Encoding png files
by Jacob · in Torque Game Engine · 02/26/2005 (4:26 pm) · 9 replies
Hi everyone,
How could I prevent the user of my game from seeing all the pictures in the directory folders? I am specifically interested in hiding all the possible inventory item pictures to keep their availability unknown until they are found in the game. Is there some way to encode them and have them only visible in the game? Thanks!
How could I prevent the user of my game from seeing all the pictures in the directory folders? I am specifically interested in hiding all the possible inventory item pictures to keep their availability unknown until they are found in the game. Is there some way to encode them and have them only visible in the game? Thanks!
About the author
#2
I think this would be easiest since you wont have to write your own custom art formats for images and so forth.
02/26/2005 (5:12 pm)
You could write an extension to the stream class to load and save encrypted formats. Then you could just write a conversion utility for each of your art asset types to convert them to the encrypted format.I think this would be easiest since you wont have to write your own custom art formats for images and so forth.
#3
02/26/2005 (6:59 pm)
Sounds great...I wish I knew how to do all that :) Is there anything out there that would show me how to? Still quite new to C++. Any books or maybe a resource that could be used or at least a place that I could start from? Thanks again! 
#4
02/26/2005 (7:45 pm)
Jacob, I will be posting a code resource which is a simple version of the DRM we will be using to protect the content on future TGE demos which is suprisingly similar to Robert's suggestion ;)
#5
02/26/2005 (7:54 pm)
That's wonderful - I look forward to it. Good timing <--- seems to be quite common around here :)
#6
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=7253
02/27/2005 (12:41 am)
Resource is posted.www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=7253
#7
02/27/2005 (2:35 am)
What happened to the BM8 format?? Wasn't that some kind of special format so that you couldn't copy the files??
#8
02/27/2005 (2:41 am)
The Bm8 format is an 8bit palletized bitmap format. It is mostly used for cards that don't have a high texture storage capacity.
#9
02/27/2005 (2:46 am)
The BM8 format is NOT a protected format. It was an 8-Bit Bitmap with Alpha and MipMaps.. It took me about 2 days to reverse engineer 90% of that file format after Tribes 2 released. 
Torque Owner Harold "LabRat" Brown