how to make an urban legend in your game, in the internet age

make a rare event that happens in hidden area, like 1% of the time, but every month the game is out, the chance of it happening drops by 0.1%.

the event also doesn't happen if it detects any common streaming software, like OBS.

also, all the assets for the event would be embedded into the binary, so dataminers would have to decompile it to confirm its existence.

oh, and in a switch port, it would disable video snapshots while the event is active

@lily even better is if its some sort of multiplayer / mmo game and the map/level data or something similar is sent by the server every time you load in. That way you can make the urban legend require no extra code or assets on the client and come purely from the server, removing all easily-identifiable traces of it

@lunacb
an online game could theoretically look through all twitch streams of the game to see if a given match is being livestreamed

@lily I don't know if it would enhance or ruin the legend but it would be funny to have early prerelease demo footage consistently showing the rare event. So after release most people dismiss it as people just misremembering/lying about something that was in early versions but removed before release. Like Luigi in Super Mario 64 if he was actually hidden in the final version of the game

@nytpu
on exactly the 7th day of the demo being out, it has a 100% chance of happening, but on all other days of the demo, it is exactly 0%

@lily you should also hide the resources so that dataminers don't easily confirm it.
Hide textures inside sound files. Models inside textures. Voice lines and text steganographically encoded in splash screens.

@foone
that's the point of embedding it in the binary, but you could also do stenography on top of that. decompilation will reveal it either way.

@lily If your game was popular enough you'd probably get at least one maybe two recordings from people who were using hardware capture cards and maybe another couple from people who happened to be pointing cameras at their screen at the time
But all you would really need to do in that case as the developer is through even the slightest amount of doubt on the veracity of the recordings and you could probably still make it work

@addressforbots
hardware capture cards aren't completely undetectable, just look at the name and number of the displays.

@lily right, I'm just suggesting (as someone who reverse engineers/datamines video games) ways to slow down the discovery further.
So it won't be easy to find even if we already are decompiling the binary to find it

@lily true but it very much depends on the capture card many will just pass through the signal and the display metadata unchanged if the resolution and frame rate is something it's capable of you could theoretically use HDCP but that would preclude streams and let's plays of your game entirely and even that isn't entirely foolproof and speaking of DRM then there are the crackers who will inevitably discover the embedded assets while cracking your game especially if you try to obfuscate them
1/2

@lily not saying you couldn't start an Urban legend but it would be difficult and somebody would inevitably figure it out eventually even if it some bored CS grad student 25 years later whose decompiling your game for fun
2/2

@addressforbots
i mean, that's fine, personally i would want them to find it eventually after a few decades.

would be wild to see people going "i knew it!!!" and all

maybe have a sequence of like, 70 buttons to trigger it manually

@lily also one of the most likely ways this kind of thing would get found out is when your attempt to hide stuff breaks something and somebody tries to figure out why it's breaking (again not saying you couldn't do it with enough time and effort)

@foone @lily I am now trying to picture how I'd design the code that took one actual real datafile (like a sound file) and turned it into another (like a texture file) without steganography. Maybe provide some kind of custom decompression dictionary you could use with one of the compression algorithms so the sound file unzipped into an image or texture or something.

@wordshaper
that just sounds like stenography
@foone

@lily @foone I've always assumed steganography involved extracting parts of one file to reconstruct another rather than full file transforms, but my assumption about the meaning of steganography may be wrong. (In which case I guess decompression or decryption could be considered steganographic, which seems odd)

@wordshaper
cryptography aims to hide the contents of a message

stenography aims to hide the fact that a message was sent at all
@foone

@lily Aren’t stenography and steganography two different things?

@nil
honestly, no idea

@lily FYI CFW users on the Switch can screenshot/record any time. 😁

@nazokiyoubinbou
doesn't the record buffer take a bunch of memory?? don't some games use that memory?

@lily
Make sure you have code that "enhances" streaming experience when OBS is detected to have reason to have that code.
@mcc

@encthenet
oh, it could just rearrange the ui to make room for the webcam
@mcc@mastodon.social