Stopping end user from accessing developing tools

#1 You should be doing this anyway as per the license agreement for Torque, but you simply do not include the creator directory in your release.

(oops, I didn't not the not)

#2 Woah, could you cite exactly what you're talking about, Erick? I've heard no such thing that we couldn't remove development tools from distributed products.

#3 Corrected, sorry. You have to remove the editors.

#4 Afaik, the gist of the license is that you cannot distribute *source code*.
the terrain editor is okay, i'm pretty sure.

when in doubt, rtfl. it's not that complex.

as for andrew's question,
yeah, just don't distribute the terrain editor script files, and/or disable the keyboard bindings which open it.

#5

Quote:You have to remove the editors.

Erick,
i see no reference to the editors in the eula.
can you cite what you're referring to ?

edit: cute -> cite, lol!

#6 Whilst you can just delete the creator directory and remove the keymap as well, it wouldn't take someone with a copy of torque (legal or otherwise) more than about 5 mins to put that folder back again and have access to any of the editors.

Far safer would be to work on disabling the editors from your released engine, if you down this route I'd suggest wrapping around some precompiler directives so that with a simple switch of which directives you use to compile you can have the editors in or out of your game.

It comes down to just how safe you want/need your game to be.

#7 I do agree that Andy's method is probably the best, but it seems complicated and to require a high level of understand of Torque's inner workings, at least to me.
What I've done is rewritten Main.cs so that the creator directory isn't loaded unless a certain command line switch is used followed by a short password phrase. I had then planned to use one of the resources I've found here at GG to remove main.cs, moving its functionality directly into the engine code.
This is more like a temporary solution, though. I think before I get close to actually releasing anything I might investigate more what Andy was describing. If there isn't a resource already out there, perhaps I could write one if someone doesn't beat me to it!

#8 No one's beat you to it yet, and the question has been asked for years. It's got prime resource potential.

#9 I don't know if this helps, but I think there's a setting in torqueConfig.h

Quote:
/// Define me if this is a shipping build; if defined I will instruct Torque
/// to batten down some hatches and generally be more "final game" oriented.
/// Notably this disables a liberal resource manager file searching, and
/// console help strings.
/// This is usually defined by the build system.
//#define TORQUE_SHIPPING

Not sure if that fixes your problem though, but it's worth a try.

#10 Holy cow...

Right then, removing main.cs and putting it into the engine is farrrrrrrrrrr more difficult than removing WorldEditor and GuiEditor capabilities.

As Andy Rollins said, the solution of removing the editors from using a script method (ie deleting the creator folder, editing main, removing keybind) can be bypassed in less than 5 minutes.

To remove them from the engine, thus fully removing them from the end user, would also take less than five minutes. If you want more details or a how-to, just let me know.

#11 Removing main.cs has more purpose than just disabling editor functions, of course. I can't speak for the thread author, but personally I still plan to eliminate it whether development tools are disabled in my engine or not.

#12 Thanks for the replys! Andy Hodges's solution was exactly what I was looking for =O I had no idea it was that simple.