Would it be possible that when you upload a skin (if you have s2) that you select some sort of "private" option that your skin would only be allowed with your account. So nobody else would be able to use it online? And if you want other people to use it you just select the "public" option.

In other words connect skins to accounts.

skins_x folder and dont publish it on anywhere

Not aviable at the moment, the best sollution would be to not upload it to LFSW. Others wouldn't see you your skin, but you could see it. The bad with it is that it's freakin anoying to see just plain white cars in race, aswell that the message "skin not found" is anoying aswell.

I think this would be abused.

Eg, Most skins I create are for public use, but I do not have the slots available to upload them all.

All it would take would be for someone to upload one as a private skin, and everyone else using it would then not be able to, and probably get grief for being a 'skin stealer' even though they have done nothing wrong.

The best way is to use skins that noone else would want to use - have your name or your team name on them.

This has been suggested before and I'd like to see it added.

All you'd need is for LFS to delete any private-flagged skins from user's PCs when the relevant account left the server. While on the server it could simply bury them in a temp folder somewhere. So while it'd still be possible to find and take a copy of the skin, it'd be annoying and waste time.

It may also help if it masked the name of the skins you're downloading. Right now there's no real need for it to show you, other than keeping everyone on the cutting edge in terms of info.

The thing is, firewalls might have an issue with an external online program wanting to delete files.

But the user can save it manually.　　Even LFS hide the file name and the root, you can find the DDS with some tool easily.

Quote from Bean0 :

I think this would be abused.

Eg, Most skins I create are for public use, but I do not have the slots available to upload them all.

All it would take would be for someone to upload one as a private skin, and everyone else using it would then not be able to, and probably get grief for being a 'skin stealer' even though they have done nothing wrong.

The best way is to use skins that noone else would want to use - have your name or your team name on them.

That would be a whole other scenario, but in general most people make a skin for themselves and would like to keep it that way.

There's no simple way to keep people from stealing skins if they really want to steal them. Any sort of encrypted file can easily be hacked, and even then it would need to be converted to an image file again for the game to use it so it could just be picked up somehow that way.


I think the ideal situation is just for people to stop stealing skins, but society has proven that people are jerks so that won't happen.

Pleaaase! Implement this into LFS in some way!

Todat i AGAIN saw a person with my private skin online :bananadea
He was using my private DriftWorks skin, and after we told him to take it off, he took it off, and used another skin, which was our teamskin!

He is known for stealing other people's skins.. Couldn't we just ban those disrespectful people from LFS?

They usually dont know how much time and effort goes into the making of only 1 skin.. Imagine how much time i had to spend on our teamskin pack! And about a month ago, i saw someone with that skin online, and i saw a screenshot from another person, which also contained the skin!

SamH, the moderator said: If you don't want people to see the skins, don't upload them to LFSWorld.. But that's the problem now! We want other people to see them, but we don't want them to be able to rip them!

And the stealers, just drive around, pissing people off, every time they get out of the pits. . . And there's nothing we can do about it now, i guess??

I would really like to see something like this implemented. I tend to get pretty damn greedy over my skins and don't really want everyone else using it, however, I would rather have my car's skin viewable than force others to view a white car.

Maybe if LFS randomized the colors of cars that had no skins it'd make it less annoying.

Quote from rsnake53 :

I would really like to see something like this implemented. I tend to get pretty damn greedy over my skins and don't really want everyone else using it, however, I would rather have my car's skin viewable than force others to view a white car.

Maybe if LFS randomized the colors of cars that had no skins it'd make it less annoying.

+1

What about the people who actually want the plain skin in white?

I still think a temp folder would help, especially if everyone didn't see the filename they were downloading. Could be worked around, but not during racing and I suspect would be more work than most stealers would be willing to put in.

Or we could use a system to send others a public skin while the user uses a private skin. I always updated my cars and didn't bother submitting it to the website while I was league racing. Everyone else got my first version while I always saw my up to date skin.

Not sure if something like that would be worth the trouble either.

Quote from rsnake53 :

Maybe if LFS randomized the colors of cars that had no skins it'd make it less annoying.

How about a skin-missing colour option ?

/me points at white car/red car/yellow car/oh screw it


FWIW IMHO skins system is fine and works well. You can share PRIVATELY with close friends and PUBLICALLY if you so choose. You can even choose not to share at all. If you want people to see them, then the risk is they will steal them. Software companies have had this problem for 20+ years now. What ever protection you put in, (even if LFS force spectate skin stealers from the track) people can rip the file and rename them and re-use them themself.

If you want them stolen don't upload them as has been said many times.

We had trouble with some people stealing our team skins, so we hunted them down ourselves, even re-uploaded newer versions and replaced the old ones with pink coloured "skin stolen" kits. =)

Best idea would be if Scawen and co implented a system with 32 skins for each car, that would be shuffled between people on a server (spectators don't need a skin). So then there would be a number of aviable racing skin(s) for each car (would be chosen randomly) so people would not see white cars, while you on the other hand could chose any skin you wanted from your skin selection people would still only see one of these fixed skins. Would preven skin stealing.

Random generating Pass protected folder for skins.
Since ppl start thinking how to get the skin from place, the whole thing should be Frequently updated (just the way numbers are generates)
So keygens wouldn't much usefull.

Quote from Keling :

How about a skin-missing colour option ?

Thats exactly what I was thinking. I don't know why I couldn't sum it up as well as you.

This was the only reason I didn't bother with collecting skins in NR2k3. Hell, it already happens when you add AI to a race.

Yeah, that could work too, if the skin is white / no skin it would assign the driver with a skin. I am not a fan of just colors, so preferable this would be a racing-stylish-skin.

A quick way to pillory skin-stealers would be to make a dedicated thread, where the victims could post a screenshot of the skin that was stolen and mention the name of the driver.

Rude, but so is stealing skins. Might at least scare off a bunch of people.


Technically (as has been said), you cannot completely prevent skin stealing. It's like streaming media: if you see it / hear it, it is somewhere on your computer and therefore only a step away. Of course you can enlarge this step a bit.

The possibility to tag your skins as "private" right from your account would not make it impossible at all to steal the source file of your skin, but at least people couldn't use it directly from your account by just typing in the right name for the skin.

On the other hand - almost as a benefit - you would have a pool of true "public" skins (maybe browseable?), and many potential skin-thief would possibly rather look thru this "legal" supply first than steal a private skin.

Edit: not showing your real personal skin to other racers wouldn't be an option to me. Isn't this exactly the point of making skins? If you want to hide your skin, you can always upload one skin and use another with the same name.

That name & shaming idea will never pass on this forum tho, even if people agree's on it I still think that an option where the user could chose if the system would let other see a random generated skin or the user's skin would be awesome. Then the ones that are really cranky about the skins can chose people not beeing able to see it.
As someone said, once you have uploaded things to internet it's not private anymore.

Does anyone think distributing poor quality public skins while privately distributing the hi res one would work?

It would be nice to race with a different color at least, and blurry textures would scare me away from using it at least. It would kinda suck for replays, but I wouldn't really mind much with that.

Hell, if everyone puts 50 KB skins on LFSW, I could load them in sim! (Still on dial up...)

Don't think that would work, because the second you changed to your high-res skin in-game the other would automatically download it aswell.
Also, if I got you right, about the server prossessing it first and let people download a low quality one.. not sure if that is possible, and if it is, would not be a good or simple sollution to the problem.

Quote from Chupacabras84 :

Random generating Pass protected folder for skins.
Since ppl start thinking how to get the skin from place, the whole thing should be Frequently updated (just the way numbers are generates)
So keygens wouldn't much usefull.

You still can dump video card memory and extract dds textures

Still not an good option if you ask me