Garry's Mod developer exposes pirates with fake error

[Matthew DeCarlo]

If you're among the many Garry's Mod users experiencing the startup error "Unable to shade polygon normals," you should probably keep that information to yourself. According to GMod creator Garry Newman, he introduced the error this week and it's designed to only appear on illegal copies of the game as a means of flushing out pirates.

Upon receiving the error, unsuspecting pirates posted on the Steam forum looking for assistance. Those individuals are being banned from the message board. Making the situation even more interesting, the polygon error message is followed by a number in parenthesis that most folks would associate with an error code. See the example below:

"Engine Error:Unable to shade polygon normals(#################)"

The kicker is, that's actually a SteamID, so pirates are unknowingly revealing their Steam identity. Speaking with Bit-Gamer, the developer claimed that 2,500 pirates were identified 15 hours after rolling out the error. Newman doesn't have the power to ban Steam IDs and it's unclear if any accounts have been banned outside of the forum.

Instead, he wants this to serves as a point of humiliation for people running illegitimate copies of the game. "I did this for the people that did buy Garry’s Mod. They get to point and laugh at pirates. If we leave it easy for people to pirate we're betraying the people that paid," Newman said. "I'm just having fun at the pirates expense."

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/43292-garrys-mod-developer-exposes-pirates-with-fake-error.html

 

[krayzie]

Well played sir!

 

[Wagan8r]

Awesome job!

 

[Cota]

Epicness, now can you make something to lower PC games prices? im getting sick of eating cups of noodles

 

[Cueto_99]

Awesome... Did you saw that Ubisoft... That's how you treat with pirates... Not with a prohibited and SecuRom... Watch & Learn...

 

[Nima304]

Whoever thought of this is a ****ing genius. I agree with Cueto, SecuRom is a terrible way of dealing with piracy.

 

[KG363]

I like this... a lot

 

[gwailo247]

Wow, so many angry people on his Twitter feed, LOL.

How can you call a guy a **** for catching you pirating his game?

 

[Wendig0]

Nice job!

Cota said:
Epicness, now can you make something to lower PC games prices? im getting sick of eating cups of noodles

I'm sure there are higher paying jobs out there for you.

 

[Greg S]

Wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets a job offer in the near future...

I think that this is a creative way to deal with it, but they really need to come up with a bunch of little tricks like this to get all the pirates. As soon as one is discovered, most of the pirates won't post about the "error". There really needs to be a bunch of things that happen, maybe like defaulting all graphics settings to low and putting the game in 8 bit color?

 

[wujj123456]

That's epic. Valve guys are so humorous.

 

[Guest]

Hahaha, that is awesome. This is how Anti Piracy measures should work, exposing the pirates without hurting the actual paying customers.

Only other similar approach I have seen/read about was Batman Arkham Asylum's "bug", you couldn't glide with a pirated copy so you would fall to your death when you jumped from a high place. Making it impossible to make it to the destination to fulfill the games objective.

 

[Steve]

This is funny but hasn't this kind of thing been done many times before in the past?

If I recall ages ago if you pirated "Red Alert 2" all your units would blow up within a few minutes or something like that... Still all great ways of tackling piracy as it only annoys the pirates.

 

[treetops]

lol why would someone ask for advice about a pirated game on the steam forum

 

[herpaderp]

Nima304 said:
Whoever thought of this

Are you serious?

 

[mrtraver]

Love it!

 

[HaMsTeYr]

Nice hahahaha. A bit cruel, the guys have been blindsided but nice never the less. Oh well. Its not that expensive anyway, just drop like what? 2-3 cans of beer and you're all set lol

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

*Troll face*.

 

[Timonius]

Nice. Goes to show you that using pirated software could potentially bite back. Who knows what else has been engineered in the code...

 

[bugejakurt]

"If we leave it easy for people to pirate we're betraying the people that paid"

Thumbs UP!

 

[Kibaruk]

How could they have this pirated on steam? For me its odd... you could have it "pirate" but as "aplication outside steam", thats the whole deal of steam isn't it??

 

[Lokalaskurar]

Nima304 said:
Whoever thought of this

I agree with Nima304's genius part. And the SecuROM part as well. This way of flushing out pirates should be more widely used, haha.

 

[doradhorror]

Anybody retarded enough to fall for this deserves to be banned.

 

[stewi0001]

Awesomeness!!! anti-pirating without screwing over legit buyers!!! woot!!!!!!

 

[Guest]

For PC games, anti pirate code should be:

if (pirate) {
string shd = detect system hard drive;
format shd;
}