Anyone know anything about 'Themida'?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-04-25 02:19am

It appears to be a Starforce-esque low-level copy protection soft. I ask because it's apparently used in M&B, and I'm curious how it works. All I've found so far are the offical site stuff, which is pretty uninformative - although it looks like it's pretty processor-intensive, like the newer versions of Starforce. I want to know what impact it has security and performance wise.

Advocate · Post by **Advocate** » 2006-04-27 09:38am

I want to know what impact it has security and performance wise.

No idea about security-wise, but processor-wise the impact seems to be negligible. I'm running a mid-range system and still getting about 75-80 FPS with the (unofficial) Battle Size Changer set to 100 units.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-04-27 03:20pm

So am I. However, the description on their site describes the system as very late-Starforceish, and I have to wonder if the never-addressed slowdowns (like when loading a new bunch of guys on the battlemap, or the ABSURD starting loadtimes) are due to the crazy 'encrypt the whole memoryspace' concept. It also cheeses me that unlike Starforce, Themida is entirely silent, so I had no idea until some troll showed up on the M&B forums being lame. We can't declare the performance impact negligible until we've run a side-by-side comparison with non-Themida version... and given how starting the game, starting a new char and loading the game has always taken an extremely long time, I'm starting to wonder if that isn't due to inefficient python scripts at all, but rather their copy protection loading everything into their 'encrypt into lots of little bits' system.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-04-27 05:05pm

The creator once posted that the difference from the non-Themida version was negligable, and he doesn't seem like the type to outright lie about his product.