Hide Bitmaps from users

[Halsafar]

How would one go about keeping the bitmaps for your game as your own.
Is there a way to hide them easily without much code implimentation?
Any complex ways?
Any solutions?

[Jacob Roman]

Have you heard of Pak files? Professional games use this now. In this program called Pak Explorer you can create your own pak files as well as open them. And I believe you can use different compression techniques other than .zip's to really prevent people from accessig your data files. Although other people who have Pak explorer have a chance on accessing them.

Also there is code on the internet to be able to load the bitmaps or any other data from your Pak files.

[Electroman]

If you don't want anyone to let anyone view them then best way is to make your own format up. If you want something working wuick then PAK files would be good enouhg but making your own format is more secure. I made one a while back that takes bitmaps and puts them all in one file and then runs a compression algo on them which when viewed it just looks like static.

[NoteMe]

Just remember that patching and upgrading software (this goes for shelf games) gets kind of slow if you have to update the whole resource file just to add some new textures and models. So if you make sutch a format, it should be pretty dynamicaly.


ØØ

[Halsafar]

*.pak files??? that begins to bring me back to Doom.Wad, DukeNukem3D.grp, Quake.pak files....Those where the common formats...not anymore, there are billions now. I am a fan of Blizzard MpQ file structure, at least for Starcraft it provided nice ways to hack.

Anyway I would enjoy my own file format...Problem is, I need to end up with a bmp and I have no idea how to 'make a file format' or run compression on a file.

I don't even exactly know wut compression does, I believe it finds and marks any instances of like data, then removes the data and replaces it with a symbol. A symbol which relates to the data which it removed...

Any assistance on this subject?

[NoteMe]

There is millions of diffrent ways to compress a file. I think that ZIP files relies in Huffaman codes. You can start by googleing on that.

[Halsafar]

There is millions of diffrent ways to compress a file. I think that ZIP files relies in Huffaman codes. You can start by googleing on that.

I checked google for Huffaman codes and it found 3 pages of nothing related.
I search for compression algrythms and found nothing I could readily use, seems like a more indepth time consuming search is in need.

I came to one easy conclusion.

First I must know, I got a 32bit bitmap...Is that still a 256 colors picture? Or is it (255x255x255)

My plan is to use GetBitmapBit and turn each picture in an Bit array.
Stream the values into a textfile in binary mode.
Encrpty the file by any means.

Then on loading
Unencrypt the binary file, stream its values back into a byte array and use SetBitmapBit to restore the bitmap.

Will it work???

[NoteMe]

I did a search and I got 116000 hits, and the first one was pretty relevant...


http://www.howtodothings.com/showart...sp?article=313

[Electroman]

There is also an API for compressing which is what i used, if you want I'll check what it was....I think you needed a small dll too but its on most windows machines.

[Halsafar]

lets see this api.
thanks

[Electroman]

I've attached a zip file containing the dll & a class which does the compression using the dll.