Product Registration Mod
IAmTheRad:
I did not invent nor sculpt things in the career bundle when I installed it.
It was a case and a design job that I thought were in the bundle. Truth is, they were in the base ambitions game. Just human error that time.
VegaBlack:
Just thought I'd throw it out there; you don't actually have to wait to sculpt the statues randomly. They're available in buydebug, along with the new inventions.
Baaa for the mod.
PolecatEZ:
Quote from: Crysill on 2010 June 07, 04:31:53
Quote from: PolecatEZ on 2010 June 07, 02:42:36
Perhaps a silly question, but how does the game know if it is registered or not? Is there another file that gets downloaded or a change to an existing file which would let the game know if the user has registered his EP or not?
From a quick glance at the code, TS3 always assumes that the base game, WA, and HELS are registered. However, when it checks for Ambitions registration, it performs some sort of check using values from the two sculptures and two inventions provided by the Ultimate Career Bundle. I'm not sure if registering and downloading it from the EA store generates a personalized version for your game/CD-Key, or if it's just something that gets removed or altered in the usual methods we install Arr'd Store content (would love to hear the results of people who used a method other than decrapified Sims3Pack with and without Rothchild's mod). Either way, for legitimately registered games, the act of installing the Ultimate Career Bundle that EA provides you results in the confirmation of your registration in-game.
Due to that roundabout way of checking if the expansion pack is registered, it is doubtful that they perform any modifications to tag the game files themselves.
Quote from: PolecatEZ on 2010 June 07, 03:58:43
It just seems that tricking the game into thinking you're registered with a single mod, hack, or copied file would be a better tactic than individually cleaning each download or releasing a supplemental patch for each future download package.
Normally from an elegance standpoint I would agree. That's technically what the core mod I posted should be. However, the Inventing/Sculpting items were further broken (again: only confirmed with the decrapified Sims3Pack installation) such that even having Ambitions "registered" wasn't enough, so Rothchild's XML solution which also addresses that issue is superior in every way.
In this case, the parts that are edited by this mod were already in the game data as of the 1.12/2.7/3.3/4.0 patch; not added by the Ultimate Career Bundle. If EA continues to use this method, the only time they could add more restricted content is with the release of a new patch. While it does concern me that this seems like a test swipe at the rampant store content sharing, I don't foresee them releasing restricted items rapidly enough that the mod catching up would become an issue.
My guess would be that it checks if the item is legitimately installed, which would make it nicely self-contained.
For example, shifting around the .dbc files results in them dynamically losing their "tag" in the buy or CAS menus. Perhaps the game simply checks in the file is where it should be (is tagged as a "Sims Store" item) and maybe also does a hash check on itself to determine if it has been tampered with (decrapified). If anything about the file is changed, then it will no longer match a fixed internal value. If the file is not changed, then it simply won't install in an unregistered game. The fix in the future would require a bit of programming ability beyond me, basically getting Decrapify to seek and destroy the hash check.
This is all just theoretical guesswork though, without having to look at the files. As far as I know though, there is no legitimate way for a package to tell the difference between a cracked game or a legitimate installed one, just too many variables. If some supplemental file or change to a file in the game directory took place upon registration, I'm sure it would have been posted somewhere.
Crysill:
Quote from: VegaBlack on 2010 June 08, 11:33:28
Just thought I'd throw it out there; you don't actually have to wait to sculpt the statues randomly. They're available in buydebug, along with the new inventions.
Baaa for the mod.
Unfortunately, at least in my setup, the sculptures and inventions always exist but just wouldn't be created without their versions in the XML changed to "BaseGame". For example, here's a failed sculpture from the InventSculpt_EP2 experiment next to the fully functional statues from buydebug:
Even in a test without touching the ProductRegistrationRequired values, the inventions and sculptures were still available in buydebug despite not being able to be created normally. Very odd.
Quote from: PolecatEZ on 2010 June 08, 13:24:07
This is all just theoretical guesswork though, without having to look at the files. As far as I know though, there is no legitimate way for a package to tell the difference between a cracked game or a legitimate installed one, just too many variables.
That seems to be the right train of thought. The drop-in-a-file solution you desire would probably be a "correct" Ultimate Career Bundle installation. Whatever the difference is between that and our installation is the only thing separating the "registered" and "unregistered" expansion packs.
ShortyBoo:
I have the .package version of the career bundle and my sculptor sim makes those red cube failure objects, but her husband who is a level 10 inventor won't make the last two inventions at all. I haven't tried the other careers yet.
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