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Work on Official GameMaker Obfuscator

GameMaker Obfuscator

Mike Dailly has been “having fun playing with obfuscators” in response to the recent release of a GameMaker 8.1 Decompiler.

Games created in GameMaker that are run through an obfuscator will have their source code jumbled up so that if an executable version of the game is decompiled it will not be in a human readable format. Schreib‘s Game Maker Obfuscator has existed for three years now but remains incompatible with Game Maker 8 and beyond.

Writing on Twitter Mike said that “we’ll change the encryption soon” but added that a proper fix would not come about until the release of GameMaker Studio.

“Unfortunately, we can’t “stop” decompilers with the current code base; we can only delay it. However, GM Studio will stop it forever. Because Studio is almost a rewrite, we can prune out enough that you can’t actually rebuild it. The Delphi runner is the issue.”

Fellow GameMaker developer Russell Kay then added “in Studio (and our C++ Runner) we will have compiled code (even the interpreted GML) so [there is] no source code to decompile.  We will be using LLVM to compile directly to machine code to get a huge speed boost.”

Progress on an obfuscating as an intermediary solution to protecting GameMaker source code appears to be going well.

Mike writes that he is “not sure how we’re going to bundle all this yet” but has clearly had some success including a reduction in file size. “Having our own [obfuscator] means we can take advantage of local knowledge of the code we’re able to cheat a little more because we know the code. Our obfuscator has shrunk the code buy more than 2 thirds! It also removes unused functions!”

What do you think?

35 Comments

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  1. A short tl;dr for everyone overwhelmed by this debate.

    Loaf, Joe and Zach love GameMaker.
    And they argued passionately ever after. 😀

  2. Loaf, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that logic doesn’t work on you. It’s a safe bet to call you insane at this point.

    Typically when an action isn’t effective you stop doing that action, or choose another course of action. If you try to bake a cake and it comes out tasting horrible, typically you either stop baking cake, or change the reciepe.
    You, however, like to continue making poorly tasting cake.

    Now, allow me to quote Albert Einstein, a man far more intelligent than you or I,
    “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

    As you can see, by this definition, you are, in fact, insane. Of course this also makes anyone arguing for this point of view insane.

    Either way, I see no point in bitching about something that’s not going to change. You’re trying to make a moral issue out of something that has nothing to do with morality in any way.

  3. Sabriath :Joe: Loaf {thinks} that bitching is going to make all the decompilers go away, but it won’t.
    Loaf: No.
    Captain Obvious: Then stop bitching.

    I’ll pretend you aren’t that stupid and never posted that.

    • After several stories I’ve heard about Sab from Zach, and what he’s posted here over the past several hours, it’s not farfetched to say that he’s easily twice as smart as you are or ever will be. So, Loaf, you can either stop your whining here, or you can man up and take a challenge. Be a superhero, loaf.

  4. Joe: Loaf {thinks} that bitching is going to make all the decompilers go away, but it won’t.
    Loaf: No.
    Captain Obvious: Then stop bitching.

  5. I personally like the sound of a challenge…but even if you discontinued the work on the decompiler (if heaven-forbid Loaf wins), I would have no choice but to create my own. I don’t think anyone (including YYG) would want me to do it because even an anti-decompiler/obfuscator/true-half-compilation would protect it from me.

    Why would I do that? Because I’m an a*hole and don’t care who gets hurt. I pay for things that I believe deserve my hard earned money out of pride, but garbage should be free, and the decompiler helps keep it that way.

    • See, this is the thing. Loaf things that bitching is going to make all the decompilers go away, but it won’t. The challenge that I have written out and approved by Zach would be very, very doable if the things that Loaf says are true. But if the things that Loaf said are just rhetoric (… and let’s be honest, here …), then there’s no way in Hell that the decompiler will be discontinued.

      But we’ll see.

  6. Loaf Face,

    Deal with it, it’s life. This is a cool program. I’m already wrapping the C++ source to add some GM compatibility to my sexy new program. And you’re against that why?

    • He’s against it as it poses a minor inconvenience to him. Good luck on your app, feel free to share the app with us; I’m intrigued.

  7. Loaf :You obviously don’t understand what an analogy is since you are taking it so literally.
    You are totally ignorant of what your decompiler does and focus on the marginal positive effects, blocking out the rest. As far as you are concerned, unless people are supporting the decompiler or trying to stay neutral in the controversy their opinion is under-developed. Obviously you’ll never accept that you have done more damage than good, whatever helps you sleep at night.
    We are all better off with you gone, but how could I possibly expect you to admit that?

    analogy |əˈnaləjē|

    a comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification

    A comparison between two things. In this case, you compared (1.) us, to (2.) Adolf Hitler. Our purposes are not even remotely similar to those of Adolf Hitler, nor was your analogy a decent way to explain or clarify our purpose. Please, for the love of God, research the things you say before you say them. Honestly, man.

    We are actually quite aware what our decompiler does. It decompiles games. It takes an executable file, and turns it into an editable file. Ta-dah! It has lots of positive effects. It lets people learn how developers do things. It lets people recover the source code to their application in the event that they lose their source. It also has a downside. It lets people view your resources, and potentially repost it as their own. But, see, that never works. Because then they’ll get either a C&D letter, or they’ll get taken to court. But, here’s the thing. When we wrote the decompiler, there were perfectly viable methods to secure your apps. It’s not our fault that they no longer work. We read each and every one of our comments, here and on our site. We check out the GMC. We know that only a few crazies (such as yourself) are getting very worked up about it. We know that most people actually acknowledge the fact that it has upsides, while you’re sitting here typing away, trying to come up with the most outrageous ways to say “This might have a negative impact on me sometime in the distant future. I do not care that other people are utilizing this tool legitimately, because that would be rational of me.” Seriously. That’s all your several posts here have said. Except you throw in words like “Hitler” and “Illegal”. What damage have you done? We’ve visited the GMC so many times over the past several months, and, honestly, nothing there has changed. People are not up in arms about the feared and evil decompiler. People are living their lives. People are releasing their games just as normal. In my experience on the GMC, I have seen one, maybe two games that were decompiled and rebranded as somebody else’s, and each time they had been resolved. Not just that, but they were all done in the GM7 era, meaning that it wasn’t even with our decompiler. So, yeah, no damage has come from our decompiler. If you give me some examples of the torture that our tool has put on the distinct society that is the GMC, sir, I will give you an award for “Best Pest and Twelve Year Old on the Internet!”. I really will.

    Now, just so that you didn’t read this entire post for nothing, I will tell you this. Loaf, if you continue to rally against the great evil in the world that is the x2048 Game Maker 8.x decompiler, I will formally invite you into a challenge that, if you were to succeed in said challenge, we would cease the development of the Game Maker 8.x decompiler.

    • Our purposes are not even remotely similar to those of Adolf Hitler, nor was your analogy a decent way to explain or clarify our purpose. Please, for the love of God, research the things you say before you say them. Honestly, man.

      Oh yes, because comparing you to a gun manufacturer is so sensible.
      Nice patronizing joke under-estimating my age there, nice to see you are continuing to be healthy with debating your damaging software. Just the kind of butthurt response I expect. I think that says enough about you, I have nothing else to add other than you have posted a lot of words which bare very little meaning. Bravo.

    • “Oh yes, because comparing you to a gun manufacturer is so sensible.”

      Oh, you’re right, how silly of Joe, clearly we’re not like a gun manufacturer, which makes a tool that could be use for a “good” or “evil” act. But it’s sensible to compare us to Hitler, who killed millions of Jews after brainwashing the Germans into believing that the Jews were the reason they lost WWI and were the scum of the Earth. Clearly your analogy makes more sense.

      “Just the kind of butthurt response I expect.”
      Joe hasn’t made any butthurt response to you, he’s made a few childish jabs at you, but honestly you’ve been far worse. At this point you’re not even making an attempt to defend your position, you’re looking for cop outs left and right.

      “Obviously you’ll never accept that you have done more damage than good, whatever helps you sleep at night. ”
      You’re right, I’m just so morally distraught over the whole ordeal. You fail to realize that decompilers can also help the developer of the games being decompiled. Look at Minecraft – a few mods now have been integrated into the game that started as a decompiled copy of the game.

      “I think that says enough about you, I have nothing else to add other than you have posted a lot of words which bare very little meaning. Bravo.”
      I think that says enough about you, I have nothing else to add other than you have posted a lot of uneducated, poorly constructed arguments that have no backing whatsoever, and you have an obvious lack of knowledge about the general subject matter at hand. At this point, it’s clear that you’re looking for whatever cop out or straw man you can find.

      Also, you mentioned nothing of Joe’s little challenge, which leads me to believe you didn’t actually fully read his last post.

  8. Loaf :You keep trying to avoid your wrong doing by hiding behind other people. “We have support” and “its their fault if they abuse it” are not good enough. Hitler had support too but that doesn’t make him any good. One thing that happens to have more support than the decompiler is the anti-decompiler. Whether or not you care about my opinion doesn’t matter, if anyone has an un-valuable opinion on the decompiler its the biased people who developed it.

    Talk about pathetic analogies, I guess I can add “hypocrite” to the list of things you clearly are, trailing ever so closely behind “cry baby” and “drama queen”. Hitler brainwashed Germany into believing what he did was for their wellbeing, not to mention the citizens had very little idea about the holocaust. You need to learn your history. I don’t care if what we say is good enough. People appreciate our work, and they have told us stories about how our tool saved their tail. That’s good enough for us. We don’t mind the hits for the anti decompiler. We’re not against people protecting their game. We’re not against anything. We completely support the anti decompiler. Read our other posts. We’ve encouraged the developer to continue working, and even provided slight support to the developer, but he doesn’t want to continue working on it. I don’t know how our opinions are less valuable than yours. You’ve provided absolutely no assistance to anybody being here. All you do is whine. Maybe, if you’re so worried about people decompiling your software, you should actually take an initiative to solve your problem, like Charlie and the countless others who have contributed to the vast array of great software there is to improve the Game Maker ecosystem.

    • You obviously don’t understand what an analogy is since you are taking it so literally.

      You are totally ignorant of what your decompiler does and focus on the marginal positive effects, blocking out the rest. As far as you are concerned, unless people are supporting the decompiler or trying to stay neutral in the controversy their opinion is under-developed. Obviously you’ll never accept that you have done more damage than good, whatever helps you sleep at night.

      We are all better off with you gone, but how could I possibly expect you to admit that?

  9. Rex :Personally, I feel the existence of the decompiler is neither good nor evil. Its just a tool that was possible due to the design of Game maker, and like any good tool it has many uses. It can be used for educational purposes, to help recover a lost GMK, or to crack open a game and steal someone’s work. Its capable of all these things.
    Even though I don’t consider its creation to be a criminal act, obviously it makes my life as a game designer more complicated. And it seems there are others who feel a lot more strongly about it than I do. I guess those kinds of reactions are just something one has to learn to deal with if they choose to create something controversial.

    We have no problem with people expressing their opinions. That’s why I wrote in a comment system for anybody to use freely. No account or email or anything required. We know it was controversial, but at the time there was also a very, VERY secure anti decompiler available by Charlie. It’s been discontinued, unfortunately, but that’s not going to make us stop working on our stuff. There are a few people we know of writing their own anti decompilation methods, and we’ve also tried to encourage Charlie to update his. We’re sorry that it results in some people needing to be more careful and secure with their work, but, like you said, it’s a tool that has legitimate uses. You seem to understand, and I thank you for bringing some sense into the mix. Only a few people here have looked at it from both sides, but you’re one of them. So kudos to you.

  10. Loaf, honestly now, you’re beginning to make a fool of yourself.

    >> “Shall we pick an analogy that isn’t so poor? This is getting pathetically trivial.”
    There’s nothing wrong with this analogy, really. Somebody is making something that you don’t like. It can be used to do very good things, and was indeed produced for that purpose. However, it can also be misused, like pretty much every other thing on the planet. You think that instead of bitching at the people misusing it, you’ll get better mileage by bitching at and about the people who produce it. Tell me, please, how this is not the case.

    >> ” I can’t take you seriously until you say something that isn’t fluff and hasn’t been spewed up by people time and time again who don’t really appreciate nor understand the effects the decompiler has on GM and its users. ”

    Nothing Sab said was fluff. The only thing I particularly want to mention is the thing about how Zach produced the decompiler “to break Game Maker’s compiler”. The decompiler was produced as a learning experience for Zach, as a utility for others, and, at the time, as a mild protest to YYG’s shifting dedication of platforms. But, the main purpose of a decompiler is to reverse engineer the compiler, so, in a way, you’re right. Honestly, Loaf, I’m having a hard time taking you seriously. The only reason things have been “spewed up time and time again” is because that’s the fact. Every time somebody gives you a valid point, you just throw back some of your BS about how your games are the only things that matter, and about how we’re super villains because the tool we produced can be used by dicks to reverse engineer your precious code. Let me put your heart at rest here, pal. Nothing I’ve seen from you on the GMC has indicated that anybody would want to steal your precious games. It’s just not worth their time.

    >> I should use another program because some people who have posted in the past they don’t like GM (and don’t deny it, I’ve seen it posted by the person who hounded my blog) decided they wanted to start causing trouble with a malicious product?
    “Deal with it” sounds very much like yet another dismissive typical Internet comment, so again, no fluff please.

    First of all, we know who the person who hounded on your blog is, and he’s in no way our representative, and is actually an individual who we keep distant from us. Citing him as a source is worse than citing Fox News as a source. We don’t have an issue with GM. We know that it has its flaws, like all software, but we also recognize how powerful it is for a beginner. That’s how Zach, I believe Rohan, and I got into software development; through GM. We’ve all purchased the software (I’ve actually purchased it 2 or 3 times now), and we did not do this to cause trouble. You’re honestly a broken record. If you believe that we’re annoying people other than you with our software, read our website, linked in my other post. There are maybe 1 or 2 out of at least 90 (it was 90 about a month ago when I last checked the database, I’m guessing around 115 now. You can count them, though, because you clearly have time on your hands) comments that express unhappiness at the decompiler’s release. The rest is people thanking us, contributing to us, and asking for help with using it. I’m not going to tell you to deal with it, simply because you have no other choice. What I am going to say, though, is that you need to stop thinking about yourself. This tool IS useful for a LOT of people, and I have yet to read one legitimate thing for you that debunks this fact, and just because it serves as a MINOR inconvenience to you doesn’t mean your panties need to be in a bunch. It’s not the end of the world, dude.

    • You keep trying to avoid your wrong doing by hiding behind other people. “We have support” and “its their fault if they abuse it” are not good enough. Hitler had support too but that doesn’t make him any good. One thing that happens to have more support than the decompiler is the anti-decompiler. Whether or not you care about my opinion doesn’t matter, if anyone has an un-valuable opinion on the decompiler its the biased people who developed it.

  11. @Loaf: Stopping the gun manufacturer does not stop the evil in the world coming into your home with a bat or golf club or any other tool. If they want your stuff, they’ll get it. Even locks have ways to be picked, and there are tools specifically designed to pick any lock easily….a decompiler is merely a lockpick, not a gun. Stop getting all righteous, it’s synonymous with stupid.

    It doesn’t matter what the intentions were, if it wasn’t XXX, then it would have been YYY. If your game was good enough or important enough, then it would be cracked, hacked, and sold on the black market. NOT creating this type of software actually makes it worse for the GM users. If you didn’t know about the decompiler, then your awareness of how easily broken your software is is much lower…to the point that you may even think you are safe from harm. This knowledge allows you to search for tools such as the obfuscator, AST, or other forms of software protection.

    You can yell at Zach and the others all you want, but their creation has helped many see the truth….software is not a fortress. In fact, they shouldn’t have to find some “moral” standing to hide behind just to save face…they should simply say “I did it so that we can break GM’s compiler,” because it’s the truth, and it’s not evil.

    You don’t like it? Go to a different language….then find out that there are decompilers for them as well. Deal with it, it’s life.

    • Stopping the gun manufacturer does not stop the evil in the world coming into your home with a bat or golf club or any other tool. If they want your stuff, they’ll get it. Even locks have ways to be picked, and there are tools specifically designed to pick any lock easily….a decompiler is merely a lockpick, not a gun.

      Shall we pick an analogy that isn’t so poor? This is getting pathetically trivial.

      Stop getting all righteous, it’s synonymous with stupid.

      NOT creating this type of software actually makes it worse for the GM users. If you didn’t know about the decompiler, then your awareness of how easily broken your software is is much lower…

      but their creation has helped many see the truth….software is not a fortress. In fact, they shouldn’t have to find some “moral” standing to hide behind just to save face…they should simply say “I did it so that we can break GM’s compiler,” because it’s the truth, and it’s not evil.

      I can’t take you seriously until you say something that isn’t fluff and hasn’t been spewed up by people time and time again who don’t really appreciate nor understand the effects the decompiler has on GM and its users.

      You don’t like it? Go to a different language….then find out that there are decompilers for them as well. Deal with it, it’s life.

      I should use another program because some people who have posted in the past they don’t like GM (and don’t deny it, I’ve seen it posted by the person who hounded my blog) decided they wanted to start causing trouble with a malicious product?
      “Deal with it” sounds very much like yet another dismissive typical Internet comment, so again, no fluff please.

  12. And, no, the decompiler was not developed to give users a way to hack into your precious games,

    Being dismissive about the value of my work does not justify the product you released.

    If people are using it maliciously, bitch about them — not us. We’re not the ones doing something malicious. With your logic, if somebody ever walked up to me, and shot me in the foot, my tiff would be with the gun manufacturer, and not the person who shot me.

    But if I could stop the gun manufacturer in the first place, it’d be easier than having to deal with every individual case that the product is responsible for.

    We’re incredibly interested in developers creating unique tools for enhancing the Game Maker experience.

    Ah yes, you released a tool that allowed peoples work to be reverse engineered to make everyone happy. You released a tool that allowed people to do something illegal. Then you pretend you had good intentions and try to shift the blame to the users of your software. You aren’t fooling anyone, and your program isn’t appreciated by anyone competent enough to not accidentally move their game to the trash then recycle it.

    • >> ” Being dismissive about the value of my work does not justify the product you released. ”

      That may or may not be so. But there is something that does justify the product that we released, and that is support. So many people have thanked us and helped us and praised our work. There are a lot more people than you, Loaf, and honestly, your opinion really does not matter to us. There are so many more people who appreciate us than those who do not, and if you don’t believe me, look at our site. While I cannot prove it, I’m hoping you’ll take my word when I say that not a single comment on that site has been removed or edited that was not written by one of the x2048 guys. Several comments that were made simply to test changes to the comment system were either edited or removed, but comments made by those seeking support or who wish to thank us for our work, and even those who disapprove of the work, are left unchanged. Take a gander. http://www.x2048.com/decompiler

      >> ” But if I could stop the gun manufacturer in the first place, it’d be easier than having to deal with every individual case that the product is responsible for. ”

      Sab pretty much nailed it. Just because our decompiler does not exist doesn’t mean others won’t arise. In fact, I’m pretty sure Zach said something about having other pals who had their own functional decompilers, they just never got around to releasing them and/or adding finishing touches. Besides, similar to a gun, the decompiler has a lot of legitimate uses. Just because some dick uses it maliciously doesn’t make us responsible, and we’re not going to stop working on it because some dick uses it maliciously, because we know most people use it how we intended it. And that’s a good thing. You just fail to see it.

      >> ” *Rant about how we’re encourage illegal activity and not innovation with Game Maker* ”

      You clearly didn’t read what I said. We released a functioning C++ library that can examine/modify .GMK files. This has nothing to do with the Game Maker .exe files, which is what the decompiler focuses on the most. The .GMK library allows developers to write tools that modify the .GMK file, meaning that a developer could easily write apps to assist in obfuscating or further modifying the .GMK in ways that Game Maker itself does not. There’s nothing malicious about that library. You are incredibly naive in thinking that the bulk of users who need to recover their source files lose it by dragging it into the trash. I have no idea why you have the right to judge other people’s competence. With the nature of hard drives, and computers in general, it’s not rare for data to be lost due to hardware malfunctions, and it’s not rare for somebody to, say, transfer data to a new system and forget their .GMK / .GM81 files. People should back up their files to external disks, or to the internet, and I do this myself, but some people either can’t afford an external disk, or just can’t be bothered to back things up. But that doesn’t matter, we feel that we should have their backs anyway. It’s incredibly selfish of you to say that all those people should, indeed, NOT have a way to regain their source code just because you can’t properly secure your code.

      We’re not “shifting the blame” on anybody, because there’s no real blame to be had. We’re acknowledging the fact that the decompiler can be used maliciously, but we know that more often than not, it saves somebody a lot of trouble. And you’ll understand that once you acknowledge the fact that not every single person on the universe wants to steal your game, and that there are a lot more good people than there are bad.

  13. @Loaf: Peace of mind… about what? Somebody seeing your source code? Sites will redistribute popular games, often without giving credit, whether they’re decompiled or not.

    The real advantage of moving over to code generation with LLVM is performance. Beyond simply compiling and linking with the runner, which would by itself bring a lot of performance and size improvements, it would be possible to do run-time optimization in the style of modern JavaScript compilers, which would be amazing.

  14. I am looking forward to not having to worry about decryption. People always like to debate that its unlikely anyone will want to decrypt your game, but that is just not good enough for me. I need peace of mind. GM Studio for this, among many reasons, is the only GM update I’ve ever been really excited for. Looking forward to iOS and Mac exporting too… can’t wait. 🙂

  15. Schreib is actually working on updating his Obfuscator for GM8.0 currently, as far as I know anyway. I’m excited to see GM Studio come out, have the code actually compiled into the EXE would make only resource extraction possible.

    My only concern about YYG’s Obfuscator is if they automatically obfuscate code at compile time it would screw up error messages. I’m sure they’ve taken this into consideration though.

  16. Loaf :
    *Babble*

    Game Maker is aimed at those who are just learning game development, yes. In many cases, these are the younger folks. You /know/ that it’s aimed at the younger crowd. Look at the YoYo Games website. Look at the (new) Game Maker logo. Look at the Game Maker logo that was chosen by Sandy to replace the old Game Maker logo, but was not used due to an outcry by the fans. If you think that that is the type of marketing for older individuals, you’re wrong. I don’t know how old you are (I could take a guess…), but 7-9 is VERY young, where as young kids are 11-14, in our eyes. That’s the age group we were referring to there. You’re correct in the fact that the original Game Maker 8 Decompiler was released by us, and was lightly influenced by our disapproval of how YoYo Games was operating at that point. Mind you it was not the only reason or the “primary” motivation behind the project. The primary motivation behind the project was a learning experience for the developers and as a useful and legitimate tool for users. Over the past year, though, especially with the introduction of Mr. Dailly as the primary developer of the tool, things appear to have improved greatly. Now, we’re definitely not YoYo Fanboys, Loaf, but we definitely are not doing this to “stick it to the man”.

    And, no, the decompiler was not developed to give users a way to hack into your precious games, and we knew that that would not be a problem with applications such as Charlie’s Anti Decompiler. If people are using it maliciously, bitch about them – not us. We’re not the ones doing something malicious. With your logic, if somebody ever walked up to me, and shot me in the foot, my tiff would be with the gun manufacturer, and not the person who shot me.

    We’re incredibly interested in developers creating unique tools for enhancing the Game Maker experience. That’s why we released the GMK/GM81 Parsing Library (http://www.x2048.com/project.php?id=4&page=1) several months ago, so that developers could easily create apps that use your Game Maker source files. And, honestly, using that tool, creating a 3rd Party Game Maker obfuscator would not incredibly difficult. Our support goes the same way for those who want to encrypt Game Maker .EXE’s. We’re not going to try to crack 3rd party encryption methods, and offer kind words for those who try to write encryption methods of their own. This way, users do have a legitimate way to protect their games. We’re cracking YoYo’s encryption so that our tool works and can be of use to some people to learn and to recover backups, and that’s that.

    • Personally, I feel the existence of the decompiler is neither good nor evil. Its just a tool that was possible due to the design of Game maker, and like any good tool it has many uses. It can be used for educational purposes, to help recover a lost GMK, or to crack open a game and steal someone’s work. Its capable of all these things.

      Even though I don’t consider its creation to be a criminal act, obviously it makes my life as a game designer more complicated. And it seems there are others who feel a lot more strongly about it than I do. I guess those kinds of reactions are just something one has to learn to deal with if they choose to create something controversial.

  17. The obfuscator is for the HTML5 version and is nothing to do with the new decompiler. The problem with HTML5 is that you HAVE to release source code to everything, so this work is to protect our runner, and the end users game.

    http://yfrog.com/z/ketp7p

    • Ah, I was wondering how you were going to try and protect the HTML 5 code, so this makes sense. And its good that you’re also aiming to protect people’s game code as well as your runner. I would still love to see obfuscation built in for regular GM games though. Even just an option to strip out comments and rename variables would make me feel better when distributing a game.

  18. As Zach said, this is a good thing. The decompiler is not a tool that was made to be malicious. It’s a tool made as a learning experience for Zach and as a legitimate utility for those who want it. We have not been opposed to breaking any third party encryption schemes, so (until the GM 8.1 update, Mike) users could encrypt their application if they were genuinely concerned of it being decompiled. We have encouraged developers to create any apps to encrypt their games, and every comment on the x2048 website has indicated that people are generally pleased to have a decompiler on hand in case something ever goes wrong or they want to learn how somebody does something. It’s a legitimate tool, and Mike is acting as though we’re doing it to piss him off, and we’re not. He’s pissing us off.

    • It doesn’t matter how you want to dress the decompiler up or what ethical approach you want to take. Its used abusively by almost everyone who gets their hands on it. And developers of one of the decompilers actively made it clear they wanted to do it as a protest against YYG for some reason that is beyond me.

      If you are careless enough to not back-up your projects, that is your problem.

    • Loaf, the new decompiler is in no way a protest against YYG. The GM7.0 was, because the group that created it was mad at Mark (not YYG, if I recall correctly, YYG was just getting started). The GM8.0 decompiler was in slight protest simply because I was annoyed at how inefficient the runner was and how clunky the game data was stored.

      YYG has done wonderful work with GM8.1 addressing many of the issues brought up by many people on the GMC, and they’re continuing to do so with GM Studio and the auto-updater included in GM8.1. The only reason I bothered with GM8.1 was because I didn’t actually crack the encryption on the EXE 100% myself last time, so I thought a fun challenge would be nice as a weekend project.

      And, it is a legitimate tool, yes I understand many skiddies will use it, and that sucks honestly. But you have to keep in mind, GM is aimed at younger kids, people just getting into programming or game development for the first time. It’s completely possible to lose track of your source especially when you’re getting started. I recall a few times I did this myself. Likely you’ve uploaded it to some site or passed a copy to a friend, this tool allows for those people to retrieve their source code. And I know for a fact that this has been used by these people I’ve seen people talk about recovering their sources in passing and through people directly thanking me.

    • GM is aimed at younger kids

      No, its not.
      GM is aimed at people who are getting into game development for the first time, yes. But its also suitable for more advance developers, especially for prototyping. A lot of people who are more design orientated and aren’t too buff on the programming part also use GM as a tool. In no way is GM child friendly, and I haven’t seen any decent games developed with it by “younger kids” which to me is 7 to 9 year old children.
      These twisted perspectives on what GM and its community are why you fail to realize that, whether or not your intentions were reflected in the product, its a tool that is used abusively almost always. Saying “oh well thats not what its for” doesn’t make a difference to what people choose to use it for. What right do you have to release a tool that puts my work at risk of theft just because it suits you and your opinion?
      I recall that when the 8.0 decompiler was released someone hounded one of my blogs & forums with GM developers and I received messages about them saying how it was about YYG and how they need to straighten up. I assume at was you.

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