I am coding a rhythm game and one of the things I really want to keep in mind is the integrity of an artist’s license and copyright. I appreciate artists giving me copyright license to use in my game but I don’t want people to use my game as a way of getting their music for free.
Part of the idea is to distribute the game with 1-2 songs and they can download as many as they want from my website (to keep the installer size small so people with bandwidth limits can download the game without having to worry about size limits).
What I would like to do is have a file for instance a .dbf which when double clicked will move itself to my game directory (e.g C:/Program Files/Dashie’s Sky Games/Rhythms/) as a .dbf, each .dbf will essentially contain two files (the .mp3 and the .drf), the .drf will contain the things such as where the notes would be, difficulty level, where the UberDash is and so on, this would be unencrypted however only editable via the ingame editor (not around yet).
I don’t want people to be able to just rename the .dbf into .zip and be able to access the .mp3
I kinda want it so that the game will open the .dbf, decrypt it or whatever and store the .mp3 and .drf into memory (or in some very obscure temporary directory). I am using bass.dll for the music library. Any ideas at all?
Very much appreciated.
End of the day if the song is stored as an MP3 or other popular format then no matter how you package it someone will in theory be able to get it.
In my opinion your best option is to zip them and change the extension (maybe not zip zip, but 7zip or rar or a not so “default” compression mechanism) and then let your program unpackage the songs. I think you have to accept that if your program can unpackage the file then a human being will be able to as well, but assume that if someone wants a song, trying to decrypt your song storage mechanism won’t be their preferred way of doing so (bittorrent will be, let’s be honest). You could also include a “Get this song!” button in your application which would take the user to iTunes or what have you, allowing the user to get the song legally. If Warner, EMI and the RIAA can’t stop people from pirating music, you most certainly won’t be able to. Just try to make it easier for the user to get the song legally.