Demo: Encrypted or Not?

[KanaX]

Welp, seems that there's not real way to automatically update patches etc. Scripts have their own problems too. I'll just stick to the classics. I thank you all. Have a productive today.

 

[sweetladyamy]

If I may, I'd only encrypt the parts that I was absolutely sure were fully functional, and then...7zip the rest.

The file type '.7z' is a very reliable compression from my experience, and often times, 300 MB becomes as little as 30 MB.

.7z files can be compressed and uncompressed by the freeware known as 7zip.

Just my thought. .rar is another decent compressed file, but winrar is the only program I know of that handles the compression of .rar files, and winrar is not freeware.

 

[amerk]

He'd still need a way to provide patch updates to the end user and a means of replacing existing encrypted files, if changes were to be made after the initial download.

The players could probably just download updates and grab whatever encrypted file is there and replace it with the new ones, but assuming he's doing this for commercial projects, it's kind of expected that any updates be handled automatically without expecting the player to do this manually themselves.

 

[Tsukihime]

It requires the player to download the patch on its own, separately from the project/demo. This wouldn't be such a problem, if the players actually read that they need to download the patch. I can hardly get them to read a very important note given with the demo.

 
Well, you typically wouldn't include the patch with the main file, so they'll have to download it on their own at some point.


If you're looking for automated patching solutions, you would have a separate version-checker that will download patch data if they are available, and then let the patcher do the rest of the work.

It's only for patching. I often go back to previous maps to apply a layer of polish (which I couldn't provide two years ago). This can mean new events, or a slight change in mechanics (which can be done with the script, of course), but it can also mean new graphics, new sounds, etc. Also, what if a resource is missing? Can I include it in the patch, or does it count as a new resource?

Those are all considered patches. Patches can include new resources as well.


What the patcher does is load new files instead of old files, so if you have a new map with extra events, it will load the new map with those extra events and ignore the old map.

It falls under the category of patchers that don't work with the standard RM encryption.

When it comes to patching and RM encryption, it is proprietary and the EULA forbids users from reverse engineering it. So if you have a tool that builds or reads RGSS3A archives, they are considered illegal unless someone clarifies that it is actually not illegal to do so.


Now, in order for someone to provide a tool that will patch your files AND have them encrypted using the default encryption, at some point it would need to be reverse engineered because by default RPG Maker only reads one encrypted archive (so you'd need something that will read data from other archives), or you could potentially re-build the existing archive, which would also require reverse engineering.


For patches, I would recommend NOT using RM encryption for the patches. Instead, use a different archive format with its own encryption/compression applied. The patches themselves could use any archive format as long as you have a tool to build them and another tool in the game to read them.