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Encrypt my mod from theft


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Somebody is stealing my work, editing it slightly, and posting it somewhere else. Is there a way I can encrypt my NIFs and .dds's and permanantly set them as read only? Or even make it so that Skyrim is the only program that can read the file? This is getting on my nerves and I haven't published a mod here for a while because this is happening.

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No way to do that afaik, and in fact, fortunately, a lot has been learned by opening other mods, see their author's approach to common problems. Open source is allways a good thing.

 

There is some stuff you can do but it's not going to avoid the usage, might make it harder to the thief to say they made it, or in other words, at least there is proof the work is yours.

 

> Textures: You can fill the non-UVd space or otherwise non-visible texture space with a watermark, might show a bit on edges while on upper mipmaps (viewing from distance) and if they want they can remove it, but takes time and photoshop.

> Nifs: You can write your name all over the branch names, again, removable but takes time.

> Scripts: Don't include the source, they can allways decompile it though.

 

Haven't tested it but I remember someone said that Champolin fails to decompile scripts containing "While 1", if that's true you could add this within any script to block reverse enginering

Function DoNotDecompile()
While 1
EndWhile
EndFunction

My recomendation though is to just live with it. If your mod is good someone will upload it to some russian site (or other country, not saying all russians are pirates). You can control theft within the nexus since it has great moderators, outside of that anything can happen.

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No way to do that afaik, and in fact, fortunately, a lot has been learned by opening other mods, see their author's approach to common problems. Open source is allways a good thing.

 

There is some stuff you can do but it's not going to avoid the usage, might make it harder to the thief to say they made it, or in other words, at least there is proof the work is yours.

 

> Textures: You can fill the non-UVd space or otherwise non-visible texture space with a watermark, might show a bit on edges while on upper mipmaps (viewing from distance) and if they want they can remove it, but takes time and photoshop.

> Nifs: You can write your name all over the branch names, again, removable but takes time.

> Scripts: Don't include the source, they can allways decompile it though.

 

Haven't tested it but I remember someone said that Champolin fails to decompile scripts containing "While 1", if that's true you could add this within any script to block reverse enginering

Function DoNotDecompile()
While 1
EndWhile
EndFunction

My recomendation though is to just live with it. If your mod is good someone will upload it to some russian site (or other country, not saying all russians are pirates). You can control theft within the nexus since it has great moderators, outside of that anything can happen.

Well I've tried editing the file header in HxD, I've tried BitLocker and the last thing I'm going to try to do is change file owner metadata to something else from a Unix system using root chown or chmod. Not sure they will work.

 

They are slightly editing textures and names and claiming they made everything themselves.

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