Hi all,
the last days I was looking for a way to copy protect a finished
game. I found a product on Ionworx Technology which has the possibilty to register your software
through a web server. It is a dll with all the functions you can call. The
problem is that I think it is not possible to call the functions within
3dgs. So did anybody think about copy protection and way to do it ?

One that came up on these forums a while ago was Armadillo. You can gett it from about $100, if I remember rightly. Also, they have a free trial download going right now.

There are various opinions about the amount of copy protection needed. Some people think you need all the protection you can get, others consider you shouldn't spend a lot on it as anything will be cracked anyway.

Maybe you are right but without a protection I think our product is going
around between 1 week or less. So this is a kind of thinking about that.
Thank you for the link, if I understand it right Armadillo is also a dll
with a lot of functions you can call. The problem is still how to call these
functions within 3dgs ??

To call the functions within 3DGS, you might want to consider getting the plugin SDK. It should allow you to act as
a middle-man between 3DGS and the Armidillo DLL.

As far as copy protection, you have to surrender to the fact that if someone wnats to remove the protection, they will.
The best you can hope for is to at least make it an inconvenience.

But I'm sure you already know that.

A.Russel is right. There are opinions of the matter of getting very protective of your software and "dont bother, cracking cannot be avoided." I do have to add, that Despite the fact that there is ALWAYS a way around anti-piracy software, some protection is good. The reason for this is that amateurs who don't know much about piracy, but still want to find ways on how to do it themselves can't get around anti-piracy software. Considering the majority of today's society don't know much about programming or even their way around MS Windows; these are the people you will profit from.

If you had absolutely NO protection, then these amateurs have a chance to go "hey, if i delete this file I can spead this game all over the internet with the website I made in Notepad" Of course not so literally, but i think you get the point.

There are only two ways to effectively protect your work.
1. Develop something thats really not all that great nor is it of great demand, but sell it cheap and you could probably profit. Software "Pirates" arent interested in spreading cheap "less than exciting" software.

2. Develop something HARDware based. This obviously isn't going to happen. Expensive to make and expensive to sell, and no one wants to play a game by using a PCI Card (or something of the like) that they have to plug into their motherboard .

i have to go now so i only read the first post in this post.i found a document a while ago that said as soon as you create something it is copy righted. that being a drawing or game even .