CompuServe Messages

Hi John, I've got a couple of suggestions of my own for copy protection on your Windoze version of Interchange. 1: Make it cheaper. I've never really understood why companies feel that just because they're porting their software to PC's they have to charge 2 to 5 times as much. It seems to me that with a price of $500 your only customers are going to be companies that do MASSIVE ammounts of object conversions. The 3D hobby user will just wait till he can get a pirated copy or do without a conversion program. It seems to me that if the price were in the $150 to $200 range you would get a lot more volume to make up for the lower price. If the person just wants Interchange to be able to use objects from BBS's and FTP sites, even your 3D-ROM is a better value if it has the object format he's interested in. I realize that it's more difficult to be taken seriously in the PC world if your software is inexpensive, but sending review copies to PC magazines should get the message out that a program doesn't have to cost a lot to do a lot. Perhaps you could even work out a deal with AutoDesk, Impulse, Caligari corp, ect. to include one of your Interchange flyers in every 3D package. 2: My other suggestion is to ship the program ONLY on CD-ROM. You could include a couple of dozen objects to make it seem like a better value, but the real reason for using a CD-ROM is as a key disc. You could put a few hundred protection files full of random numbers on the disc. When the program runs you could have it check a specific sector of the disc for a particular byte sequence. Even if you were to copy all of the files to a hard drive Interchange still wouldn't work since the data wouldn't be in the correct sector and you don't read it by filename. If you wanted to get really sneaky you could even have the files contain data required for the conversion process. Stuff like how to set up a conversion array or scaling factor. Have a couple of dozen real data files mixed in with a few of hundred dummy files and it should be pretty hard for the casual pirate to get around. Minor bug fixes could be shipped on floppy and require the CD-ROM as a key disc while major upgrades would require a new CD. Although not everyone has a CD-ROM drive yet the price is coming down and 3D animation requires pretty high end hardware anyways so the cost of the drive should be no big deal. Once the master disc is done you might even save money on disk duplication costs. :^) Jeff H…