Armadillo?

Anybody here using this?

1. Do you use the 'Basic' or 'Pro' edition?

2. From the list of features it seems hugely complicated. Is this the case?

1. Pro.

2. No, not really. A bit of trial and error at first while you decide which options you should and shouldn't enable, but there are plenty of us around here who use it and can advise you which options are a bit too strict and cause more problems than they solve.

Otherwise, it's really pretty simple.

So locking to hardware serial numbers etc is all optional?

This concerned me somewhat. I want to spend my days writing games, not sending email after email with new licence keys for people who buy a new hard drive every three weeks.

Yes, hardware locking is optional, and I think disabled by default.

I realise I'm taking the conversation to places it maybe shouldn't go, but, how secure is Armadillo?

I mean, could I go to 'certain places' now and download cracks for just about anything encrypted with Armadillo? I remember a thing called Softwrap which was next to useless in this respect.

Well, Armadillo will stop casual Piracy and maybe deflect the cracker noob but, as you are probably aware, nothing is crack proof.

When Grey Alien released Holiday Bonus, he uses Armadillo also, within 2 days it was available on P2P torrent sites. If you don't believe me I can send you the link. Not only that but all games released by reflexive, and all other popular sites like that, have been cracked and are readily available to download via popular Torrent sites.

So, as for Armadillo being secure, well, no it's not. The only thing that will secure your game from Piracy is if it is crap and no one wants to bother to crack it.

Was it definitely Jake's version of Holiday Bonus that was cracked? I would have thought the portal versions would be the ones to get cracked, as some of the portal DRM is a lot less secure than Armadillo.

You may be right. Although the torrent does state it was cracked from greyaliengames. There was also another version released with a reflexive crack.

There were others also, like Holiday Gift ect.. but i don't think Grey made that one.

Well I suppose cutting out 'casual piracy' is about the best any of us can hope for anyway.

In my experience (nigh on 20 years of it) they'll crack anything regardless of whether its crap or not.

Think about it -- If not even multi-billion dollar companies like Microsoft and Adobe can prevent their software from getting hacked, the rest of us don't stand much of a chance either. :-?

Er.... isn't that what I said? o.O

So Armadillo's a good first defence then....

Yes, it's a good defense. What we do is showing the licensees name at startup of the game eg: "This game is licensed to: Joe Blow". This stops people to give away the game to all their relatives.

We had a issue with a pirated copy of the game being available on P2P networks. They didn't crack the game but simple delivered it with a valid name and key. The name was an actual customer from Spain. After some consultation with the police here it became clear that to prosecute this person (and to haul it's butt to the Netherlands) the punishment must be at least 4 years prison. Which in this case it wasn't. We could try some legal action in Spain but hiring a solicitor was way too expensive compared to the possible gains from a lawsuit.

Missed this thread as I was away. I use pro for the 60 minute limit, basic *cannot* do this. Anywhere here's a tip how to save a tiny bit of money. Buy Basic. They give you a 10% off off you next purchase. Email them and say "oops didn't realise Basic couldn't do 60 mins, I need pro). They'll give you a link and you can upgrade to pro but with a 10% discount on that part of the price. so maybe overall a 5% saving I think...

as for HB, the crack is normally from Reflexive not the armadillo verison. If anyone ever sees this, please let me know and I'll ask them to take it down (they do this).

I dunno how secure Armadillo is in the long run but basically it puts off a large non-tech part of the population from ripping it off and the people who get the warez version wouldn't have bought it anyway so I don't mind.