Forums » Impact Engine » Package game assets into a single file?

Hi,

I was seriously looking at the impact engine with an eye towards purchasing it in the near future, but I had one question / concern (not really specific to impact)

How does one package all files (javascript, sound and image files) into a single file. 'Baking' was very exciting to see, but it only applies to javascript files. A major factor in distributing games in the casual game space is placing the games in a single file (thinking along the lines of flash games). It makes a huge difference in getting your games distributed onto multiple game portals sites.

There are several frameworks available to package an HTML5 game into a iPhone, Android or Desktop App, e.g. Ejecta, CocoonJS, DirectCanvas or AppJS.

You can't however, do the same when publishing on the web. Portals like Kongregate just allow you to embed an IFrame, unlike Flash Games, where you can upload a single .swf. Other portals just want a ZIP file with all the sources and assets, and will serve all the files themselfs.

From my experience, this isn't much of a problem. I had some good reactions from showing my games on MarketJS. Publishers/Portals want HTML5 content.

(Technically, you could combine everything into a single HTML file, containing all the JavaScript source and all assets base64 encoded in Data URIs, but I don't think that's a good idea. Also Internet Explorer doesn't like big Data URIs.)

@dominic: The problem with all of the frameworks that package the game into an iPhone, Android or Desktop environment is that you can still download those packages and look inside them to strip out the content.

For example an iPhone IPA file using a jailbroken phone is easily accessible if you know where to look. Once you have that IPA you simply rename and unzip it and all the contents (hopefully baked at least) once unzipped will contain all the source code.

If there was a way to compile the baked JS files (I'm not so much concerned about the Media assets and there's always PNG tools to stop them from being copied) within the compiled Objective-C source code that would be ideal. At least then it can't be decompiled properly unless you feel like snooping by using a hex editor of sorts.

UglifyJS or Google's Closure Compiler produce very unreadable code. Reconstructing the original source is close to impossible or at least a whole lot of hard work.

Embedding the javascript source directly into the app as resource is possible, but probably wouldn't stop anyone determined either. There are tools for windows EXEs to easily extract resources. I guess something similar is available for OSX/iOS as well.

My big hope is that eventually deploying HTML5/JS games to Steam would be a realistic option. From what I understand now to do so one would have to package the entire app into an executable through the use of various third party tools (which tend to get messy and come with a performance hit on top of that). I'm hoping as the popularity and quality of HTML5 games rises Valve might look into developing a streamlined solution to deploy these games on Steam.