Dead Key?

[milo christiansen]

When I bought the game I received an email with the following:

Keep your key code, it has unlimited activations forever, even after the game is finished. I won't have no evil DRM system on my ship! No sir!

But after spending forever downloading the latest non-steam torrent I find that my key code will no longer activate the game.

When I enter the code (tried with and without dashes, checked and double checked, copied and pasted, etc) it simply reports that "Activation Failed".

Note that the computer I am installing on has no internet, and activation worked fine for .72

What changed? A dose of "evil DRM" or is it something else?

Note: Just to add extra fun to this, I can only get online tuesday or friday afternoon (via a linux laptop and public wifi), so timely replies will be difficult.

[Koomatzu]

PM sent

[someone]

The reason it stopped working is due to the key system we were using being discontinued. The only way to keep all the old keys was to use an online activation system, which is problematic if you don't have internet access.

So, here is what you can do. I assume you have the 0.95.12 torrent version.
First you need the 0.95.13 patch from here.
Next you need to run the offlineactivation.exe I included in the patch from your kenshi directory.
Then go to here and input your serial key and the activation key from that program. This should give you a kenshi.reg file.
Finally open this file on the computer with kenshi installed. It will add the activation codes to the registry which should unlock the full game.

[milo christiansen]

Thank you!

While I am very glad that there is a way to continue to play the game, I must say I am disappointed that the DRM seems to be getting more and more intrusive as time goes by...

Couldn't you do something similar to what the Factorio guys do? There you log into their website and download a DRM free copy, no fuss and bother required. Also distributing a paid product via torrent is really unprofessional (you are basically making your users provide infrastructure for you).

[Hatsune_Neko]

Also distributing a paid product via torrent is really unprofessional (you are basically making your users provide infrastructure for you).

Lo-Fi Games is a small company with limited cash. the turrets are a easy and very cheap way to have the item distributed when a company has limited funds, who would rather they be spent on making the game.
maybe that will change once the company gets bigger. and a more steady supply of money from more than just 1 game it currently has on the shelves. we will find out sooner or later.

[milo christiansen]

So, on friday I entered my key and what I assume is a machine ID/hash into your activation system and got a .reg file back. So far so good.

I got it home and added the .reg file to my registry, then started the game. This resulted in it asking my to activate, the only difference being that it already had my key filled in. Examining the relevant part of the registry with regedit revealed that the confirmation number was set to all zeros and dashes. Setting it back to the number in the .reg file simply resulted in it being zeroed out again as soon as I tried to run the game.

Either the .reg file is missing something, the online activation system is returning a confirmation number the game can't handle, or there is a bug in the game's validation logic.

I have the patch linked above installed, did you test it?

[Hatsune_Neko]

Private message it to someone or Koomatzu

[someone]

Bah, Seems I did not put enough form validation and error checking in the activation system.
It gave you an invalid activation key because a decoding function was expecting the dashes in the machine id. Very sorry for that.

[milo christiansen]

Being a programer myself I understand completely...

"If you didn't test it it doesn't work", I have been bitten by that little saying many, many times, I think every programmer has

Also: It still doesn't work, I get the following error:

Code: Select all

Database Error
SELECT * FROM kenshi_keys WHERE keycode = '<my key code>'
Table 'lofig0_forum.kenshi_keys' doesn't existYour serial key seems invalid

It seems it can't find the key table? The same serial and machine ID worked fine last time, so it can't be that.

BTW: I hope you are adequately protecting from SQL injection...

[someone]

Ah man, it looks like the forum update just wiped the key database. What poor timing. I was certain it would work perfectly for you today.
Chris will be re-uploading the database when he gets back a so it should work again soon.

[milo christiansen]

Figured it was something like that when I saw the DB name. Hopefully I can stop bothering you soon

Also: I love the new forum. The old one really lagged and looked kinda ugly, this one is much nicer.

EDIT: I now have a new .reg file, wish me luck!

[milo christiansen]

Good News: I was able to activate the game and play over the weekend.

Bad News: I was able to do this despite a bug in the activation system. It seems that whatever generates the .reg file will strip leading zeros from the activation code. I got super lucky and noticed that the all-zeros placeholder the game uses to overwrite an invalid activation code started with a three digit group, and my code from the activation system only had two digits in the first group. Padding my code with a zero fixed it.