Sorry your browser is not supported!

So, I'm working on the graphics for my game, and I was wondering, is there a way to make my .x models inaccessable to users so nobody ( or at least very few people ) "graphic hack" my game? I mean, I can just go to the program folder for the 3D Game Creator (My first 3D game-making experience ever ) and change the entire look of the software, but for other games, like RCT1, all the GFX are hidden or packed in special files. Is there a way I can do this with my files?

anyone can take the media, in alot of ways, i managed to view the media (textures/meshes/etc..) of alot of popular games, along with how they are rendered, order, real-time modification and alot, ALOT of detail, there is no way to protect your media.

but if you want it so that it's "hard" to do so, like, prevent people from just taking them when they see the media folder, you can write your own file format, with GDK this could be a little bit advanced, you will, for example, save the pixels of an image in such a way that you know how to read it from your application, none will be able to open it then, unless they decode it (dunno if people does that, or tries to, but well.. ), or they take it while your game is running
one more option is to use .rar with a password, i don't know much about this but perhaps, there is a winRAR API that allows your application to use the file using a known password

honestly i have written alot of file formats for all my media because i was thinking just like you: i want to protect my stuff!, but recently i found out that it was all a waste of time, not totally (yeah well, it's cool to have your own format ^^), but really, the main goal wasn't reached, there is no "real" protection

[href=http://www.molebox.com]
http://www.molebox.com/[/href]

Copyrighting your media provides you with the best protection of all, Legal Protection. If someone infringes on your copyrights, you have the ability to sue for statutory damages.

IMO, its a waste of time to hide your assets. In fact, they can serve as advertisement for media creation services or you can sell licenses to use the media on limited basis. Besides most Game Devs desire unique media assets specific to their games.

As a start you can save those .x as .dbo files. You can also convert the .dbo to memblocks and then save those memblocks to a fileblock of your own format.
At some point in the middle, you can also encrypt the data with your own internal key value. (There are snippets around to do this).
For runtime, you can delete files inmediately after the extraction from the fileblock and the loading, even though they would be encrypted memblocks at that moment.
All that would keep people busy enough so that they probably give up before they are done with ripping your media.

What I do is put them into a format that is kinda like a zip file, but only my game can open them. Even though it is impossible to stop people from ripping X models (they are opened at runtime, simple memory extraction can do it), putting them into a file format only you know will take time, manpower and most of the time it isn't worth it to reverse-engineer the whole format (you can use like zlib compression to make it even more tough). Note this is quite advanced coding though.