LÖVE

Robin wrote:Legally, that's the default anyway. But what seems to work well is guilt-tripping: "pls don't use my source code I need the money ppl throw at my game to feed my cats, you don't want to be responsible for the malnutrition and eventual death of my cats, do you? LOOK AT HOW CUTE MY DYING CATS ARE! let them live, I beg of you"

Something like that.

i am going to hide stuff like this in my source code all of the time

herrybiscuit wrote:i am going to hide stuff like this in my source code all of the time

Who do you think wants to "steal" your code and what would they do with it?

Can you name me some instances where indie game developers were hurt by having exposed code?
Can you name me some where the modding community thrived because of exposed code?

You're spending your time fighting a battle against the users for unspecified reasons. They can't legally use your code in a product and your game will be cracked regardless. The most they can do with it is learn how to code better (or worse) and of course cheat. If you were coding a multiplayer game where code tampering would result in online cheating, then you'd have a valid reason to put up a fight. In singleplayer people cheat because that's how they like having fun, developer spending time actively trying to prevent users having fun in their singleplayer game is quite disturbing.

Imagine if all the time you spend wondering how to protect your oh so valuable for loops, you'd spend on actually making your game more fun!

Azhukar wrote:

herrybiscuit wrote:i am going to hide stuff like this in my source code all of the time

Who do you think wants to "steal" your code and what would they do with it?

Can you name me some instances where indie game developers were hurt by having exposed code?
Can you name me some where the modding community thrived because of exposed code?

There is some logic behind it.

On the casual market things are pretty cutthroat.
Someone could steal all the code and modify it so it can work on a iOS, the logic is still in Lua so you could port it to Cocos2d or something and then replace all assets.
Blatant ripoffs have happened before.

Although it isn't that much of an issue if you don't actually care about iOS or Android or whatever.

Your best bet for this is secret functions that you know about so you can prove its a ripoff. You could do some interesting stuff with chuck loaders and strings to uncomment lines and reveal hidden 'debug' functions.

adrix89 wrote:Blatant ripoffs have happened before.

Can you name one? I mean, can you name a case where really code was copied?

I only recall the game ridiculous fishing being copied, but that was an "idea ripoff" not a "code ripoff". If I remember correctly one of the Vlambeer guys talks about it in this talk (in case you are interested. Most parts of the talk are unrelated to this topic here).

micha wrote:

adrix89 wrote:Blatant ripoffs have happened before.

Can you name one? I mean, can you name a case where really code was copied?

I only recall the game ridiculous fishing being copied, but that was an "idea ripoff" not a "code ripoff". If I remember correctly one of the Vlambeer guys talks about it in this talk (in case you are interested. Most parts of the talk are unrelated to this topic here).

Can't remember exactly but there was at least one where they ripped of the actual code since it was found to have some assets from the original.

Here is a example, but it wasn't the example I remembered :
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... le_my_game

Lugaru

Someone stole the code, recompiled it, submitted it to the App Store and released it as the same game with the same name and then took the credit and money for it.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/02/Counter ... developing

(Note the official game being $10, but the knockoff being $1 in order to catch more sales.)

Thanks for the two examples. I find this particularly scary when this happens across different countries. Because in these cases, even if copyright is violated and the act is illegal, it could become difficult to reach the violator and claim ones rights.
From that perspective I can understand why code obfuscation seems reasonable: Scammers would probably go the path of least resistance and rather copy a game with readable source than an obfuscated one. This sounds a bit like "You don't have to make it impossible to copy your game. It is sufficient to make it more difficult than for other games". This for sure is a pragmatic approach. I am not sure though, if this really solves the problem or only postpones it/moves it to other people.

I think getting cloned was the best thing that ever happened to many games.
Threes for example. If it hadn't been for 2048, I would might have never heard of threes, or never paid attention to it.

If someone just copies your code and uploads it to a store, he might as well copy your obfuscated code and upload it to a store, I don't see an advantage there...

And let's face it, most code is ugly enough, and the games simple enough, that it would be just easier to reimplement the game yourself than to learn from the code provided...


I recently took a look at the Lua code for "Hack n Slash" by Double Fine, and it's not something I would like to learn from...

Unless you implement some DRM, I don't see how having obfuscated code will prevent someone taking your game and selling it as his own.

And even when you do implement DRM, how will that stop someone from taking the cracked version and selling it as his own?

Azhukar wrote: And even when you do implement DRM, how will that stop someone from taking the cracked version and selling it as his own?

In an illegitimate market you can't do anything. I doubt anyone here cares they are ripping off you game in china or eastern block.

However it can affect you in a legitimate market like Apple Store or Steam.
In a legitimate market they would have to change the assets and modify the code somewhat which is more complicated then just making a crack.

DRM is a user authorization it doesn't have anything to do with source code, source usually gets compiled which means it hides it.
If decompiling was easy then DRM would be meaningless.

But for dynamic languages like Lua things are more complicated in hiding stuff.