Thanks for the writeup. To be completely honest, i wish you (and other scammed players) would sue Ubisoft and claim huge sums (maybe to give away to FLOSS game devs?). These huge game corps are avidly exploiting their workers and charging tons of money for unfinished/buggy games in clear violation of all consumer/worker protection laws.
I mean, if the game doesn't work for you, that's conceivable. But that they sell a game that doesn't work for many people, and the problem is widely known and the editor refuses to do anything but still takes money for it... it makes me wanna throw up :)
Hi, author here. On one hand I wholly agree with you. Ubisoft has absolutely no right to go around selling products that don't work - it's abysmal. In my other "how to fix it" post, my first suggestion is to just buy it from GOG, with a link. Don't give Ubisoft your money (I'm pretty sure we won't from now on).
I could have also just pirated it. If I gave up, that's how we'd have done it.
That said, if we'd have done that, I wouldn't have had the fun ripping this piece of software to bits. :)
You mentioned checking the forums, but did you ever try contacting Ubisoft through their support page? If nothing else, I'm curious about what their response would be to an issue that's preventing you from playing your purchased game that is entirely a problem with the way the installer is written.
My partner spoke to some who did and from what I understand there was no resolution. We could maybe have pushed for a refund but I had a bit of time pressure of her leaving for a trip (and I wanted her to have this game for it).
I'm gonna drop their support a link to my writeup, see what happens!
Besides, I had a lot of fun playing with it. There were no doubt easier ways to do what I did but I enjoyed digging! :)
Since you've spelled it all out, I hope they actually take your fix and start shipping it. Not because I want them to benefit from unpaid labor, but because I want anyone else who buys the game to benefit from it without having to find your blog post.
This sort of reverse engineering stuff certainly is fun though. As long as the software isn't heavily obfuscated that is. Before WoW died because of the Blizzard harassment investigation, I tried to reverse engineer Battle.net and the game to create an alternate launcher so I didn't have to see the ads in Battle.net. But both were obfuscated and had anti-debugging features. While I'm sure it would have been possible to figure out, it was too much for me so I eventually abandoned that.
I love your write-up on your process. I've done a couple short explanations before of how patches I've released work, but your blog post is far more thorough and a great read.
I hope so too. I could only imagine that they didn't know why this happened and/or didn't have the budget to investigate the problem. They kind of don't have any excuses now. If they've still got the original sources, it should be a 5 minute fix (rounded up to a day with testing and whatever corporate processes they follow).
Nothing is uncrackable and it was that thought that kept me going with this. I can imagine that deliberately-obfuscated DRM like Battle.net would be a hell of a lot harder than this was though. Technically, it was all there for me to see from the start but I didn't know the way I should approach the problem. Finding that out was a big part of it.
Cheers, I'm glad you enjoyed it. More people have said they liked it than I ever thought would, I'm kinda surprised.
> Don't give Ubisoft your money (I'm pretty sure we won't from now on).
My personal strategy is to only give money after i'm satisfied with a product (at least in the computer world). I never bend to paywalls and will NEVER financially support non-free software because it enables that kind of user-abuse situation to begin with.
> That said, if we'd have done that, I wouldn't have had the fun ripping this piece of software to bits. :)
You can still pirate the game as a quick workaround while you dismantle the original release. Anyway thanks for this read i learnt much about windows debugging (as a non-Windows user).
I mean, if the game doesn't work for you, that's conceivable. But that they sell a game that doesn't work for many people, and the problem is widely known and the editor refuses to do anything but still takes money for it... it makes me wanna throw up :)