Executive Summary

From IGAEditorWiki

This is an executive summary of the situation, giving you concise information about IGA's software and this program.

IGA

IGA Worldwide is an in-game advertising company. They provide:

• A library that is hooked from within the game, to display the advertising, and record performance data
• A bunch of servers that serve advertising (images and videos), and recieve performance data from the client
• Advertising consultancy services

They use their own advertising platform, which they "sell" to advertisers to put ads on (or integrate a commercial product into a game).

As far as research has seen, there is no evidence that shows that the IGA libraries record activities outside the game. However, at this time, no actual testing has been performed to suggest either way.

In the game, the IGA libraries will record when an ad was viewed, how long it was viewed for, what angle it was viewed at, and how big it appeared on your screen. Presently, many web-based advertising services will attempt to monitor similar statistics - it is simply the same concept applied to a 3D interactive environment.

This software

This software provides an interface to a file called icontent.cache, a file which is used to store the ad images.

It allows you to view and edit advertising that would be otherwise be shown within the game. This software also provides a number of other features:

• "Vaccuming" fuctionality (similar to the "compact and repair" feature in Microsoft Access), which allows you to free unused space in the cache file after it has been changed.
• "Adpacks", which allow you to store a group of ads in a single file for easy import, as well as doing batch exports of ads. For example, a clan may wish to replace the in-game advertising with their own logos or artwork.
• A library that allows third-party developers to easily interact with adpack files and the cache file.

This software was initially developed for Battlefield 2142, after the community outrage that a retail-sold game would contain dynamic advertising. It was extended to support other games using the same IGA software.