Sorry for offering people that race with us the possibility to have nicer cars on their screen. Now what's the reason for all the shouting?
LFSW is not protected, nor are we at this time, because we simply can't. The purpose of this thread is to find a solution for that problem.
Also, on that same page it says the following:
Yes it would take fundamental programming changes but reading from the replies in this thread I seem to be not the only one with this problem, so it might be worth to put it on the list for improvement on the long term...
I'm sorry I didnt see that thread before, although I have used the search function before posting.
What I read there is another opinion of why you wouldnt want this feature implemented or why you think it's too difficult to implement, I don't see a valid reason for why it couldn't work.
It's not that it couldn't work (it has the ability to work, but it is outlandish), its all the other issues and complexities that just make it really an "out-of-the-way" feature... and all for what? Someone using a team skin which means absolutely nothing or has no affect on anyone but a team? An LFS team???
If there was a real Ferrari team playing this game, they would get pretty mad with the usage of their stuff of course, but that isn't the same as our teams running into issues which are completely impossible to enforce.
This is all a public domain world/community in LFS, you gotta realize that. Nobody has ownership of anything. And if you want to spend time to think of a solution in which people must be enforced, that'd really spoil the game's atmosphere of flexibility, especially for skinning. It is like passing on MP3s over the internet... and we really don't need The Skin Police.
Definitely NOT if teams are going to make their skins so readily available for people to "abuse", and therefore circumventing any efforts made by the LFS devs. I cannot think of a more wasteful use of the devs' time, to implement such drastic changes in such circumstances.
The discussion took hold because of an 1ST posting, and I myself participated even though I really DONT care personally. Nevertheless I posted my idea for a solution because I was mistakenly under the impression that, despite best efforts to protect team skins, they were being stolen from the skins_x folder and reused. I didn't realise until later that those skins are available in quality resolutions for download from the 1ST website's front page.
I still think that a mood of intolerance in the community would be a far more effective route to stop people racing in team skins without permission.
I am not sure that I understood it correctly... But the problem is not that some people steal the likeliness of a team skin - the problem is that some just go through their skins_x folder looking for a nice skin for themselves illepall
Though offering hi-res versions of teams skins on the team's site is little uncautious. I would never even upload my own personal skins to the "render my skin"-thread simply because some a***ole might just "take it".
One would think that just contacting the "misbehaved person" by some kind of PM in friendly tone telling him why he shouldn't use their skin and give some links to where to find some good public skins.
I bet it is still most of the cases that the "guilty" just doesn't "know" it.
dSRC currently has 26 members i believe so i think we class as a big team.
Having produced all off the S2 skins to date for the team i can confirm that it is indeed a big job. How we have gone about it more by luck than judgement has produced highly personal skins for all members making them less piratable and IMO hasnt taken a massive amount of time.
Several factors are key.
I dont design the skins. Therefore the workload is spread between 2 members as Ian.H designs the base skin (his own naturally).
As we are using a vector based graphics package it is incredibly easy to substitute, align and change for individualities. Currently GTR and Formula classes have 3 personal details; number, Nationality flag and a personal colour. Road going cars also have the drivers name added to make 4 individualities per skin.
I am now at the stage where i can skin the team in under an hour per car even when i am fiddling lining names up for road going cars. The key is a little preperation. I have 2 prior prepared files which are invaluable.
A swatch catalogue with every members personal colour saved into it. Each swatch is named with the players name exactly as it is to appear on the skin, their number and which country flag is correct. These swatches are then ordered by country so that when i apply a flag to the skin, i can relock that layer while i produce all of the skins needed and i never have to reapply a flag more than once. The other file is simply all of the country flags displayed at the correct size and ordered to correspond to the swatch order. Simple copy and paste, a quick align and voila
As for piracy i have had several instances of people using my personal skins complete with my name on the side and frankly it makes me LOL.
Very flattering tbh especially for someone renowned IRL as having the creativity of an Ant
I can understand with team skins it is a different issue slightly. I think that having a link on your site screaming get me is asking for it a little but thats just my opinion. I think you can find links to our skin packs in our forum somewhere but AFAIK everyone has uploaded to LFSworld and people get them from that. The skins i am producing are all in the <400kb range anyway so you get the hires version from LFSWorld
I remember one instance of someone using one of our skins on our server but tiny :margesimp soon sorted him out. As he failed to remove it and then rejoined still using it after being kicked i think he got a 999 dayer illepall
The skins from skinx folder after being dowloaded should be attached to a big file - sort of database - of dowloaded skins so far. Like the email programs they dowload all mail from the mailbox server and keep them in sort of cache file. No additional comression. Each file could have some sort of additional information then - about the author and Team it is used by.
I understand your point Tweak, but I hope you agree that LFS is growing and turning more professional every day. I can imagine teams like Ocrana, pod, n!, pttm, and so on, who have real life sponsors and race in EPS where you get money for podium places, wouldn't really like the negative publicity wreckers and noobs with their skins could deliver them. This can be an even bigger problem in the future if simracing as an e-sport keeps developing the way it has over the last few years.
I'm sure that when LFS has found a way to protect the skins in skins_x folder, teams where the stakes get high will protect their skins at all costs. Now there's simply no need to protect them cos there's a big leak on the other side
The only way for this to work would be if the skins are loaded into memory of your GFX card only. I havent heard about anybody extracting anything for a GFX yet since all hacks are done to extract stuff from computer memory only and nobody did yet need to crack textures. But for this LFSW would need much more bandwidth. An easy solution around this is that they allow us to host or own skins on or own webhosts. I'm sure everyone has at last 10MB free webspace from his ISP.
I really don't see the connection here. If a wrecker uses the skins of some team and goes to a server with it - I don't think no one takes it as the wrecker was part of the team. The skin the wrecker is using has 0 effect on how he gets treated.
And how is it loaded in GFX memory ? illepall
Well anyway it's not a big deal. As some people already said, Scawen should make a tiny file format (jpgx) that encrypts skins files. When a user download them via LFSWorld, he downloads the encrypted jpg file (jpgx) that will be store in skin_x directory.
So the game load it, decrypt it in memory and show it on car, simple as that
Why are you talking about extracting decrypted skin from memory ? illepall
99.9% of thoses skins stealer are just kids that stole skins from skin_x directory, they are not able at all to extract skins from memory, it's a hard task.
They will probably don't even know that the skins are decrypted in memory or even encrypted on hard disk ("how shit i cannot open them with Photoshop, i'm wondering why ").
@ Becky Rose, i understand what your talking about with the CD keys but although these things come with keygens none work online at all, which is why i think its an effective solution, all MP games need a proper vaild cd key as opposed to just the keygen ones.
Also i think one way to combat this is to run your own server then you could kick/ban anyone using the skins.
It is also impossible to do. LFS uses filenames to load the skins so really there is no way of knowing if the skin you see on the other car is actually your skin or is a different skin entirely sharing the same filename. I have seen one or two people get into embarassing arguments over skins when they discover that the "offender" is using the same filename on a different texture. Also many people seem to accidentally use the default file names from LFS resulting in mistaken identity once more when racers are wearing the default skins.
Tis why I put my initials at the beginning of the file name. Well, not real name initials, but NH for NightHawk. Helps a bit more to identify from the could be common problem you mention.
Plus us stoneage dialup guys would no longer be able to see skins. I couldn't download skins every time entering a server. I do it from the replays and save them for next time I see those folks.
Well why should I think about skin abusing, shell they use them if you are unsure if a member belongs to us, just watch LFSW or our Website, then you'll see if the one belongs to our team or not.
Yes we have real life sponsors and if someone else uses our skin he just drives advertising around for us.
There is no way to protect skins and i think there is also no need to.
I spend a lot of time for our skins, if you want to find out if the skins belongs to the driver, look at the car the drivername is writen down on it if it matches he is the owner, if not he's a fan of my work
If there is any negative publicity than we can react to it.
illepall 
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