What?

Nope, you didn't. Anti-cheating is unrelated to network stack. Game network stack is topmost about adequate enough connection. You repeatedly confuse casino security system with transportation type casino staff uses.

If you want a tamper-free public server - the game state, client hardware, client input, the network - all will have to be monitored.

Making an "industry standard" out of what exactly? Out of secured network with anticheat and unified interface that run on same platform? Sure - a console from monopolist with a crazy-butt DRM through whole certified-only (overpriced) hardware. Just don't expect them to run for YOUR goals, they will do it for OWN goals (aka profit). This isn't possible with free/open software because its more than software - it requires tight hardware integration and distrust to owner.

Nature created GOG because she abhors a vacuum. ;p

GOG started out by tapping into a small niche market but it's primary interest is to expand, which requires moral flexibility.

Microsoft deserves the lion's share of the blame because it had the muscle to force other publishers and developers to create standards that would improve quality and security -- two things that Microsoft has never been committed to.

Easy there, Tex.
I'm as much of a GNU/Linux fanboi as the next nerd. Doesn't mean I can't take the mick out of RMS, when he's being a little over the top.
And while some of his opinions are, IMHO, a bit too rabid, some aren't. And he's perfectly entitled to all of them, anyway.

Also, I do think it's important to have a few extremists like RMS on his side of the arguments to counter the Disney corporation and their ilk.
Otherwise we'd all be completely screwed by having the Disneys of the world dictating our IP laws.

Are there any games which require galaxy or GOG signed up for single player?

With multi? I wouldn't per say call it drm but I understand why people would. It's a bit grey area especially in some cases the drm is built into the game.

But there is no way to use it while offline?

No, the only case were you would 'need' Galaxy is for achievements like with TW3

I think the problem for gog now is that back in the early days when it was Good Old Games they could use the DRM free angle relatively easily because publishers didn't much care about their old IP's and it was practically required to strip the DRM out anyway (though gog usually used other people's cracks to bypass). As they branched out into other games though they lost that simplicity and found that a large portion of their community was focused on DRM Free so they were trapped into it.

From a business standpoint I'm sure drm free is largely an inconvenience for gog & given how they always try to push out new things regardless of the community, it wouldn't surprise me if Galaxy's online check in is one of the angles they use to sell it to developers.



As I've said before I am not opposed to an ownership check for online. What I am opposed to is gog not saying so clearly & the way gog touts Galaxy as DRM Free & optional whilst pushing it on us as hard as they can get away with. All I want is gog to be more honest about this kind of thing and present the customer with accurate information so they can make the choice of whether to support the practice or not.

In the case of Shadow Warrior 2, I preordered a long time ago yet gog only updated the page just prior to release to say it would require Galaxy for multiplayer. Surely gog knew much further in advance that the developer was using their own program for multiplayer and they could easily have clarified that it was the only intended method. If they knew then why didn't they update the page much sooner and maybe email those with preorders to say that the requirements were changing for that game. If they didn't know then gog has some serious issues.

Here is what I would do:

- Multiplayer both available via LAN or other peer-to-peer or free servers and some other method asking for authentification one way or the other but both modes are almost equivalent feature-wise: DRM is only optional, don't mark it

- Multiplayer both available via LAN or other peer-to-peer or free servers and some other method asking for authentification one way or the other but both modes are not equivalent feature-wise and the authentification method offers much more features or is the only available option: DRM is not optional, mark it

If this is too complex, just mark them with labels for each characteristics:
- Requires serial number
- Requires connection to third party service X
- Requires connection to third party service Y
- Requires connection to third party service Z
- Offers LAN mode
- Offers some otther mode

Assign labels to each game for every property that applies and let there be a search for an arbitrary combination of existence or absence of these labels.

That way it would be most flexible.

Implement this label by label. Start with Galaxy because this is probably the easiest to implement. Maybe include the customers allowing them to give (and vote on) custom labels and let them include these custom labels in the searches.

You surely anticipated that I cannot do the whole work for all of the 925 games on my own. So one way or another it would have to be distributed anyway. GOGwiki or magog if it still existed could maybe provide an alternative if GOG is not willing to do that.

There are some, but they are not specifically geared towards gaming. Network communication is a fairly mainstream topic and that's why there are also open source libraries available.

See for example: http://stackoverflow.com/a/118968/1536976 and among them SDL, SFML, ZeroMQ, Boost.Asio, Poco

They are mature and well used, although more by regular applications.

It may well be, GOG Galaxy uses one of them under the hood. It's not uncommon for commercial software to use open source (depends on the license though). Maybe someone could have a look at the credits of Galaxy, sometimes they list the open source software there which they are relying on.

Why would you want to use it offline?

Not sure DRM free is largely only an inconvenience anymore for GOG. After all it's also what sets them apart from other stores like Steam. If they would give it up, what unique selling point would they have?

Being honest and making clear statements should be the rule in every business ever. What good does it do to cheat on your customers? It may result in a short term gain but it surely backfires at some point and overall the resulting loss of trust would be disastrous. There are even laws about that, for example against decepting advertisments.

Regarding Shadow Warror 2 - you really preordered it? Did you know that over and over again some people had bad experiences with pre-orders? One has to be of an adventurous mind to buy a product without knowing how it will look like. It seems to me that not pre-ordering would probably solve this particular problem.

It does exist, but it's builtin and can't be deleted, that's why you don't see it in net localgroup. The simple fact it shows up as "Everyone" means it's recognised by the system, otherwise you would only see its SID.
Frankly, I would rather suspect a bug in Galaxy...
That's not the correct way of seeing things. If you open an asian text file as if it was a US ASCII text file, indeed you're going to see english characters, and you're likely to have more characters displaying, since asian characters are often coded on two bytes at least (no matter the charset, since their alphabets are so big), while in US ASCII, everything is coded using no more than one byte. In the UTF-16 charset though, even english characters are coded on two bytes, the first/last (depending on chosen endianness) being zero. It explains why if you open a Unicode file as ANSI in the Notepad, you're going to see english words with each letter separated by a space, because Notepad shows the zero-coded character as a space.
I don't consider this a bug, as the registry should not be considered the manual pointing the end user to where things are. The actual manual should be, if there's one that is. However, developers usually don't care to tell where the game settings/saves are stored, and most of the time users don't care, but when they care I agree it can be a real pain sometimes ! Usual places to check for savegames/settings (aside from the game directory) are :

Documents
Documents\My Games
Saved Games
%APPDATA%
%LOCALAPPDATA%
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%
%PUBLIC%

About the fact that the save was moved outside the program directory itself, indeed no game should save in its installation directory where writes should be restricted to administrative purposes only, for security reasons as well as to prevent mistakes corrupting software installation. But let's not dream, some games still do that, and that's why Microsoft created User Account Control Virtualisation.
I suppose you mean the HKLM registry key ?
GOG always use their own installer, but maybe sometimes they encapsulate original installers. Anyway, I didn't check but I'm pretty sure all my GOG games are there, I saw AI War which you told me had the Everyone Full Control ACL, iirc.

You have not asked me for what I have said. I said there are many open network stacks ready and you demanded network stack + full anticheat (including hardware) + pizza delivery + from one hand + industry standard, which is ridiculous and tried several times to prove that network library is useless because "it sends packets through ports".

Teach me more about rambling into something. It means you are a brainless troll. Auf wiederschweinen.

I think he is over-the-top not because he is a nerd, but because he has a much better picture than any of us.
I don't see where he is an extremist, at least I've not seen him residing to fist-arguments, blowing stuff up or purposely destroying a company for own profit. But I've seen the later from MS.
The only situation where I see him "over-the-top" is when he blocks the technology just for the "potential" it may have to be mis-used, which means he blocks the opinion and challenge in same way the "good" old church with forks and fire. And by that he cuts down entire argumentation line to a "cult of allowed and forbidden" (free of rational "why") which drags downhill pretty fast.