Lassie AS

thing is... you can get legal software that will convert SWF's back to FLA whethers it got author protection or not unless you are doing commercial games i can see a big problem, anyone wiith "print screen" on a keyboard can grab images if you ever watch "Charmed" they never lock the front door for two reasons A/ demons dont need doors, B/ they would only break it down if they did! a hackers works much the same, the more you try to hold onto something, there is always someone prepared to go on step more if i was selling a game commercially i'd release a demo that couldn't be of any advantage if it was hacked and sell the full game

Well, there's a difference between protecting the game assets so that someone can't open them up to look at them and protecting your game so that people won't illegally distribute it. There's virtually no point in copy-protecting a game, someone will always find a way to upload it somewhere. If it's a commercial game, there's nothing you can do to prevent one person from buying it and then that person making copies to give to friends or put online. But if you just don't want someone to go through your assets so that they don't "cheat" basically and see the rooms, animations, graphics, sounds, etc. outside of playing the game, then really you just want some way to make it not-so-easy for a person to do so. Most people won't bother looking for that stuff anyway, if they bought the game they generally want to play it, and not see the graphics out of context and end up ruining the gameplay for themselves. And if they bought the game, do you really care if they opened the background to the last room in the game and they saw the ending without actually playing through to the ending? I mean, you'll already have their money, so why not let them play around with the files? If they decide to alter them and upload them somewhere, then that's a problem, but that's a different issue than someone just looking at them on their own computer with the copy they paid for. I think who'd really want to get to any graphics or resources to a game would find a way to do so no matter what, so having a deterrent for casual users is enough to stop the average person.

in some respects LASSIEas as web application has an advantage to some flash games, the only thing you can grab in the game web page is the player, unless you program with lassie, there is no way of know where the assets are without decompiling the player, then it doesn't tell you everything, and i can't see anyone trying to go through the data.swf to find the rest of the rooms, sprites, movies, sounds etc people who pay for games are mostly honest if prices are fair, its when thing are expensive, and by big companies it becomes a challenge to get something for nothing

Ahh.. And what about putting the game assets in .swf's format: every swf will preform as another library like Director. Every first frame will be blank and the other frames will refere each one to each background and such... This idea can be done? Yeah, this would be a dream come true if Macromedia were to open up SWFs to library sharing. Unfortunately, you can't. This is one of the mundane limitations of Flash: nested SWF movies are limited to only accessing each other's timelines. Asset libraries are restricted to each individual SWF movie. But yes, to answer your question Ohad: lining up assets on a flash timeline will allow each frame of a movie to be treated as a seperate resource. You can do this with all graphical sprites. Sounds will be a different story. I have something "special" in the works for them. It should make managing a sound library MUCH easier.

I've got your idea. I'm really not that afraid that my assets will be opened and seen by a player, the problem is the players that want to steel the assets can do it - by importing the .swf to flash. But, as said in the manual: the stop() command stops 99.0 of the players, the "lock" frame stops 0.9 of the players and the other 0.1 will be able to steel the assets(oh dear...) so I shouldn't be afraid. OK now I'm sure that I will use LassieAS to create my game becuase the assets can be stolen more quickly in Director :D LOL... As for librarys of Flash with all the grhapics - thats a good idea and I will use it. THX

i can't see anyone trying to go through the data.swf to find the rest of the rooms, sprites, movies, sounds etc Yeah, that was a secondary goal of the LassieAS ex-loader model. I actually just got an email about this: a commercial game developer was interested in Lassie becasue the last game he had published had been downloaded, decompiled, re-packaged, and posted elsewhere... Most regretably, his game was basically gift wrapped for the pirates since they got all the media and code in one easy-to-download SWF file... packaged and ready for hacking. But yeah, if someone cracks LassieAS, all their going to get with the player app is the engine code (which isn't much good without the media). I am (of course) interested in protecting my code, but I have already accepted the fact that -inevitably- it'll be hacked; and quite frankly I'd rather someone get the code for an already free-use system than someone's entire Lassie game. While all the game media files will be accessible to download from the game's server, it certianly won't be fast and *convenient* pull for a pirate to track down all the individual media files.

a commercial game developer was interested in Lassie becasue the last game he had published had been downloaded, decompiled, re-packaged, and posted elsewhere i can think of flash developers who has left themselves wide open to this i hope it never comes to you getting hit greg, i know what its like to put a your heart and soul into a project and some lazy lowlife comes along who reckons he has more right to it than you

Quick status update: It's been a couple weeks of light development... aside from being busy, I've been stumped. It was easy to build a working audio-system prototype, but to expand it to fit the needs of the game engine as a whole has proved to be a worthy enigma. However, a couple weeks worth of rolling it around in my head has resulted in a solution! I'll have to expand the AS compiler to accomodate the system, but there is still a good chance you'll be seeing a working sound build in the coming weeks.

cool m8 8) the speed you've got the project so far is just amazing

cool m8 8) the speed you've got the project so far is just amazing Don't give me too much credit. A few weeks worth of thought only amounted to about 20 lines of code... about the volume of a short paragraph. Code is fast to write and structure, it's the logic that takes time; which is why LassieAS has been pretty fast. I have just been re-writing logic from the Director player as Action Script.

ARG! Technology spits in the eye of progress! I got the entire sound system built and was set to post v0.65a over the weekend, but first tried a sound demo online... *grumble* Sounds plays fine while running off a local disk, but are unreliable once downloading from a web server becomes a factor. Now I'm debating if I should: A) release v0.65a as is and try to fix online playback later B) hold off release until all online playback issues are resolved C) scrap the external sound library system and move to an idiot-proof (though laborious to manage) sound system (ie: 1 sound per frame of a SWF). D) fake my own death and disappear to Tahiti. Feel free to voice opinions.

I'm supporting D :lol: HeeHee.. Grab some coffee and try to solve it later!

I'm supporting D :lol: HeeHee.. Grab some coffee and try to solve it later! :lol: i'd go with option D too.. or hit the coast with ye winter woolies and surfboard :wink: or release it with a don't use the "sound online" clause, i guess it depends how much the recoding effects the developer (us) later on i have tryed using SWF with the sounds and worked for me

I think you should just upload it. Is the sound playback a problem because it has to be streamed? Incorporating sound in the .swf is quite straight forward and shouldn't be a problem since everyone using Lassie will have/need a basic understanding of flash. Infact I'm not going to even have voice acting and probably won't have a soundtrack for my game so version 0.65 would be a treat for me.

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