[casual_games] Encrypting text files

[James Terry]

In addition, it sounds like you have an editor that is spitting out
LUA/XML files. For using XML through an encryption library like
blowfish, your editor could spit them out encrypted, not sure if you
could precompile a lua file being built in memory at runtime.

 

Ideally with the level editors, in-house you would run from the
unencrypted XML/LUA, your precompile step would build all the luac files
and encrypt the XML (maybe an extension of exml for encrypted xml) and
your release build would remove the lua and xml files and the project
would only run from the luac and exml files.

 

For end-user level editors, you may just want to give them the
unencrypted lua/xml so they can make additional modifications after
creating the initial files (so long as you sandbox what they can work
with) and give them a packaging tool that will encrypt/precompile
everything before they distribute it for people to play.

 

James R. Terry
Game Developer
Yatec Games 
(225) 274-1550 Ext. 104
jterry at yatecgames.com <mailto:jterry at yatecgames.com> 
www.yatecgames.com <http://www.yatecgames.com/>  

________________________________

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org
[mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of James Terry
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 8:41 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Encrypting text files

 

For LUA, you can precompile the .lua files into byte-code with luac,
this will give you some immediate benefits in faster loading and syntax
error detection, in addition to preventing users from changing the
source. For your xml, you could look into using blowfish or rjindael or
another encryption library to unencrypt the xml before parsing. I am not
sure if there are any better ways to handle the XML, but for the LUA
files, you definitely want to be using luac.

James R. Terry
Game Developer
Yatec Games 
(225) 274-1550 Ext. 104
jterry at yatecgames.com <mailto:jterry at yatecgames.com> 
www.yatecgames.com <http://www.yatecgames.com/>  


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