Could someone copy all my game files while doing Remote Preview?

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santidx

  • Hello everyone,

    I've been working on a game for 10 months now. The demo is ready and I'd like to be able to let people test it remotely. The game needs to be launched from the NWjs Preview module to be able to benefit from local file read/write functionalities. Everything works great. (I specify it's the NWjs version in case it changes anything).

    My question is: Since all the files needed to launch the game are downloaded by the computer running the Remote Preview, is it possible for someone to easily copy all the files of the game? Are they all temporarily stored in a folder that's easy to find for someone tech-savvy?

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  • Remote Preview will download similar resources to an unminified export of your project. I'm not aware of any tool ever having been developed that could reverse even an unminified export back to a Construct project, but it is theoretically possible (although a lot of details would go missing, like comments in event sheets).

    If you export your project with advanced minification, it makes it far harder for anyone to reverse engineer it. I suspect (but don't know for sure) that it is infeasible to develop a tool to reverse advanced minified projects back to a complete Construct project - we've specifically designed it to make sure this approach scrambles all the key details of the project. I'd guess it's more convenient for pre-release testing to export an advanced minified copy of your project anyway, as the Remote Preview URL only works so long as you keep the Remote Preview window open, so your testers will have to load the project at the same time as you.

    I'd also point out NW.js is deprecated and is going to be removed from Construct in the next few months, although it will continue to be supported in the next LTS release to the end of 2026. It will be far easier to switch to the other export options before you release your project, since otherwise you risk losing things like Local Storage data. So I'd suggest switching over and using the File System plugin for local read/write functionality, as that will be supported indefinitely.

  • Hey Ashley, thanks for the reply. I hesitated tagging you as I thought only people with "under the hood" knowledge would know about that :)

    Actually, I initially started exporting through WebView but I went to did a demo of the game and it crashed on my laptop. It is a 1.6 Gb project with 100 small videos used for backgrounds and it crashed on what I assumed was a bug because of videos.

    But more importantly, I need to be able to save files like every game does to the UserFolder located in "C:/Users/UserName/AppData/Roaming/GameFolder/"

    And right now, only NWjs can do that AND it's compatible with Mac and Linux folder system. It has the "NWjs.UserFolder" expression that the FileSystem object doesn't have so it's rather crucial for me.

    Regarding my initial question, I understand the minification process protects exports BUT, since the game is still in development, I do not want to send exports to anyone and the Remote Preview tool is perfect for one-shot testing sessions. My only concern was that perhaps the downloaded content could be copied, kept and dissected even after the remote preview ended.

  • I went to did a demo of the game and it crashed on my laptop.

    Both WebView2 and NW.js use the Chromium browser engine so in theory they should work the same. If you could file an issue for a WebView2 crash (ideally with a minimal project - you could just fill it up with dummy video content if you need a lot of videos to reproduce the problem) then I'd take a look - anything that blocks people moving over to WebView2 is a priority for us to fix.

    But more importantly, I need to be able to save files like every game does to the UserFolder located in "C:/Users/UserName/AppData/Roaming/GameFolder/"

    The File System plugin supports that with the Windows WebView2, macOS WKWebView and Linux CEF export options, using the picker tag "<current-app-data>". (You can also use "<roaming-app-data>" but that's Windows only.) See the File System manual entry for more details.

    My only concern was that perhaps the downloaded content could be copied, kept and dissected even after the remote preview ended.

    In theory the content downloaded via Remote Preview could be copied and kept. You'd probably need a specialist tool though. If you trust your testers it's probably OK.

  • Alright, I'm going to give a look at all of this. Thanks a lot Ashley!

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