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[Moral Panic]

I don't know anything about the situation or have any opinion about the issue more broadly, but calling someone a moron is insulting them. You're not arguing you didn't insult him, you're arguing he deserved it. Which is fine, but most forums will agree that in order to prevent conversation from exploding, you need to have a rule that people can't insult each other, even if one side of the argument is correct.

I have never seen a forum which doesn't allow people to insult each other. Even here which is stricter than 99% of forums people still sends low level insults without a eyebrow being raised.

 

[Scythesurge]

EDIT: Wow, this post is now edited!

 

[Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew]

Is this a new meme?

Are you a new meme?

 

[MUnited83]

so the main reason si to protect you from problems if people use your mod to do copyrighted texture mods or something aka CaD letters


so no more halving FPS and messing lowing textures like you did in Berseria

How is this a bad thing at all lmao. Like you do realize this thing is still open source. Nobody is stopping anyone from making texture mods, just fucking download another fork of the mod and don't use the main one. It's really simple stuff.

 

[Glass Shark]

.

 

[kaioshade]

Is this a new meme?

No, its a played out copypasta that for some bizarre reason people like to trot out for random reasons. Kind of like the shot themselves in the foot

 

[Kssio_Aug]

I have no opinion about pirating software (I would be an hipocrate to condemn it) but one thing is a fact: If you're pirating something you're really not entitled to complain about anything related to that software. You have no rights to claim for any mod compatibility, any update (oficial or not), nothing... just accept that you're not doing the right thing and using a totally illegitimate software, for whatever reason it may be, and if you like it you should support buying the original content anyway as soon as you can.

So if you downloaded a pirated version of Nier Automata and stumbled to a performance issue that was patched by whatever it was (a mod, a official patch, it doesn't matter) just deal with this situation.... if you can't afford the original title, too bad, you had no luck this time; if you can afford it would be a good idea and a good excuse to actually pay for the damn thing.

 

[texhnolyze]

Figured I'd drop in and correct a few things before kowtowing back to those awful toxic Steam forums where I do my development.

1. The blacklist of users was established nearly a year ago when (as you'r probably familiar) Steam moderators did absolutely nothing to stop a rash of troll flood posts while I was trying to offer support for the two mods I was working on at the time. Nobody has been added since, nobody ever will -- largely because I'm done with that entire toxic community.
   
2. I was banned for calling someone who was lodging lie after lie after lie about how my software works a "pirate moron". This is not an insult to anyone, it's comically ineffective as an insult. If I wanted to insult these people I could think of much better language.
   
3. My anti-piracy measures actually have nothing to do with my personal views on individual piracy. I don't condone the practice, I don't generally think highly of people who do it, but this is not done to punish them. It is to protect me against asset injection of copyrighted material, which began to happen in my mods between Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Berseria.
   
   It is the party who facilitates copyright infringement who always takes the fall, never the end-user who commits the crime. So pirates - take my actions as some sort of punishment if you will, but they're not even about you - I don't care in the slightest what you do as long as I'm not tied to it.

There is now a license that requires a simple SteamAPI validity check. Nothing malicious happens if you fail this check, you're just presented with an infinite license screen that you can click Accept on but since you don't respect licenses the license doesn't respect your click.

Pirates are free to

1. Uninstall the mod and accept that you're not entitled to everything in this world and acting like a giant baby because you don't get your way is immature.
2. Obtain a modified version from someone else who condones piracy and who can take responsibility for how their modification is used.

• Either way I don't care, you're out of my hair and that's 5 minutes of my time well spent.

Thank you for your amazing works on fixing the Japanese games with your mods.

 

[OmegaDL50]

No, its a played out copypasta that for some bizarre reason people like to trot out for random reasons. Kind of like the shot themselves in the foot

The last time I saw someone make that sort of post they were banned for thread derailment.

Kaldaien is entirely in the right here. He developed the software, so he has the right to distribute / give access to those that meet his license agreement for it's use. Seems rather cut and dry really. Pirates aren't entitled to anything.

 

[prudislav]

How is this a bad thing at all lmao. Like you do realize this thing is still open source.

the hell??? didnt said anything about if its bad or not ... was just stating/asking things ffs
you seem quite touchy today

 

[Kazuhira]

What was the issue with the resolution again?

When using fullscreen mode, the game played at a lower resolution than the selected one.

Thanks.

 

[ezodagrom]

What was the issue with the resolution again?

When using fullscreen mode, the game played at a lower resolution than the selected one.

 

[Xliskin]

Never heard of anti-piracy on mods lol


off topic reading op while listening to the OST is soo FREAKING INTENSE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW4Kk2R39Rk&index=4&list=PLPEzOGbt-HPWPVvpYoD0XmFssM3ZqZ06D

 

[Kssio_Aug]

When using fullscreen mode, the game played at a lower resolution than the selected one.

Is this the only issue with the game? And can it be actually played at 1080p without this mod?

I have this on my Steam Wishlist but read that people were using a mod to play it and I was wondering if the developers shit in this port.

 

[Huge Succeeded]

Never heard of anti-piracy on mods lol

There are a bevy of mods that will

- only work with the latest patched version of a game (most effective while a game is still being patched actively)
- inject code into the .exe, or launch the .exe with hooks, but only if it's the matching .exe
- simply not work in non-Steam versions of a game

Fallout and Elder Scrolls Script Extenders come to mind.

 

[ezodagrom]

Is this the only issue with the game? And can it be actually played at 1080p without this mod?

I have this on my Steam Wishlist but read that people were using a mod to play it and I was wondering if the developers shit in this port.

The mod itself has a few other useful tweaks, such as increasing ambient occlusion and bloom resolution, being able to reduce global illumination quality to improve performance, and framepacing improvements (especially for the cutscenes, which are rather stuttery without the mod).

To play at 1080p without the mod, would need to set it to windowed mode and use the borderless gaming tool.

There are a few issues that the mod doesn't fix though, white screen issue, which mostly happens to users with recent AMD cards drivers.

 

[Kssio_Aug]

The mod itself has a few other useful tweaks, such as increasing ambient occlusion and bloom resolution, being able to reduce global illumination quality to improve performance, and framepacing improvements (especially for the cutscenes, which are rather stuttery without the mod).

To play at 1080p without the mod, would need to set it to windowed mode and use the borderless gaming tool.

There are a few issues that the mod doesn't fix though, white screen issue, which mostly happens to users with recent AMD cards drivers.

That's bad. =/

Are they planning on patching it officially? Have they said or hinted anything about it?

 

[ezodagrom]

That's bad. =/

Are they planning on patching it officially? Have they said or hinted anything about it?

Game released on March 17th, only patch they've released so far was related to the DLC...

 

[Carlius]

Figured I'd drop in and correct a few things before kowtowing back to those awful toxic Steam forums where I do my development.

1. The blacklist of users was established nearly a year ago when (as you'r probably familiar) Steam moderators did absolutely nothing to stop a rash of troll flood posts while I was trying to offer support for the two mods I was working on at the time. Nobody has been added since, nobody ever will -- largely because I'm done with that entire toxic community.
   
2. I was banned for calling someone who was lodging lie after lie after lie about how my software works a "pirate moron". This is not an insult to anyone, it's comically ineffective as an insult. If I wanted to insult these people I could think of much better language.
   
3. My anti-piracy measures actually have nothing to do with my personal views on individual piracy. I don't condone the practice, I don't generally think highly of people who do it, but this is not done to punish them. It is to protect me against asset injection of copyrighted material, which began to happen in my mods between Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Berseria.
   
   It is the party who facilitates copyright infringement who always takes the fall, never the end-user who commits the crime. So pirates - take my actions as some sort of punishment if you will, but they're not even about you - I don't care in the slightest what you do as long as I'm not tied to it.

There is now a license that requires a simple SteamAPI validity check. Nothing malicious happens if you fail this check, you're just presented with an infinite license screen that you can click Accept on but since you don't respect licenses the license doesn't respect your click.

Pirates are free to

1. Uninstall the mod and accept that you're not entitled to everything in this world and acting like a giant baby because you don't get your way is immature.
2. Obtain a modified version from someone else who condones piracy and who can take responsibility for how their modification is used.

• Either way I don't care, you're out of my hair and that's 5 minutes of my time well spent.

good. glad you came here and said this. keep at it, your efforts are appreciated.

 

[Shawsie64]

Good to hear from Kaldaien himself. The amount of shit posting on /r/crackwatch over this is disgusting. They just want eveythging for free and hate anything/anyone that stands in their way.

I posted in a thread there calling them out and got down voted heavily.

 

[Nillansan]

the hell??? didnt said anything about if its bad or not ... was just stating/asking things ffs you seem quite touchy today

Given the way you attempted to discredit Kaldaien in the Steam GAF thread I don't blame him.

 

[meltingparappa]

That's bad. =/

Are they planning on patching it officially? Have they said or hinted anything about it?

I heard they were analyzing the sales numbers, and taking into consideration all the pirates who were sending a message by playing the game without paying for it unless an arbitrary moving benchmark is achieved.

 

[DrDaxxy]

There are a bevy of mods that will

- only work with the latest patched version of a game (most effective while a game is still being patched actively)
- inject code into the .exe, or launch the .exe with hooks, but only if it's the matching .exe
- simply not work in non-Steam versions of a game

Fallout and Elder Scrolls Script Extenders come to mind.

In most cases these are basic sanity checks to ensure the mod doesn't break incompatible game versions. Mods that specifically try to detect pirated versions are quite rare. Let alone mods that, when detecting a pirated version, negatively impact the game experience (TBFix, not FAR) similar to what some official antipiracy measures do, or delete the crack's configuration file when you click on a menu item labelled "I am a filthy pirate".

(Kaldaien's never tried to hide either of these things. and he accurately explains what they do when you ask him about it, but he doesn't exactly indicate the presence of these "features" in bold red flashing letters on the download page either.)

 

[nynt9]

In most cases these are basic sanity checks to ensure the mod doesn't break incompatible game versions. Mods that specifically try to detect pirated versions are quite rare. Let alone mods that, when detecting a pirated version, negatively impact the game experience (TBFix, not FAR) similar to what some official antipiracy measures do, or delete the crack's configuration file when you click on a menu item labelled "I am a filthy pirate".

(Kaldaien's never tried to hide either of these things. and he accurately explains what they do when you ask him about it, but he doesn't exactly indicate the presence of these "features" in bold red flashing letters on the download page either.)

I mean, downloaded of a mod aren't owed anything. It's a free product and you either use it as-is, or don't. Especially if you're a pirate, then you're not even entitled to the game. People are just free to not use the mod if they don't like his practices.

 

[DrDaxxy]

I have never seen a forum which doesn't allow people to insult each other. Even here which is stricter than 99% of forums people still sends low level insults without a eyebrow being raised.

Steam forums go as far as to censor cuss words. They'd probably be a lot less lenient than most forums if their moderation team was paid and/or better staffed relative to the massive volume of posts.

In any case, it wasn't a single post.

Kaldaien's been attracting controversy for his stance on piracy, his anti-piracy measures, the blacklist mentioned earlier, and his position in the Denuvo drama for a while. Thus, you'd have people come into his support threads and insult him and and apply misleading/exaggerated characterisations to his anti-piracy measures ("malware") or make outright false accusations ("he collects your private information"). 90% of the rest of the threads are people asking the same support questions over and over again, in various degrees of politeness, often without reading the OP (which suggest solutions for some common problems and detail what information you need to provide for your problems to be diagnosed).

As you might imagine, that isn't the best environment for friendly, level-headed conversation.

 

[TLCO]

I don't get the white knighting for someone who is the sole cause for all this drama.

 

[RionaaM]

I don't get the white knighting for someone who is the sole cause for all this drama.

Yep, pirates don't need to be defended. I'm not gonna judge them, but I also won't feel bad if they can't run mods because they don't own a legitimate version of the game.

 

[Cipherr]

I must say, it is rather hilarious to read numerous post in the FAR thread without a mouse icon next to their steam username asking for support, then gets upset when being told they are a pirate.

LOL since when did argument about piracy become so complicated? You're a fucking thief and you have no rights at all. What you did beyond any doubt costs the developer - no matter what. But but the Witcher 3? Well not every dev is CD project you fucking sub-human.

Love this post. Agree completely. I feel nothing for the people getting exposed as pirates while asking for tech help for the mod lmao.

 

[Datschge]

Can you cite an example of this? Honestly, I have to say this sounds really flimsy to me.

Injecting DLC costumes (that one normally has to pay for) happened.

 

[Easy_D]

I don't get the white knighting for someone who is the sole cause for all this drama.

The only sources of drama in this are salty pirates.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

It's not up to him to decide who isn't able to use the mod and play the game. If it was really a huge problem then Nier would have had much more rigorous anti-crack measures, but it doesn't.

Um, Nier uses Denuvo. Can't get much more rigorous than that. (Except maybe Denuvo + no offline support, and I don't think anyone here wants that.)

 

[Glass Shark]

z

 

[jrcbandit]

Okay, but did someone get in trouble for it?

Suing the creator of the tool is a much easier and straightforward process then trying to track down those who pirated their DLC using the tool. Preemptive protection is an excellent idea in this litigious society.

 

[DrDaxxy]

Suing the creator of the tool is a much easier and straightforward process then trying to track down those who pirated their DLC using the tool. Preemptive protection is an excellent idea in this litigious society.

Most devs will likely find litigation more trouble than it's worth; the bigger concern is official mod builds getting on an anti-cheat or anti-tamper blacklist. For a single game the risk is probably limited, but SpecialK has some game-independent functionality and Kaldaien's written mods for many games based on it.

In a similar vein, ReShade disables some of its functionality when detecting network activity (to prevent you from using it to cheat in multiplayer games) and this issue was the dev's main worry about making it open source.

 

[Datschge]

Okay, but did someone get in trouble for it?

Would you personally knowingly take the full financial risk being sued for all the supposed damage a tool you created "facilitated"?

 

[Quote]

Okay, but did someone get in trouble for it?

I don't think either answer to this question changes anything?

 

[Weltall Zero]

Is this the new Godwin's law?

It's been the new Godwin's law for a while. I'm conflicted about it, since, you know, Godwin's Law, but it also makes people think of Hitler when they think of Trump, which isn't a bad thing...

I have never seen a forum which doesn't allow people to insult each other. Even here which is stricter than 99% of forums people still sends low level insults without a eyebrow being raised.

That's simply not true unless you're using a very broad definition of "insult". Of course not every single insult is going to be caught by the mods, but that doesn't mean it's "allowed".

Figured I'd drop in and correct a few things before kowtowing back to those awful toxic Steam forums where I do my development.

Hey cool, I didn't know you had an account here. Great work on the mods and good call on the pirate bans. Only one question that was discussed earlier, how do you ban specific users? Particularly, does the mod "call home" to any server?

 

[Dyson Industries]

Figured I'd drop in and correct a few things before kowtowing back to those awful toxic Steam forums where I do my development.

1. The blacklist of users was established nearly a year ago when (as you'r probably familiar) Steam moderators did absolutely nothing to stop a rash of troll flood posts while I was trying to offer support for the two mods I was working on at the time. Nobody has been added since, nobody ever will -- largely because I'm done with that entire toxic community.
   
2. I was banned for calling someone who was lodging lie after lie after lie about how my software works a "pirate moron". This is not an insult to anyone, it's comically ineffective as an insult. If I wanted to insult these people I could think of much better language.
   
3. My anti-piracy measures actually have nothing to do with my personal views on individual piracy. I don't condone the practice, I don't generally think highly of people who do it, but this is not done to punish them. It is to protect me against asset injection of copyrighted material, which began to happen in my mods between Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Berseria.
   
   It is the party who facilitates copyright infringement who always takes the fall, never the end-user who commits the crime. So pirates - take my actions as some sort of punishment if you will, but they're not even about you - I don't care in the slightest what you do as long as I'm not tied to it.

There is now a license that requires a simple SteamAPI validity check. Nothing malicious happens if you fail this check, you're just presented with an infinite license screen that you can click Accept on but since you don't respect licenses the license doesn't respect your click.

Pirates are free to

1. Uninstall the mod and accept that you're not entitled to everything in this world and acting like a giant baby because you don't get your way is immature.
2. Obtain a modified version from someone else who condones piracy and who can take responsibility for how their modification is used.

• Either way I don't care, you're out of my hair and that's 5 minutes of my time well spent.

This is outstanding.

 

[DrDaxxy]

Hey cool, I didn't know you had an account here. Great work on the mods and good call on the pirate bans. Only one question that was discussed earlier, how do you ban specific users? Particularly, does the mod "call home" to any server?

It (locally) checks your SteamID against a hardcoded blacklist of two accounts (which are blacklisted for trolling his support threads on Steam forums - and when you have someone's Steam profile link, you can find out their SteamID, no calling home required).

It has an auto-updater which works by downloading both update files and version info off GitHub. That doesn't send any private information and only GitHub even gets to see your IP.

 

[MadJackChurchill]

Good guy Kaldaein. Entitlement is insane in people that want to have a free game AND a mod to fix its resolution. Lol.

 

[Kaldaien]

Hey cool, I didn't know you had an account here. Great work on the mods and good call on the pirate bans. Only one question that was discussed earlier, how do you ban specific users? Particularly, does the mod "call home" to any server?

There are actually two sets of blacklists. There's the one I'm not proud of that was implemented as a poor-man's moderation tool (now rendered unnecessary since I do my communication in a private sub-forum on Steam that I can moderate) and there's the one that identifies Denuvo bypassed games.

The way Denuvo works is such that any cheap no-frills bypass is going to hardcode a SteamID that was valid at the time the game was originally activated into the "crack." Every single person running the game has to use that Steam ID, it's a 64-bit number, so there's a 1 in <number too large to bother mentioning> chance of collision.

Sadly, these immoral pirates are known to use the steam IDs of famous individuals such as Gary of Gary's mod. Nier is "licensed' (if you can call it that without busting out laughing) to Gary's account and all pirates run using Gary's account. Of course they never connect to Steam, but in effect they've stolen NieR: Automata and also Gary's account

People can accuse me of weaponizing SteamAPI all they want, that's ludicrous. Anyone using the bypassed version of this game is impersonating Gary, I think that's a bigger problem we should be discussing. Gary won't be able to activate this game if he were to ever buy it now, because Denuvo knows this exists. Hopefully Gary's cool with being locked-out of a game by an entire community of ...s, the pirates certainly never asked (I hope).


In no case, however, am I ever collecting data or sending data anywhere. I have a pretty sophisticated SteamAPI hook engine that adds various Steam enhancements, I can just pull this information straight out of the communication stream between the game and the (fake, in the case of cracked games) Steam client.

In fact, a large part of my frustration with pirates began precisely due to my SteamAPI features. Their inferior fake SteamAPI DLLs fall apart very easily, lol. With next to no effort I used to be able to crash a pirated Steam game. They've gotten better, but the pirate morons (oh no, I did it again) are now using hard-coded Steam account IDs making detection of illegitimate versions child's play.

 

[Kaldaien]

Can you cite an example of this? Honestly, I have to say this sounds really flimsy to me.

Durante might be willing to talk about his troubles with the DMCA. I'm trying actively to prevent any such nonsense. I would prefer to spend my time coding, not settling disputes with publishers over petty tiffs.

Durante clearly provided an invaluable service for Bandai Namco and still was not exempt from the wrath of these enigmatic publishers The more silent a publisher is (and Square-Enix is the king of this), it seems, the more unreasonable the requests they make if they think you've done something to violate their copyrights.I prefer to just reverse engineer their software illegally without also adding something else on top of that, hahah.

We're talking publishers that aren't as warm and welcoming as Bethesda to modding. I never know how a Japanese publisher's going to react, because the ninjas never say a word until they're angry!

 

[Kaldaien]

so the main reason si to protect you from problems if people use your mod to do copyrighted texture mods or something aka CaD letters

Correct, as my software becomes a more general-purpose tool, I'm bringing the advanced texture streaming stuff that I implemented for Tales of Berseria and Symphonia to all games. Not to brag in any way, but it's a very different approach to injecting textures in real-time, and it allowed me to do that 4K texture upscale in Tales of Symphonia. It has HUGE potential when I finish the abstraction to support GL/D3D9/11 and possibly Vulkan.

That's even more publishers who might up and blacklist my software because they don't like some of the things it's capable of, thereby rendering the goal of my project unattainable :-\ This is the same reason crosire has depth buffer access disabled in multi-player games, to avoid a sweeping blacklist for enabling cheating.

so no more halving FPS and messing lowing textures like you did in Berseria

Yes, I have stopped that.

Pirates are now removing code they believe is malicious and finding the code that disabled certain things ..... wasn't malicious I don't need to do anything sneaky to get cathartic release, pirates will remove important stability features all on their own because they assume they know what purpose stuff serves and that in their mind anything that disables something is malicious.

Karma's a comedian.

 

[Kvik]

Karma's a comedian.

Hey Kal, going for a bit of a tangent here, but did you manage to get your SpecialK repo back from GitHub admins?

 

[diaspora]

You're good people Kaldaien. The mod might be the reason I ultimately pick up the game since it's not good enough without it.

 

[duckroll]

It is embarrassing that Square Enix still hasn't fixed Nier Automata to run properly without the help of a mod. I managed to beat Persona 5 and moved back to this, and was still having resolution problems. If not for this mod, I probably wouldn't be playing the game at all and might even have asked for a refund. Shameful on their part. Thanks for your contributions to the community Kaldaien!

 

[fvng]

This is great and hilarious.

Fuck modern day pirates.

.

 

[Kaldaien]

Hey Kal, going for a bit of a tangent here, but did you manage to get your SpecialK repo back from GitHub admins?

No I'm resorting to publishing a full copy of the source code in my release pages for FAR at the moment. It completely screwed up my installer as well.

I'm hoping they explain things on Monday. I don't like it when I have to guess what terms of service I violated, I read the terms of service (probably one of maybe 2 people in the world who do) and they are SO generally written that everyone and their mother is guilty of violating them

If I have to guess what I did, I'm likely to self-incriminate somehow. It's silly to tell someone they've violated ToS but not how, when your ToS is 20 pages long.

 

[theultimo]

No I'm resorting to publishing a full copy of the source code in my release pages for FAR at the moment. It completely screwed up my installer as well.

I'm hoping they explain things on Monday. I don't like it when I have to guess what terms of service I violated, I read the terms of service (probably one of maybe 2 people in the world who do) and they are SO generally written that everyone and their mother is guilty of violating them

If I have to guess what I did, I'm likely to self-incriminate somehow. It's silly to tell someone they've violated ToS but not how, when your ToS is 20 pages long.

This explains why my ds 3 fixes isn't working or updating

Seems shitty to restrict a github because people report is as malware for spite.

 

[Kaldaien]

This explains why my ds 3 fixes isn't working or updating

Seems shitty to restrict a github because people report is as malware for spite.

There's a test installer version in my FAR
repository.https://github.com/Kaldaien/FAR/releases/download/far_057/SKIM64.exe

That may help you. I've also started moving all my other stuff over to GitLab, it's going to be a learning experience but I think it's probably a more reliable host.