Distributing SFML games on other websites.

[Viruses]

Ok guys listen. The only thing i care about is that they can't CHANGE my ART assets and then play in MY SPECIFIC game with assets that they changed. For example, lets say im desiging a space shooter and i have bullets. Well the bullets are going to be sprites. So i made collision detection that if the bullets hit the enemy they die. Now listen. All they have to do is go into the directory of my game, look for the bullet sprite, change it so that it fills the entire screen or watever, and then when they shoot all enemies die because of the collision detection. I want my ART ASSETS LOCKED. You guys are thinking about copyright and people stealing my work. I just don't want my game to be played differently then its supposed to. I want to make sure it plays the way its supposed to with the assets that i created. Like, earlier i told you that in this game i had downloaded, they had the maps and models in dll files so there was nothing i could do to change the maps or models. I want to do something like that. In other games i've seen files with changed extentions.

[binary1248]

Like, earlier i told you that in this game i had downloaded, they had the maps and models in dll files so there was nothing i could do to change the maps or models.

That must be the most idiotic thing I have ever heard of. Packing resources into dlls in the hope that they won't get modified at the expense of good software development practice is a crime against the user as well as the developer who has to put up with the weird antics of people who come up with such ideas.

If they are able to play the game on their own PC disconnected from the internet then I'm very sorry, but there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING you can do to prevent them from changing the way the game looks or functions. You really shouldn't care either because as long as they keep it to themselves they don't bother others do they?

If on the other hand you want to play the game in multiplayer, the typical method used by many games out there is to keep a copy of the game state on every player's computer and perform the same calculations every frame on the game state. If a player's state deviates from the other players' states then his game goes out of sync and he is kicked or whatever. This would indicate to the other players that he manipulated his game in some way.

So to keep it simple. In single player, don't give so much effort, it isn't worth it. In multiplayer, there are methods, one of them I described here.

[julen26]

Ok guys listen. The only thing i care about is that they can't CHANGE my ART assets and then play in MY SPECIFIC game with assets that they changed. For example, lets say im desiging a space shooter and i have bullets. Well the bullets are going to be sprites. So i made collision detection that if the bullets hit the enemy they die. Now listen. All they have to do is go into the directory of my game, look for the bullet sprite, change it so that it fills the entire screen or watever, and then when they shoot all enemies die because of the collision detection. I want my ART ASSETS LOCKED. You guys are thinking about copyright and people stealing my work. I just don't want my game to be played differently then its supposed to. I want to make sure it plays the way its supposed to with the assets that i created. Like, earlier i told you that in this game i had downloaded, they had the maps and models in dll files so there was nothing i could do to change the maps or models. I want to do something like that. In other games i've seen files with changed extentions.

You don't have to use the image size as bounding box collision, just use a constant boundingBox size independent from the image size.

[Nexus]

hat must be the most idiotic thing I have ever heard of.

Why? I don't understand this almost fanatic aversion I sometimes see when it comes to protecting source code or content. I can completely reconstruct that there are people who aren't willing to expose the raw building blocks of which a game was made, either because they don't want to give the possibility to alter the game and claim to be the author, or to keep it original, or whatever.

Whether a developer allows mods of his game, is his personal decision, and not the one and only way. Speaking about "good software development" while ignoring the fact that most commercial games protect their code and resources is a little bit questionable. Sometimes it isn't bad to look beyond the horizon of the holy open-source world.

[binary1248]

hat must be the most idiotic thing I have ever heard of.

Why? I don't understand this almost fanatic aversion I sometimes see when it comes to protecting source code or content. I can completely reconstruct that there are people who aren't willing to expose the raw building blocks of which a game was made, either because they don't want to give the possibility to alter the game and claim to be the author, or to keep it original, or whatever.

Whether a developer allows mods of his game, is his personal decision, and not the one and only way. Speaking about "good software development" while ignoring the fact that most commercial games protect their code and resources is a little bit questionable. Sometimes it isn't bad to look beyond the horizon of the holy open-source world.

I was referring solely to the fact that that developer chose to pack his game assets into shared library files, meant for code! If he really packed them with his executable code or if he just used the DLL purely as a container for the assets I do not know. But if he really did cause the whole DLL to get handled by the dynamic linker, then... there are better ways. I have nothing against people protecting their code or assets, but there are more effective ways of doing it than mixing them with the bits and bytes that are needed to get an executable running. Most commercial games also do not pack their resources into one giant DLL file AFAIK.

[Nexus]

Okay, with that I agree (but not with the generalized version ). By the way, even Laurent does that for the Arial font, even if it's not for the purpose of obfuscation

[Viruses]

Earlier someone mentioned i would have to make a windows installer because when i sent the game files to someone, they needed some extra dlls. First, why did this happen? Second, if i make a windows installer, how would it know to install those dlls and how would it install them? Third, where could i learn this?