xxx_red_xxx: I mean how it could work is it only lets you download the file if youre the owner of the Avatar ID. Which could be done by requiring a log in

Aizlluna: That would be acceptable

Aizlluna: How would anyone else ingame see your avatar if only the owner of the AvatarID can download the files? That's how the game client views other peoples avatars.

The solution would have to be more involved than that.

Zarniwoop: cloudrendering all the games content could work

Blubbll: Got any examples of games or apps that uses that tech to protect themselves from asset ripping?

Also from what I can tell, it's a render engine. Not a game engine?

Zarniwoop: i meant if the game would run in a vm on a server and only the visual data would be sent to thr client, it would solve this problem. so kinda like those fancy cloudgaming providers have clients of.

Blubbll: sure but that costs a fortune to run and is unusable for anyone not living close to datacenter. (and probably 100% unusable for VR unless you plug directly into a datacenter, as latency would be horrible for VR)

GotoFinal: yeah no, i dont think there would be another way, as everything clientside can be sniffed if you try hard enough. Maybe Starlink will help in the future idk

xxx_red_xxx: Back up your files.

Michael18751: to what? My other nonexistent hard drive?

xxx_red_xxx: OneDrive, Dropbox, OpenDrive, IDrive or any of the numerous online backup services that exist.

Or just buy a drive or a USB stick, that's plenty for storing avatars on.

Zarniwoop: my unity project was 30+ GB in size when the failure occurred. I'm too cheap to get an extra hard drive. I would have to make 3 or more accounts and somehow split the project data between them cause most online services only offer 10gb.

xxx_red_xxx: then no one should care if you lose your data. You can also use backblaze for 6$/mo, then you have unlimited backup space for single PC with 30 days of file history

GotoFinal: 6$/mo < free

xxx_red_xxx: then dont complain about loosing data and not being able to recover it

GotoFinal: but I'm not losing data, google drive and 3 accounts can hold my entire project, it's just inconvenient to deal with.

Zarniwoop: it will be a lot different ammount of work to restore and setup gpu rip, than just unpack ready to use package.

GotoFinal: Why even breath if you could die tomorrow anyways right? Why use space suits if long term exposure gets you radiated anyways. The answer is simple; same reason we live. Suggesting to just give up on it because workarounds are made anyways soon after is NOT a solution to any issue. And in my personal view, making anything harder, will make an impact. Even if it is small, that's how battles are won.

Quinix: The problem here is that it's making huge inconveniences to the user experience just to slow down rippers for a couple months. It's tons of time, money, effort, and player goodwill down the drain for nothing.

Most people don't give a shit that avatars are easily ripped since most people don't upload avatars. All this would do is make people complain about the game getting worse.

Kush Meyer: A proper game/platform ALWAYS has a team of professionals to deal with security. That's the responsibility of VRC. One they have not taken serious in the slightest, even if they claim they do, as clients are still a thing. And this is something that could lead to their downfall one day. In other words, if they have the time and money to make UDON and such a thing, they have time and money to do a security patch every x amount of months. User experience would NOT change what so ever, i don't know where you got that idea from? A security patch on your PC doesn't change anything either besides making the PC more secure or am i wrong?

And now to get to your oddly one sided idea of people not uploading most of the time anyways: Where do you think their cloned avatars come from? Creators are what makes this platform grow. And without them, i suppose you could enjoy the default avatars VRC supplies, and the home word/vrc hub as your home word and chill place. Ripping is a serious matter, and all of the people i know that had their content ripped, either took it down or eventually stopped making public things all together. If that is a future you prefer, then agree all you want. In the end the creators get nothing but their hard work and time stolen, even if the content is not made from scratch, its time they cannot ever get back, for an ungrateful community in return.

TL;DR: Dont assume your opinion to be fact, and don't put words in peoples mouths. Creators are suffering from this, and VRC is lacking care about all of it. And that, in fact, is quite pathetic.

Quinix: Do you have any experience programming? If they would secure avatars using some additional encryption and obfuscation it would slow down the code and add a lot of code they would need to now update, so each update to new unity version would be harder or any other larger changes. So avatars would load slower and updates will be slower.

And then after 2 days someone would crack this, and they would need to do this again, while still supporting old method for compatibility.

And after a year half of the game code would be old avatar decryption methods that would need to be maintained by someone.

As I don't see any other way to "protect" stuff then just making more complicated format on upload and then decrypting it after downloading.

So unless you have some working idea that could actually help here without issue described above... its just pointless.

GotoFinal: I have no clue how to respond to this as it is oversaturated and just wrong. I would like to see support for your claims, as this sounds as its been made up entirely. Besides that it also takes away from the point that is being made. Avatar stealing is a serious issue, and there is a lack of care about it. It should not be resolved by the users, but prevented by the platform. If a dumb game like IMVU can do it, and second life is dang hard to rip from what i have heard from people i trust, then what's stopping VRC? And if I'm completely honest, i don't think there is a single creator out there that picks their content being nicked over a increase in loading times.

Quinix: VRChat is way more open with content creation, allowing much more tools to be used, as you have access to a lot of unity components and tools. And this makes protecting stuff much harder and expensive. And also models are a lot bigger/heavier so harder/more expensive to do any operation on.

And no, these games can't do it. The only difference might be how many people are interested in this. I feel there is more tech people in vrchat because VR is still a new thing (and more young and toxic people) + many avatars are just pretty complicated and much more detailed, making them more interesting target. Like I would not want a second life avatar even if someone would give it to me for free, as most of them just looks like some random sims model. But you can find tools for ripping either from these games, or just general tools that don't care about game and just rip whatever is coming to GPU. (ofc then more data is lost)

> single creator out there that picks their content being nicked over a increase in loading times.

but players are, we already struggle with lags at loading time. And not sure if I can count as creator if I only make models for myself, but yea, I don't care at all if its protected, as ripping it will be anyways possible.

> I would like to see support for your claims, as this sounds as its been made up entirely.

How? You would first need to understand how computer graphic works and how game engine works. In short in simplification: The data at the end must go to the GPU, and unity is well known engine that everyone interested in ripping already know enough to be able to find any data they need to recover the model. The only problematic parts are shaders - because unity have own shader system but finished upload models contains compiled versions for various graphic cards/drivers (depending what they support). But it still can be ripped, just some additional data might be lost because compilation process might remove all the things that are not necessary for a model to work. (like unused options of shader or settings are just inlined - not sure here how exactly it works and how much data is removed, as I'm just a programmer, never needed to care about these details)

But still such ripped model is usable.

Ofc you can ask if something like that could not be done for other parts of avatar... but it already is, just due to simplicity of mesh/texture its harder to notice and much easier to either reverse or ignore. As all your avatar materials are usually also compressed, so people don't get your original 4k png 0 compression texture, but a compressed one according to your build process settings - so exactly how it looks in game. People are not ripping your full creation, just the parts you gave them.

So making this harder would only stop if for few days, just like obfuscation of code and compiling to native did "stop" client users. For like 3 days.

GotoFinal: idk why anyone cares about people ripping avatars which were already ripped to begin with.

GotoFinal:

Well its a nice manthra about mythic possibility of ripping asset from any game.

Yes, any 3d application assets can be ripped with professional debugging tool. But at this point you recieving messed unusable asset that you need to fix alot and restore most of features. Literally you need to rebuild normal infomation, some uvs, restore Tpose and reweight charachter. Literally asset will be just worse.

Actually right now VRCHAT just allows to download ready to use package, that can be unpacked and used by anyone without any skills, witch makes really scary side databases that just allows you to download ready to use avatar.

Making rypping alot harder will just prevent MOST of hackers from stealing, because they will need some actual knowledge and skills, and model still will be worse than original.

Actually this is a problem that touches original creators, no one needs unique commisioned model that will be just "cloned" just with simple download

Kush Meyer: this minority of actual creators actually do game attractive. if game will lose this auditory that makes content - it will be ruining event.

Ruukoto Presents: Not everyone rips models out of other media some of use make our own models and would like to see them a bit more protected.

angryuser: the less people who can do it the better true if its on ur vram and ram it can be stolen but making it hard is good idea

SAADHERO: yes it is. right now it is super easy to get ready model. GPU\RAM ripping gives much worse results that need alot of work, and due imperfection of process lots of original quality is lost