   Keeping Graphics Files Impenetrable
  Hi,I was wondering if there was a way to keep our bitmaps, used in our games, from the hands of prying users.  You could save it with a different extension, but they can still be opened and read with programs like "Microsoft Paint."  Any solutions? 
  Custom resource files. Pack every bitmap into one massive file. There''s probably an article around here somewhere on implementing something of this nature. ;  Alternativly, you could develop your game with normal bitmaps.  When the game is about to ship, create a program that will garble the header information.  Rewrite your bitmap loading function to correctly read the new garble bitmaps.  You''ve probably added an extra day to your development, and made your bitmaps unreadable by everyone else''s paint program. ;  There are plenty of free cryptographical libraries about (libcrypto, crypto++ ... look with google) ;  You draw the bitmaps to the screen at some point, either by calling something like StretchBlt(), or by uploading them as a texture.There exists commonly available tools that will rip any uploaded texture or bitmap to disk. There is pretty much no way around this, because you have to give the decrypted data to the graphics card to display it.If you make something that''s good enough that people want to steal it, you''re probably doing something right, and you should be proud of it (and you should be able to make money off of it). If your stuff isn''t good enough to steal, you don''t need to worry about it getting stolen anyway :-) ;  I personally wouldn''t bother to do this. Other people don''t seem to worry about it too much either. For example Doom3 will be all standard file formats for art/sounds and human-readable text files for most other "data". Copyright law is enough to prevent unauthorized use.OTOH if you''re worried about users modifying the content in order to cheat in a multiplayer game or some such, it''s a whole another ballgame... ;  I think it''s better not to encrypt data, because:1) There are a lot of clever people out there who are capable of extracting your own crypt routines straight out of the binary.2) Due to (1), a tool will be released and everyone will get at your artwork almost before it''s released.3) When players can skin their game, it breathes a lot of extra life into it--look at the massive skinning communities for Quake, Half-Life, etc. and some of the incredible work that appears there. 