Un-Moddable" Game
by The Trusted One · in Torque Game Engine · 01/11/2006 (11:21 pm) · 9 replies
First off I have been banging my head against a wall trying to create my own engine for a few weeks now (I found TGE after I had a run away terrain engine force me to re-format my dev machine).
So looking at the price about $500 for the indie licenses of all the pieces I would find usefull. Sounds more then fair to me.
However I thaught I would ask those who know the engine on simple question:
the game that my team is creating is going to be a single player RPG, the engine will need to be updated with alot of really kewl RPG support. IE scaleable engine (if the user wants to play like zelda they can play like zelda, if they want to play like final fantasy they can play like final fantasy) and a custom battle engine, and damage control (I have purchased I license to the visible human project and am writing a class to allow me to determine what was damaged by a sword strike. The goal being is a blow would land a sword through a tenden then the opponent could no longer control the limb on the axis that the tenden helped control)
To embed classes and functions like this (which is written in C#, I hope I dont have to start over with c++) am I looking at?
The Trusted One
Digital Awakenings
"It's only impossible until it is not."
So looking at the price about $500 for the indie licenses of all the pieces I would find usefull. Sounds more then fair to me.
However I thaught I would ask those who know the engine on simple question:
the game that my team is creating is going to be a single player RPG, the engine will need to be updated with alot of really kewl RPG support. IE scaleable engine (if the user wants to play like zelda they can play like zelda, if they want to play like final fantasy they can play like final fantasy) and a custom battle engine, and damage control (I have purchased I license to the visible human project and am writing a class to allow me to determine what was damaged by a sword strike. The goal being is a blow would land a sword through a tenden then the opponent could no longer control the limb on the axis that the tenden helped control)
To embed classes and functions like this (which is written in C#, I hope I dont have to start over with c++) am I looking at?
The Trusted One
Digital Awakenings
"It's only impossible until it is not."
#2
The Trusted One
01/12/2006 (11:58 am)
Yeah, I have paid that price before, in commercial applications. Another question the one I had actually intended to ask but forgot. Is it possible to produce a game that is not easily modable? I would prefer our work to not be changeable. any ideas?The Trusted One
#3
01/12/2006 (2:10 pm)
One way to prevent people from editing/modyfing/monkey-ing-around with your scripts is to simply not include the uncompiled version (i.e. scripts ending in *.cs) but leave in the compiled version ( *.cs.dso).
#4
1. Torque script is compiled at runtime to .dso (byte code compiled) format. I believe you have the option to just ship the .dso files without the source script. It is still modifiable in theory, since the .dso files can be decompiled, but the bar is much higher.
2. Do not use torque script at all, and write everything in C++. I don't believe the engine is set up this way to support this easily, so it would take some work making engine modifications - I could be wrong about this though.
But my question is, given that your game is going to be single player, why do you want to prevent people from modding it? What is the downside?
01/12/2006 (2:12 pm)
I think you have two options to make your game unmodifiable:1. Torque script is compiled at runtime to .dso (byte code compiled) format. I believe you have the option to just ship the .dso files without the source script. It is still modifiable in theory, since the .dso files can be decompiled, but the bar is much higher.
2. Do not use torque script at all, and write everything in C++. I don't believe the engine is set up this way to support this easily, so it would take some work making engine modifications - I could be wrong about this though.
But my question is, given that your game is going to be single player, why do you want to prevent people from modding it? What is the downside?
#5
The Trusted One
01/12/2006 (2:30 pm)
The game is based on a novel that my wife has written, I ant the game to remain as true as possible to the original story line. However, any of the advanced features I create for RPG games I would be more then happy to release as an expansion packThe Trusted One
#6
I doubt it would stop *everyone* from modifying your game, but I'd expect it'd make doing so a major pain in arse. :)
01/12/2006 (2:40 pm)
Another thought; I heard someone on some other Game related forum talking about keeping people from modding their game, and one interesting thing they suggested was having some check-lists that the game's directory would have to pass before the actual "game" started, to make sure that the original art assets were still in place and the same file-size, ect. In addition to that, they mentioned making sure no additional files were found in certain directories. I doubt it would stop *everyone* from modifying your game, but I'd expect it'd make doing so a major pain in arse. :)
#8
The Trusted One
01/12/2006 (4:46 pm)
With the in house engine I was going to be developing, I was planning on assembling all the resouces into 1 big file of a custom format, Does Torque have the support for this built in, or is it something I would have to drop to the source code to add?The Trusted One
#9
01/12/2006 (7:01 pm)
TGE natively supports zip files. There is a resource for using encrypted ones. 
Torque Owner Curt Perry