I need slowdown bug help

cucuma · Post by **cucuma** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 3:58 am

Hello I have installed vampire version 1.0 and then patched it to version 1.2 then I cracked it using the crack posted on gamecopyworld (you replace vampire.dll and vampire.exe)

what happens is when I talk to anyone or pick something (actually wheneveer take an action rather then running aroud and hitting the empty air around) the game seems to respond slower to my keyboard, for example in a diaolog when I press 1. I wait about 3 or 4 seconds for the game to recognize the command, after I come out of the dialog lets say I press up up up down left left right the game again waits for about 3 or 4 seconds then at normal speed my chracter performs the action. I tried to lower the performance and video configurations but nothing changed please help me about this

My system is

MSI Nforce4 K8N platinum

AMD 3000+ 936 Venice

2* 512MB kingston dual

MSI NVIDIA Gforce 6600GT PCIX

Seagate hard disk

AND a microsoft multimedia keyboard with a microsoft intellli type mouse (MAYBE THESE ARE THE PROBLEM AS MİCROSOFT İS ALWAYS A PROBLEM

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 4:12 am

Sorry, friend, but if you cracked it, all bets are off.

cucuma · Post by **cucuma** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 7:07 am

what do you mean all bets are off, if you say that cracking is illegal we cannot help you then I am O.K. but if you say that if you cracked it no one can know what may happen then assume that I did not crack it and I got the same error

I am sure that this has nothing to do with the crack because I have seen (in some forums) very few people having the same trouble but there were no reasonable explanation

Thanks

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 8:50 pm

What I mean by "all bets are off" is that the cracker has perforce altered the actual running code. Even simply not knowing the skill of the cracker, there is no longer any way to know how many dependencies have been broken, and therefore no way to know how many additional bugs have been introduced into a system that already had a large suite of bugs.

Even for a person with a fair working knowledge of the original system and source code to analyze, fairly trivial-seeming changes could have wide-reaching consequences in a system as complex as this (and here I'm using the term 'system in the generic way as 'a group of assembled components' - the game system, not the computer it's running on). At this point, it must become manifestly obvious that the program this person is running and the program that the rest of us are running are NOT the same program.

Even if you assert that others have encountered the same symptom it is impossible to assume that the two symptoms are due to the same cause anymore simply because they are similar. You cannot analyze a symptom on one system in an attempt to resolve a problem on a different system. Such an exercise is ultimately futile, because it is no longer possible to make an empirical analysis. And, of course, we do not know that those few who reported a similar problem were not using the same crack, and simply neglected to mention it - this bug may be peculiar to that crack, which would make even searching for it on my system ultimately useless. The reason most of us have never seen it may be because we simply don't have it.

To make any kind of useful effort, one would have to make their system the same, thus using the same crack. As that is illegal, I will simply not do it. I'm a programmer myself, and I've lost my fair share of income to piracy, and out of respect for my programmer kindred, I will not perpetrate the same crime on them.

And if you want to know if I am otherwise totally unsympathetic, the answer is 'yes'. If he's not willing to buy the program legally, he can anticipate zero help from me, even if I have the solution in my pocket.

P.S.: Does it not strike you as odd that the bug is slow reaction to keyboard presses? The place where copy-protection code would likely kick in to make sure it was a legal copy? So perhaps while the 'cracker' has ensured that the checks will in fact pass even though they shouldn't, the code is taking awhile searching for the copy-protection that isn't there? Three or four seconds, right? About the time it would take to determine that a particular file or code did not exist on a CD, but then report that it was found nonetheless?

pdblake · Post by **pdblake** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 10:07 am

[QUOTE=yrthwyndandfyre]If he's not willing to buy the program legally, he can anticipate zero help from me, even if I have the solution in my pocket.[/QUOTE]

Could also be that he just doesn't want to have to constantly have the CD in the drive which, as everyone knows, while being of some anti-piracy use does cause a lot of slowdown.

Still, the rest of us live with it.

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 5:59 pm

Any licencing agreement (and we all agreed to one) contains a caveat that it is a violation of the licencing agreement to reverse-engineer the code. Cracking the program is by itself an act of piracy even if nothing else is done. Cracking it and then posting it on the internet doubly so.

If Troika games had not already lost potentially millions of dollars in profits to software piracy, they might have been able to afford the resources required to get Bloodlines to market on time and relatively bug-free. They may have even survived as a company to produce who knows what wonders in the future?

As all of us have seen, they had a great deal of potential as game designers, and now they are gone forever. So much for a little 'harmless' piracy. Who does it hurt? Well, that would be all of us, who struggle with a buggy game with no supporting company to fix it, but that is still good enough that most of us work around the bugs and still enjoy it.

fable · Post by **fable** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 1:50 pm

Any discussion of cracks is not allowed on GameBanshee. This thread is closed.