LÖVE

NightKawata wrote:

Rickton wrote:I don't get why people are so scared of the source code being accessible. It's not like something being closed-source is any harder to pirate. What exactly do you think people are going to do with the code?

The one legitimate reason I could see to worry would be with a multiplayer game, you might not want the source code to be very accessible because it'd be easy for people to cheat. But if you're that worried about it, there should probably be other anti-cheating mechanisms in place, like many multiplayer open source (and closed source) games have.

As a side note, Minecraft is apparently pretty easy to decompile to source (it's how a lot of the more in-depth mods were/are made), and it doesn't seem to have prevented them from making millions of dollars.

Considering that helps Minecraft more than hurt it.
Personally, I think you're kind of beating a dead horse with bytecode compilation, but I can see why people would want to do it. If it makes you feel safer, feel free.

Moreover licensing is what protects your game.
Think of it this way. If someone wants to break your game, they will break your game. That's just how it is.

For multiplayer and the like, server-side protection is indeed a thing, so are anti-cheat detections.
On a more relevant note: Kudos for the author for creating this. Definitely a tool people could use if they wanna try bytecode compilation.

Bytecode compilation is not completely useless. Pre-compiling the bytecode increases the startup speed of the program. This is espessially true when there is a lot of code. If the code isn't precompiled then it needs to be for every file that is loaded. If it important to someone, they can also shrink the size of their game somewhat too. The byte compiling part of lua/luajit can also be omited when compiling Love...

But I agree. There isn't much point of trying to pre-compile byte code if your goal is to make it more difficult to prirate the program.

I~=Spam wrote:If it important to someone, they can also shrink the size of their game somewhat too.

Sometimes it also makes it bigger ;P

I~=Spam wrote:Bytecode compilation is not completely useless. Pre-compiling the bytecode increases the startup speed of the program.

FWIW, in LOVE games the major contributors to startup times are usually image and sound loading. Those generally take several orders of magnitude longer than loading Lua files, even a lot of Lua files. Using a compressed texture format (like DXT5) rather than a PNG/JPEG image will decrease startup time far, far more than compiling your Lua files to bytecode.

(The reason compressed textures don't take long to load is because they don't have to be decompressed when they're loaded into RAM and their data doesn't have to be analyzed at all - they can just be sent directly from the hard drive to the graphics card, essentially.)

I~=Spam wrote:If it important to someone, they can also shrink the size of their game somewhat too.

LuaJIT's bytecode in particular isn't optimized for filesize reductions - its bytecode is often larger than the original source file's size (and, like the above point, images and sounds are generally the major contributors to the total size on disk of a game.)

Rickton wrote:I don't get why people are so scared of the source code being accessible. It's not like something being closed-source is any harder to pirate. What exactly do you think people are going to do with the code?

The purpose is not to stop piracy.

adrix89 wrote:

Rickton wrote:I don't get why people are so scared of the source code being accessible. It's not like something being closed-source is any harder to pirate. What exactly do you think people are going to do with the code?

The purpose is not to stop piracy.

Ok, so what is the purpose?

I agree with byte-code not being much safer, but I noticed the file posted above is half it's size when compiled. That's definately a plus!

Also, in a multiplayer-setting I might consider using this. Sure, it won't stop people from cheating if they really want to, but it might make it less frequent when there's so much trouble involved.

Germanunkol wrote:I agree with byte-code not being much safer, but I noticed the file posted above is half it's size when compiled. That's definately a plus!

Also, in a multiplayer-setting I might consider using this. Sure, it won't stop people from cheating if they really want to, but it might make it less frequent when there's so much trouble involved.

Just combining the love.exe + love-file should be enough to prevent most people of trying to use the file i think?

Whoops. just noticed there was a second page to this, on which the filesize-thing has already been discussed. Sorry, I had only read the first page before.

Muris wrote: Just combining the love.exe + love-file should be enough to prevent most people of trying to use the file i think?

That's true as well.