This is pretty good for how fast the game got cracked. For context, this is Denuvo 11, the latest version, and the game came out on May 7, 2021. So a little over 2 months.
Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
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Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is they want intermittent checks, but don't trust the system clock to advance, but a zombie kill is evidence that time has advanced for the player. Seems like it shouldn't block the main game thread and there should be a longer time to live for that check, and maybe those are the bugs.
Do some cracks rely on preventing the system clock from advancing?
I’m not a cracker but messing with the system clock is a classic exploit for all kinds of things.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is they want intermittent checks, but don't trust the system clock to advance, but a zombie kill is evidence that time has advanced for the player. Seems like it shouldn't block the main game thread and there should be a longer time to live for that check, and maybe those are the bugs.
Do some cracks rely on preventing the system clock from advancing?
More that the function calls for the system clock are fairly easy to trace back to find these DRM hooks.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is they want intermittent checks, but don't trust the system clock to advance, but a zombie kill is evidence that time has advanced for the player. Seems like it shouldn't block the main game thread and there should be a longer time to live for that check, and maybe those are the bugs.
Do some cracks rely on preventing the system clock from advancing?
Generally in a software system you can't count on a time source to move forward, to move in consistent intervals, or to move at all. In a system that is designed to be resistant to attack, it actually makes a lot of sense to instead rely on a desirable event critical to progression. Especially one that occurs relatively infrequently and is likely associated with a lot of other complex calculations.
I think this is pretty smart.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#15I don’t really trust capcom on pc. I can’t run re:2 remake without using video drivers from years ago. DMC 3 never worked and you had to mod it to make your controller work properly. Re:4 on pc gives people migraines from frame pacing issues, my family members can’t play it without nausea, so I’ve never been able to show them the game (on consoles it’s fine). I heard street fighter on pc has an issue too but I’m not familiar. Edit: dmc5 on of apparently has issues where save games get deleted, so I’m told that the community uses a cheat program or shares save files to get around it
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do some cracks rely on preventing the system clock from advancing?
Generally in a software system you can't count on a time source to move forward , to move in consistent intervals, or to move at all. In a system that is designed to be resistant to attack, it actually makes a lot of sense to instead rely on a desirable event critical to progression. Especially one that occurs relatively infrequently and is likely associated with a lot of other complex calculations. I think this is p…
I think I understand the theory. If I was a cracker though, I would think that patching out the system clock calls (in order to prevent DRM checks) would have a lot of game-breaking unintended side-effects (animations, other time-based mechanics, etc). And if that was the case, it would be a perfect place to trigger the DRM calls, since a cracker couldn't patch the system time calls without breaking the game.
tehbeard (another comment in this thread) makes a point that maybe not attaching the DRM calls to the clock makes it easier to hide them, since a cracker would probably be looking for a time-based trigger.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the DRM code was cleanly separated from the normal flow of the game code, it would be trivial for crackers to patch it out.
Evidently it's still trivial for crackers to patch it out
I wouldn't say it's trivial. EMPRESS is one of the most talented crackers on the scene at the moment and it took ~2 months for this release.
Arguably, without EMPRESS, the crack would have taken a lot longer.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the DRM code was cleanly separated from the normal flow of the game code, it would be trivial for crackers to patch it out.
Interesting, does this mean DRM functions are forced inline when compiled?
Not just that. I'm not an expert, but from what I read, some DRMs will encrypt assets and critical game logic and let them be decrypted in real time on a virtual machine so that they aren't directly extractable from memory.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#19>All in-game shutters like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM’s entry points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore. Can someone knowledgeable explain why DRM functions would be called on every zombie kill? I guess I don't have a good understanding on how these DRM checks are implemented in games in general.
DRM calls are sprinkled everywhere inside the code, usually statically linked or even inlined. This is to make it harder for crackers to identify them.
Here they put some in the zombie kill routine, but I don't think there is anything special about zombie kills. It could have been anything: picked up ammo, loading a map, pass a certain event, on a timer, during a save, all of the above, etc...
I don't have a deep knowledge about the technology involved but from what I've seen modern DRM like Denuvo are based on virtual machines and are very flexible, allowing all sorts of checks at many points. Done well, there is little overhead, but some overzealous publishers do frequent lengthy checks, killing performance.
Re: Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
#20I don’t really trust capcom on pc. I can’t run re:2 remake without using video drivers from years ago. DMC 3 never worked and you had to mod it to make your controller work properly. Re:4 on pc gives people migraines from frame pacing issues, my family members can’t play it without nausea, so I’ve never been able to show them the game (on consoles it’s fine). I heard street fighter on pc has an issue too but I’m not…
I have never played Lost Planet 3. I bought Lost Planet 3, but I was unable to get it to work on my Radeon RX 470. I’m sure I’d work on my 2070 RTX but I’m wouldn’t be surprised if it still didn’t work.