Lua obfuscation

[bartbes]

I see love as a viable platform for commercial, closed-source games, we're just doing it the nice way, no aggressive (useless, annoying, etc, etc) DRM, and there is no real need for code hiding either.

[leiradel]

Perhaps I'm part of a very small group of people here that does not look to LÖVE as a toy engine?

Or maybe you are just part of the group that for whatever reasons don't want to create free software.

It's the opposite. But I've never seen a game studio release source code at launch time, though the studio I work for releases pieces and bits as open source.

[leiradel]

I see love as a viable platform for commercial, closed-source games, we're just doing it the nice way, no aggressive (useless, annoying, etc, etc) DRM, and there is no real need for code hiding either.

I was counting you in the group . I'm not talking about DRM but code hiding is an issue for me.

[zac352]

A big lol to all attempts to make Lua close sourced.

Making a lua script closed source is easy. I just did it last night, actually.

Code: Select all

function scareAwayEbilHackers(s)
local r;
for i=1,#s do
r=r.."\\"..string.byte(s,i,i)
end
return r
end

[zac352]

Perhaps I'm part of a very small group of people here that does not look to LÖVE as a toy engine?

Or maybe you are just part of the group that for whatever reasons don't want to create free software.

It's the opposite. But I've never seen a game studio release source code at launch time, though the studio I work for releases pieces and bits as open source.

I was reading this thing about how spore's (very glitchy) creature logic is the future of gaming... But do I see a source release anywhere? Lol.

[Robin]

A big lol to all attempts to make Lua close sourced.

Making a lua script closed source is easy. I just did it last night, actually.

Code: Select all

function scareAwayEbilHackers(s)
local r;
for i=1,#s do
r=r.."\\"..string.byte(s,i,i)
end
return r
end

Fail. And stop doubleposting.

[Simtex]

If you want to obfuscate code that much, just add LUBE to your project and make a thin client distributable for the user then have them contact your server to do the heavy calculations using the code you want to hide.

I think everyone here knows that no widely distributed program can truly obfuscate its underlying operations. So obfuscation or DRM are really a matter of how many hoops you want the hacker to jump through to get what he wants.

The difficulty of obfuscating LOVE code isn't a limitation of LOVE, but a limitation of Lua itself. Lua by its very nature is not useful for creating obfuscated programs. If you really want to protect code that much, you're probably better off using a game engine that uses more traditional compiled languages.

Executable packers, or compiling your own version of LOVE with zip password support are your only real options.

[pygy]

???

Why obfuscate your source when you can compile to bytecode?

http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/#luac.lua is a lua compiler that supports require(). Written in pure Lua.

See http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-08/msg00092.html for the rudimentary documentation.

[vrld]

Why obfuscate your source when you can compile to bytecode?

That's why

[pygy]

What kind of problem could arise?

As long as LÖVE uses vanilla Lua, the corresponding LuaC should do the trick... Regardless of the platform... Or am I missing something?

Of course, if you compile LÖVE with, say, LuaJIT2, it will break.

The main reason to obfuscate code would be for a commercial game, and in this case, you don't distribute a .love archive, but a binary with the .love appended. In this case, you control the version of LÖVE shipped with your game, and the whole toolchain to build it...