Hello,
I’ve got a team of coders working on a set of tools to ease the creation of videogames in the Unity Engine, mainly RPGs. and we would like to sell the extension, however, we dont know if it;s possible to copy-protect the scripts to avoid illegal distribution.
We are aiming at game making communities with our product, mostly amateur people who deal with RPG Maker, etc…sadly there’s a lot of piracy, and having a completely unprotected file would make us a very easy target.
is there any way to protect the scripts sold? is there any way to get a 3rd party copy protection system to work with our tools so that they require a registration or something along the lines?
we need to protect our work the most we can.
Thank you very much for your time
Diego
I dont think there is any way to protect the standard unity scripts, however you could instead make plugins in the form of DLLs and include some kind of registration functionality.
problem is Dlls are windows only and as far as i know, not natively supported
“Plugin” is used two ways with Unity. One refers to the Pro-only feature that involves binding C/C++/Obj-C code to Mono. This only works in standalone builds: Unity - Manual: Plug-ins
The other refers to compiling Unity scripts to .NET assemblies. These files can be included in your project, and do deploy to all targets (including web player). They have a .dll extension.
Check Emil’s stuff for an example of this: http://angryant.com/ (grab the example Path project, for instance).
huh, I had no idea they had a .dll extension.
well, what I’d like to do is a tool that works like AngryAnt’s Stuff.
a script that you put in the editor and adds new functionality to Unity.
now, is there any way to protect such script/extension from being illegally shared by people? even if it means getting a third party solution for copy-protection
.net assemblies can be very easily be disassembled hence the only benefit of distributing your script as dll will be for the developers to not have to include your sources in their project and keep somehow cleaner.
Honestly, trying to protect that kind of code is going to be relatively difficult and instead of trying to chase a wild goose you might better craft an appropriate license and rely on it. The odds to have an established company publish an unity game that will include your unlicensed code (or part of, or code inspired by your code) sounds very unlikely.
If your code solves a real problem and if it is priced correctly (in such way it would cost way more to recreate and maintain something similar) then you are going to find loyal customers.
good luck anyway.
You’re right, I will have to rely on a good license.
Thanks for the help and suggestions!