protecting media

Whats the best way of protecting your models and textures from being taken from demos or games releases. i know there are programs that make everything into one big exe but is there a better way?

Pete

You could create your own media loaders, so basically you would encrypt the media files and decrypt them in memory using your own functions.

sounds good but i havent a clue how to do it is there any examples anywhere?

well, i like using Data and store all my models vertex,face and uv values, i also store the textures that way by a rle system to save space. It's not that hard to write something to generate this data. then i use createimage, createmesh and friends instead of load. The downside is big compile times mainly so best to implement towards the end of a project. I know this is essentially like packing to a single exe but it's free and as i said not very hard to do. I probably wouldn't do this on a ton of high-res textures though.
Another way is to pack the files into custom-made large files using a similar system so they can't be readily extracted.

Blitz Media Linker (free - in the ToolBox) let's you pack everything into a single exe, but it also has an option to pack all media into a separate data file.

Personally, I wouldn't waste too much time worrying about people getting at your media. If someone's that determined, they're probably gonna get at it, whatever measures you take.

BML's good enough for me. :)