Source code protection

[adrix89]

Could you expand on this?

I am not that experienced on the subject.
The idea behind it is you have a launcher that is coded in another language(like C) and is used to decrypt your love.exe file that has been encrypted by a algorithm.
You use a serial and that authorizes the decrypter, or you can be fancy and have online authorization(the horror!).

Some problems with it is that you probably have to modify LOVE to work with the assets and code loaded in memory
Another would be that once the decryption algorithm is found it is useless,fortunately finding a serial and finding a decryption algorithm are different things. Pirates will only care about the serial and without online authorization any serial can work, which would make pirates not bother and your source code would be safe.
Another big issue is the comparability with different systems and platforms. I am not too sure but systems can require different things to launch an app that might not be compatible, for example Mac has its own app directory structure I believe so I am not sure if it would work.
Different platforms require their own DRM for example Steam has its own system that I don't know how it works.

[Robin]

Pirates will only care about the serial and without online authorization any serial can work, which would make pirates not bother and your source code would be safe.

When do pirates ever care about source code? That's more something cloners do, and they are very happy to just completely re-implement your game even without source code access.

[adrix89]

Pirates will only care about the serial and without online authorization any serial can work, which would make pirates not bother and your source code would be safe.

When do pirates ever care about source code? That's more something cloners do, and they are very happy to just completely re-implement your game even without source code access.

The topic is source code protection. The pirates usually use the method of least resistance so you have to keep that in mind.
If you make the authorization too hard to bypass they might deiced to decrypt your whole game in which case you lose the source protection.
If the code is too complex it will not be that easy to clone.

[zorg]

Pirates will only care about the serial and without online authorization any serial can work, which would make pirates not bother and your source code would be safe.

When do pirates ever care about source code? That's more something cloners do, and they are very happy to just completely re-implement your game even without source code access.

The topic is source code protection. The pirates usually use the method of least resistance so you have to keep that in mind.
If you make the authorization too hard to bypass they might deiced to decrypt your whole game in which case you lose the source protection.
If the code is too complex it will not be that easy to clone.

Well if the code is too complex, then as Robin put it, cloners will be happy to just completely re-implement the whole game, instead of copying one's code verbatim. Besides, if pirat- i mean (software)crackers would decrypt your game, they usually would just look at very specific areas to create a crack to bypass any security measure one wrote into it (since taking the whole thing apart would take longer, and is usually not their goal; see the people who make trainers for games ), not share a reverse-engineered source from the whole game.