Anonymous Poster

Awesome Just saw it on steam this morning and am in the process of purchasing. I have not purchased this or any other of your products before due to the inclusion of starforce but if you get the other games on steam as well (without starforce) then its a guaranteed buy frome me.

Changes made to MSN can effect the entire system? I have searched but these questions have remained unanswered, sorry if its a repost. Ok so DCS does not use any sort of file level protection from Starforce, correct? No checking if the executable file has been modified or anything? Is Starforce installed as a seperate application/program? For example Starforce provides their own activation/deactivation screens, is this part of some Starforce install on the system or are you guys just linking to some starforce static/dynamic libraries (which have these forms embedded)? If it is installed as a seperate app/program, does it run its own host process in the background that protected games call through? Auto updates itself?

How do you figure? I've read the FAQ and I'm reading through old threads now, from one I've discovered that running VMWare eats away at the activations because of the Virtual NIC's. Unfortunately I'm running VMWare... I do want to try this sim but I'm just having a hard time getting past the Starforce protection when I've had so many issues with them and similar systems in the past.

Are you sure because if I understand their website correctly this is how their file level protection works? If you have BS installed mind checking your device manager (right click on My Computer and choose Manage) to see if you have any Starforce devices at root or under "Storage Controllers", "Non plug and play devices" or "Other devices" (not sure if they would be called Starforce or whatever their internal name or codename is for these products). Thanks

I was looking more into FL Proactive before letting it on my system and got some more questions (decided to reuse this thread instead of starting a new one). This game uses Frontline Proactive right and Starforce defines the protection scheme in the following image (also available in the whitepaper PDF's on their site). http://www.star-force.com/images/Image/schems/fl_pactive.jpg They also offer optical protection schemes defined as... http://www.star-force.com/images/Image/schems/fl_disc.jpg (contains spelling mistakes???) Now notice that the protection stage is exactly the same for proactive and optical. From what I understand they package the protected files together and then use their own virtual filesystem to allow applications to transparently access these files (calls CreateFile, ReadFile, etc get intercepted by their VFS drivers and the requested data is decrypted and returned). If that is still the case then that means that they will still need to install their own VFS driver on the users system? Am I correct?

Any chance of this going on Steam or another provider without starforce? I saw some threads from a long time ago where this was suggested and being looked at but don't think anything came of it. What happens if you run out of activations/deactivations? I would have probably run out of activations in less then a year. Last month new video card (new activation), a month before that swapped out 6 memory modules (new activation), before that a new CPU (again new activation) and before that a new mobo and HD's (again more activations). Also when Win7 got released I re-installed that twice since my RAID5 card drivers didn't support a 64-bit intel setup (switched to onboard) so two more activations gone again... This sim looks amazing from everything I've seen but I don't want to rebuy it everytime I hit the activation limits and from Starforce's past behaviour I'm not sure I want anything from them on my system. Does starforce even work, if I type "dcs black shark" into google the first suggestion it gives is to search for torrents???