Protecting my assets / resource management

[bchan009]

Hey!

I've always had fun playing visual novels and now that I have some time I figured I'd try my hand at making one for fun. However, I've got some important questions first...

1) Is there any way to protect my assets? Having a bunch of images in a folder is great, but if I plan to distribute this to lots of people, it won't be long before some snotty kid decides to claim my hard work as his own - next thing I know I'll be seeing my artwork all over the net in crappy RPG Maker games and lousy Photoshopped wallpapers. Is there a way to encrypt files in any way? At the very least, is it possible to perhaps keep files stored in some kind of archive and be extracted when used?

2) The tutorial mentions that images should be in the same directory as the executable. Is it possible to keep them organized into folders? So I can store all the backgrounds in a 'bg' folder and all the characters in a 'char' folder? I don't like the idea of ONE mega folder that contains everything. Same goes for sounds.

Thanks for your time! I applaud the dev who made this possible - I was debating between using the Blade engine and Ren'Py, and Ren'Py's support forums pushed me over to the Ren'Py side. =)

If I hadn't found this, I would have been forced to use Game Maker (which I'm quite skilled with) - which would have been doable, but much harder...

[Jake]

1) Is there any way to protect my assets?

Yes - if you check the 'Tools' option in the Ren'Py launcher, there's an 'Archive Files' tool below that. That packs all the game assets (with the extentions you specify) into an archive file that can't easily be opened up.

Of course, bear in mind that Ren'Py itself needs to be able to get at those files, so it's technically possible for someone to crack open the .rpa file. It's just not easy, and of course the same problem exists with any other scheme in other software as well, it's not something that can be mitigated that much.

2) The tutorial mentions that images should be in the same directory as the executable. Is it possible to keep them organized into folders? So I can store all the backgrounds in a 'bg' folder and all the characters in a 'char' folder? I don't like the idea of ONE mega folder that contains everything. Same goes for sounds.

You should be able to put stuff in sub-folders quite happily. Just specify the relative path when you load the image in the script. For example, if you have a 'bgs' folder under your game folder, then load a bg image like:

Code: Select all

    image park bg "bgs/park.jpg"

(Note that you should always use forward-slashes ( / ) to delimit folders in paths, because a forward-slash will work on all three platforms Ren'Py runs on, while a backslash ( \ ) only works on Windows.)

I think the tutorial just tells you to put them all in the game folder 'cause it's the easiest option to get right; with sub-folders you have to be careful to specify a relative path, which is harder to explain.

[bchan009]

Thanks a lot for the prompt reply!