Ability to edit password protected quests

[Isana]

A password on the quest, does not protect the graphics, at all. A player can screenshot, and thus rip, anything in a game that they want to rip. The password system is also entirely pointless, as there are tools for removing the password from 2.5 quests, and older quests too. if people want something, there is no way to prevent them from getting it; except for un-compiled ZScript, not stored in a buffer. (They can dissect a .qt0 file and try to recover the ZASM from it.) I believe a ZASM decompiler exists too.

Yeah if somebody wants something bad enough, they'll always find a way.
I took the route of patching ZQuest itself on Windows and Linux to bypass the password verification to take advantage of ZQuest's compatibility with quests across it's many iterations.
I didn't release a patch or anything, but there are already other tools out there.

I never put a password on anything. I think the idea is silly, and when people defend 'protecting graphics', I ask one question: How many tiles in your quest, are ripped from elsewhere> Oh, and how much of the music, and sound effects, is entirely original to your project? The only thing worth protecting, are stories, and unless it's not based on an existing work, or a true parody, it's rather hard to defend. Just about everyone who uses ZQuest, is pirating, and plagiarising on a regular basis. Asking others not to do the same, and trying to circumvent it, is purely hypocritical, IMO.

I've not released a quest yet, but I wouldn't use a password either.
There's always going to be some level of hypocrisy in expecting people to not take from you what you've taken from another and I've personally never come across a quest where all of the assets were completely original.
I'd love to see one though, heh. ( ･ω･)

The password system is also a large problem with making a mainstream, open-source ZC release. If you want a better game engine, with more features, that is open source, start accepting a non-password-protected quest format, for the future. What I suggest, is to remove passwords entirely, and automatically strip them out of older quests when loading them with ZC 2.60. People may whine about it; but you know what? It won;t stop them from using the programme, and if ZC/ZQ didn't have passwords as of 2.5, people would already have adapted.

I thought the plan was to change the way this works or remove it completely from the open-source ZC release and just accept that quests would not be cross-compatible between the official build and open-source release?
That's what I recall reading anyway. Either way, I'm sure there have been more discussions between the developers that I'm not aware of so that's probably irrelevant at this point.

I would support the developers if they were to do this and finally make a public open-source release of ZC, but if they don't I can't say I would really complain either...

The entire model of content protection (or any other form of obfuscation) merely strangles progress. That applies to all fields of science, and art, not merely modding. How far do you think the world of games would have reached, if any idea, was constrained to its creator, and solely its creator? We'd never have gone far beyond Pong, and Space Invaders, both of which, by the by, were [u]fully cloned by Nintendo[/u[ (without permission) and sold in Japan.

Oh yeah, I definitely agree with you on this wholeheartedly. I don't have a problem with people wanting to take small steps to secure their work or anything, but a lot of this is getting out of hand.
Especially DRM which only hurts those who pay for media that is "protected" by it and it will always be defeated anyway. It's a waste of time and resources.
I always end up patching games I've bought if they have DRM in order to get rid of it.

I remember a particular case where Sony(?) made use of DRM for music and their DRM was a forking rootkit.
I can't be bothered to look it up again at the moment though haha.

I believe that the main reason that Nintendo has never tried to censor ZC, is the way that the Japanese look at doujin, and most quests fall into the doujin category of art, and literature, except 1st.qst, and 2nd.qst. Those are where they may hold objections, but haven't.

Yeah, but I don't think they're necessarily losing sales or anything to ZC. They've created Mario Maker recently though so they might eventually end up creating "Zelda Maker" if the former does well enough.
There's a chance that something like that could cause some issues, but ZC has been around so long that they probably wouldn't bother it. I would hope that to be the case anyway haha.

For anyone worried about people 'stealing their strings'--goodness--or figuring out the ending from reading the string table (the only valid concern with strings and story) you can always either make a string table with 10x the needed content, much of it intentionally misleading, red herrings, and the like (Interplay was famous for that), or embed the strings in ZSscript files, that aren't in your buffer. It's much more tedious to decode a string from numerical values stored in ZASM. Hah.

People are worried about someone "stealing" strings? Okay, I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous haha. Same with people going and spoiling the ending for themselves.
I don't know why this is even a concern. (・_・)

My final thoughts on worrying about people ripping truly original content: The community would view them as pariahs, and shame them for it. I feel that the fact that we have communities, who would so that, is enough of an incentive to prevent it, at least on a large scale; but then again, I also can't argue against ripping a tileset from an original project, as you know, we all do that from other [u]commercial[/u[ works, as routine.

Yeah. If someone wants someone to play their quests and want to be accepted in the community, it's in their best interest to avoid being a complete moron.
What's the point in someone creating a quest using someone else's original assets while claiming all of it to be their own when that would only lead to one being shunned
from the community, thereby resulting in very few people playing their quest assuming it hasn't been taken down.

Finally, in short, I just don't think anyone should make a huge deal about someone using assets from other quests as long as they don't claim to have created whatever they're using themselves and give credit.
If the quest is protected one should at least try to get in touch with the creator and request permission before going and just ripping what they want from the quest.
Don't just outright disregard the wishes of the one who created the quest.

That's pretty much where I currently stand on this matter.

EDIT: FYI, Zelda Classic is not a pirated copy of Zelda 1. It was reverse-engineered: there IS a difference.

Yeah, but reverse engineering is still a bit of a legal gray area.
Clean room design is generally considered more acceptable as it allows one to copy a design and recreate it while avoiding copyright infringement.