Any way to build a non-disassemblable executable?

[Automatik]

And this is the reason why there isn't a single commercial game released with love2d to date and never will be.
It's a good tool for prototyping, learning lua and a general process of making a game though so take it for what it is.

I would never waste my time and the time of a coder making a product we're going to sell if there isn't even a basic way of protecting our work, piracy is bad enough but if your source and asset files are open to all too ... . Yeah it's true most big companies leave their assets comparably unguarded but at the same time they have big lawyers too, so they don't have to worry much about that. For indie devs though, security is an issue.

You get what you pay for. Free engines produce free games.

http://snayke.net/
http://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3794
Also, what can obfuscating give to the developer?
-Less piracy?
Because pirates won't be able to break your DRM ? But :
1.There is ton of games whose DRMs were broken.
2.DRM harm more your customers than your pirates.
3.Mods are a feature, and can help to sell your game.
-Less stealing of your algorithm?
What's the point in not letting others use your work?

[tossit]

And this is the reason why there isn't a single commercial game released with love2d to date and never will be.
It's a good tool for prototyping, learning lua and a general process of making a game though so take it for what it is.

I would never waste my time and the time of a coder making a product we're going to sell if there isn't even a basic way of protecting our work, piracy is bad enough but if your source and asset files are open to all too ... . Yeah it's true most big companies leave their assets comparably unguarded but at the same time they have big lawyers too, so they don't have to worry much about that. For indie devs though, security is an issue.

You get what you pay for. Free engines produce free games.

This pretty much sums everything up. Sure there are 'commercial' games released but nothing good.
I mean, I've been lurking here a while and I haven't seen a single game available on say Steam. Sure, some stuff under Greenlight consideration but nothing anyone's actually voted for. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I might actually pop by here to see the replies to this. (nah)

[slime]

And this is the reason why there isn't a single commercial game released with love2d to date and never will be.
It's a good tool for prototyping, learning lua and a general process of making a game though so take it for what it is.

I would never waste my time and the time of a coder making a product we're going to sell if there isn't even a basic way of protecting our work, piracy is bad enough but if your source and asset files are open to all too ... . Yeah it's true most big companies leave their assets comparably unguarded but at the same time they have big lawyers too, so they don't have to worry much about that. For indie devs though, security is an issue.

You get what you pay for. Free engines produce free games.

This pretty much sums everything up. Sure there are 'commercial' games released but nothing good.
I mean, I've been lurking here a while and I haven't seen a single game available on say Steam. Sure, some stuff under Greenlight consideration but nothing anyone's actually voted for. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I might actually pop by here to see the replies to this. (nah)

This is a very naïve viewpoint. The last part of your post seems to indicate that you're not really interested in the truth of things but only to say an opinion founded on misinformation. Coupled with the fact that you both registered just to make these posts, it's pretty tempting to label you as trolls.

If that wasn't your intention (or if another person encounters this post), I'll reiterate what has already been written by myself and other people already:

- LÖVE / Lua can obfuscate/"hide" code as much as something like XNA or Unity can, both of which have many hugely popular commercial games created using them. There are a few ways to accomplish this using Lua - you can search this forum or google to find out more, if you're actually interested.

- Code used in games created with tools like XNA or Unity can actually be fairly easily read. There are many utilities which accomplish this. However, this tends not to negatively affect games created using those frameworks/engines.

- Many, many indie commercial games made with other tools don't any sort of heavy encryption for their assets. They also tend not to have issues with people using them illegally. It is also possible to encrypt your assets with LÖVE, the framework doesn't prevent you from doing that.

- Games which do have "encryption" for their assets have to decrypt it them some point at runtime in order to use them. Knowing this, it's actually really easy to obtain all the assets used in pretty much every commercial game you can think of, if you own the game. This doesn't make it any more legal to violate copyright though.

- The main reasons why there are few commercial games created using LÖVE are: it doesn't have a big company or even full-time employees backing it, it's relatively new, it's still undergoing changes, it's a code-centric framework instead of an editor-centric engine like Unity, and the nature of Lua's and LÖVE's core philosophies means there's a more "DIY" attitude towards making stuff compared to some alternatives. The actual framework has been viable for commercial development for years, but it takes more than that for a truly large amount of people to develop using it to create extremely high quality things.

- The vast majority of all commercial indie games are not very successful, either because of the actual content of the game, or (lack of) marketing. Usually it's a combination of both. Combine that with the fact that there have not been many commercial or even extremely polished high quality games created using LÖVE yet (again, mostly because of the above point), and you get a lack of multi-million dollar grossing games which use LÖVE. That lack does not have to do with feel-good 'security' though, and again LÖVE doesn't stop you from implementing that if you want.

[Inny]

Yay, thread back from the dead.

So, not to be mean and all, but I'm not sure why this thread ended last year with a "i hate you because you aren't everything I wanted" attitude. There are many other gamedev tools which are potentially much better in terms of a game-producing workflow. Love's community is sometimes really nice and helpful, but I think this angry vitriol that a piece of spare-time developed free-as-in-beer software doesn't aid you in your libertarian ideal of becoming the next jonathan blow is completely misplaced.

The hard part of making a game worth paying for is actually producing enough interesting content for players to consider it worth pulling out their mom's credit-card for. Worring about theft and trying to prevent it is just wasting time you should be using to produce content.

[Azhukar]

Can we have a heated lengthy debate about how it's not stealing but rather copyright infringement since the original thing doesn't change ownership but rather gets duplicated or how piracy doesn't equal a lost sale?

[Inny]

The hilarious thing about this whole discussion is that one of love's selling features is PhysFS, meaning I could easily mod the game without even opening the zip file. I can use conf.lua to setfenv a new global environment, require main into a sandbox, and string.dump every function I can find.

[slime]

Do you mean by creating a conf.lua in the game's save directory? If so, there are a couple things preventing that:
- conf.lua sets the save directory.
- In conf.lua and in [wiki]love.filesystem.setIdentity[/wiki] you can make LÖVE search the game's source directory (the .love file) before it searches the save directory, when reading files.

On the other hand, anyone can open an executable with a hex editor and change things. In almost any game (LÖVE or otherwise.) Or they could edit values in memory when a game is running. Someone doing that can do a lot (again, in almost any game.) There is not a lot you can do to prevent that.

[davisdude]

You could always not release your game at all. That way, it's guaranteed to not get stolen.