Encryption is not to important in MY opinion, just the packing.
Packing the data makes for a tidier 'project' directory on the client
PC and can be seen as the 'first' layer of encryption, weak but there.

If someone has to 'hack' to open the packing then they know they are are performing "evil".

Heavy excryption is expensive, and still no guarentee to be safe.
A good hacker will still find a way in. Be it a custom-written extractor,
or a ram-scanner.

I prefer to use a simple packer, but have embedded signatures every asset,
so if someone does strip my assets and re-uses them, the signatures are still buried in them
and can be used as proof of piracy at a later time.

use a code obfuscator and a watermark for textures, as evilsob said.

You need no code obfuscator, except maybe for the free version.

From time to time rumors of mysterious "WRS decompilers" and "stolen artwork" come up, but so far it always turned out to be 100% bogus. It is technically not possible to decompile lite-C script from a WRS file. And at least to our knowledge, no artwork was ever stolen from a WRS.

Hello JCL,

It is indeed impossible to decompile or get lite-c code from wrs since it's either compiled or packed into exe but, i gave it a try and written a small program and i can indeed unpack wrs files and get WDL and other packed art assets.

p.s. if you delete this post i will not be offended.
p.p.s.for clarification: I just written the program TODAY, and did not shared with anybody.(not planning to use this tool for any purpose or sharing it) Any other tools that may exist is not written by me.

Also, if you open a WRS file with a hex editor, you can notice that there are fragments of readable text.

I can also write a small program that can unpack WRS files. Here is it:

function main()
{
char* packed_name = "model.pak";
char* extracted_name = "extracted.mdl";
file_cpy(packed_name,extracted_name);
}

It works when the WRS file is in the same folder as the script.

it will only work if you know the filename, and the file extension is pak

the program extracts all files, without knowing the filename, including ones with extension other than .pak

If you're lucky, you can find readable filenames in the WRS.

file_cpy works for all Gamestudio-supported formats and pak-files. So, brute forcing all possible names of a file is always an option and maybe the best known attack when no information are available how the WRS format is built. Although, it would be clever to make a rainbow table with names of higher probability, though. This could be done by collecting filenames of game installations or open source projects for example (finding a "player.mdl" has a higher probability than "trdurfn.mdl", for instance).

If you can find models, you can read them out with the MDL7 lib and extract texture names (if extern). If you find WMB-files ("level01.wmb", "scene.wmb",...) you can use the public available WMB format description to read out names of used models. So, since WMB files usually contain much information - because they are crowded with models, sprites, terrain and so on - searching for them could be the best strategy. The same goes for WDL or .c/.h files, if the programmers statically defined model names or level names.

If you have such a brute force app, you only need fast computers and time to attack a WRS.

Happy brute forcing!

or you just go ahead and try to figure out the wrs format, which imo is much much easier