Game Development Community

DSO safety

by Torque3a · in Torque Game Builder · 11/06/2006 (7:46 am) · 2 replies

I want to distribute my game but I want to make sure that it will difficult for a casual hacker to read my DSOs. What methods are applied to the tourquescript files? Is it a byte-code process like Java and .NET or are they binaries that require a disassembler?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Torque Owner Scott Coursey
Yellow Duck Software
#1
11/09/2006 (12:23 pm)
The DSOs are a runtime-interpreted bytecode. Think of it as a machine-compiled script. If you open a DSO you can see what content is in there. It's not pretty. The raw strings are definitely visible, but that's about it.

It's "possible" (anything's possible) to disassemble the DSOs, but you'd wind up with something that doesn't retain your variable names (stripped at first exec()) and has no intelligent formatting or comments.

Unless your game is a seriously huge seller, you really shouldn't worry too much about the security of the DSOs. Of course, you could always tweak the DSO exec() code in your game, such that it won't match anybody else's copy of Torque (TGB/TGE/TSE/TAT/Whatever).

If you're truly concerned about security, concentrate on removing the "main.cs" and any other scripts (prefs) that may be read. Those are the biggest potential problems.

Torque Owner Torque3a
#2
11/10/2006 (7:08 am)
Thanks Scott.