication system to work on the new CPUs or operating systems at that time. For example, do you still play your Amiga? While the average joe could probably run his favorite old games in an X86 emulator, what guarantee do we have that Ubi would expend the resources necessary to keep the authentication servers running no matter how the market changes? Have I simplified this enough?
june gloom on 27/7/2011 at 23:30
I stopped reading when you said "average joe."
Yakoob on 28/7/2011 at 15:12
@Deth - I think his point was that the constant connection authentication is embedded into the game itself, so to strip it out in the future, one would need to remove it from source code and recompile the exe.
Quote Posted by lost_soul
Tell that to Square/former employees of LGS. Supposedly they thought they had lost the source code too. If they had it and wanted to, they could fix all the bugs affecting Dark engine games with modern systems.
...like updating the engines to run on dx11, use newest version of OpenAL, XAudio, updated their windows framework and net code? oh yea, that's just a 5 mintue fix right there. Heck, lets port our dos-specific code to win7 while we're at it, we only need to like, what, rewrite the whole engine?
