Unions are uploaded to the website like a decal or sound or model (almost).
Currently people can find exploits and steal your game (Phantom Forces) and steal your unions (Phantom Forces’ guns).
My proposition is let us check a setting somewhere that says a union is linked to the owner. Sort of like letting people take your decal or model. If it’s not checked by the owner, it’s not going to load for other players games. Not even in studio, it just won’t show up. It’ll load as a regular part.
It seems like a useless step if we’re just talking about preventing game stealing, however it is rather easy to copy a union asset ID if you find the link on the website and modify your place file to reflect the same ID, so perhaps there is a case for this.
This isn’t useless if it’s preventing people from loading your assets.[quote=“jcfc, post:2, topic:23877, full:true”]
It seems like a useless step if we’re just talking about preventing game stealing, however it is rather easy to copy a union asset ID if you find the link on the website and modify your place file to reflect the same ID, so perhaps there is a case for this.
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Assets can already be loaded aside form things like animations, I don’t see how unions should be any different. If someone finds a way to steal your place they’ll get all of the parts, scripts, etc. It’s a useless measure to “booby-trap” one kind of instance.
???
Unions are already uploaded online. When you load a union Roblox loads it in just like a model. If you don’t have permissions to the model, you can’t insert it.
You still have to download the union to be able to render it during a game. Trying to block it will be pretty futile.
Even if you somehow figured out a way to keep me from downloading it from the site, I could just use a graphics debugger and play your game and save the mesh.
From what I can tell you could just have the site say no to non-owner requests to download.
Mesh stealing is just another complicated workaround, but that’s the thing, it’s more work than just cloning the place. Each and every union needs to be recreated using this mesh method 
Even if it’ll inconvenience the hardcore guys, knowing that the average exploiter can’t get to them is really good imo
I’m still not sure what you mean by having the site not allow downloads from non-owners. That will mean that players playing your game won’t be able to see these unions. You have to download it to be able to use it; that’s how assets work.
It’s an agreed upon fact in the game development world that your assets are never safe once they’re on a client’s computer.
If you’re in game it’s fine, (just like decals), can’t you just do the same thing you do with decals? Don’t load them in a place that isn’t owned by someone who owns the asset.
That alone is fair, but it won’t really solve the problem. This isn’t really my area of expertise though, so someone else would have to chime in.
Ah.
I do know that it isn’t a real solution, but it is better than flat out giving everyone access.
The success of this all depends on the nature of those exploits. If the people are just stealing the ID in-game and writing it into their own place files, this would help. If they’re downloading the union itself in-game though, a place owner ID check wouldn’t do much good since they’d be publishing it as a new union.
That’s kind of how anti-viruses work. They know the can’t stop everything but they try to stop what they can, and for the most part it helps.
I’d love to know that someone can’t just copy+paste hours of my work into their crappy game.
On the topic of viruses, making a patch for ID stealing when people are just downloading+reuploading the union is like vaccinating for the Flu’s strain B when strain A is going around. If the problem is people downloading and then reuploading, patching ID stealing is going to do jack because that’s not how people are stealing unions.
If people are stealing unions by ID, yes, what you’re suggesting would solve that problem. If people are stealing unions by saving them to their computer when their client downloads them when they join your game, no, what you’re suggesting would not solve that problem and we’d need something different to stop people from stealing unions.
How do you know that?
I’m fairly certain they just copy+paste the union. My guess is a good as yours, but I wouldn’t make all these ‘ifs’
I’d love if someone who might know something about this (Maybe @zeuxcg?) would let us know what’s what.
Because of the nature of what you’re suggesting? You’re asking for unions to not load if someone else’s game tries to load your union asset. If it’s not your asset (because they uploaded it as a new asset), how exactly do you expect ROBLOX to prevent it from being used in their game? As far as ROBLOX knows, it’s theirs because it’s an asset uploaded by them. A creator check on assets does no good if they just create a new asset tied to their account.
Chill ScriptOn. I’m not insulting your feature request or what have you. You want to prevent people from using unions in your game, and seem to think that creator checking on assets is the solution to it. The past two posts were making it clear that it may not be the one-hit-wonder you’re hoping it to be, and that it might not even prevent what you want it to prevent. They were informational replies, and didn’t ever mention “No we shouldn’t have this feature at all ever”.
-.- I’ve just had this exact conversation with badFood.
Unions are saved online once uploaded. If someone steals the active place using exploits the unions are loaded through IDs. These ID’s are then used to load the union every time it’s shown on the screen. Re-uploading it yourself or whatever it is does nothing if you can’t load it in the first place (because it’s not loading for games that aren’t owned by the same owner as the union).
Then, badFood and I discussed how they could steal mesh data from it and do some complicated things to take the raw data and put it back into studio. That’s something completely different and takes much more work than pressing a button on the ‘haxor’ program to copy the place file.
Did you discuss that over PMs or off-site? In response to his second-to-last post you didn’t seem to take notice of stealing mesh data, and in his last post he never mentioned it. It looked as if you didn’t pick up on that yet, which is why I elaborated on it further.
That’s news to me. Apparently Ninja Ripper which allows me to rip 3D models from a virtual GameCube shouldn’t exist. Any step-by-step process that can be done by a human can be automated and made into a tool.
I’m going to wait for an admin to respond.
This kind of discussion comes up once in a while, mostly regarding other assets (Decals, clothing, audio), if you search a bit you will probably find similar posts like this which have already been addressed by admins or which have more elaborate replies by regular users that detail the issue and why the solution is hard.
In particular: if someone is going into your game and steals the IDs of the unions, then they will also go through the effort to install/make a script that copies the data of the union and exports it to a .rbxm file. It only takes one guy to make such a script and post it on a website such as v3rmin.