oh yeah. I haven't read all the specifics

but steamworks is free, doesn't require you to distribute through steam, and has antipiracy protection:

http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

Steamworks is entirely free. There are no licensing fees and there's no charge for bandwidth, retail copies, or OEM distribution.

Steam Anti-Piracy

Steamworks' anti-piracy suite combines three approaches to anti-piracy: (1) Custom Executable Generation, (2) Retail Encryption, and (3) Valuable Platform-Dependant Features. These work together to provide a seamless end-user experience, protecting your game and giving real value to customers.

1. Custom Executable Generation

Custom Executable Generation creates a unique build of your game for each user, making it difficult for any one user to share the game with any other user. Each individual copy of a CEG-protected game is only playable by the Steam account authorized to access it. CEG is transparent, and does not impose limits on users. It lets users access their content from any hardware, and allows unlimited hardware configuration changes without the content becoming unplayable. In fact, no changes are made to a user's computer for CEG to work. Instead, CEG works in tandem with Steam authentication, enabling content access based on user accounts, not arbitrary hardware-based "rights-management" restrictions.

2. Retail Encryption

Protect your day-one release by shipping encrypted media to stores world-wide. No need to worry that your game will leak from a replicator or stock room - your game stays encrypted until the moment you decide to release it.

Encryption technology also allows you to preload your game to users on Steam. Download encrypted data weeks in advance so that players have access to your game the moment it's released, increasing player numbers and satisfaction during the critical first days.

3. Valuable Platform-Dependant Features

Customers won't want to pirate a game that's connected to 20 million gamers and a feature-rich platform. Features like Steam Achievements, Anti-Cheat, Auto-Updating, and Steam Cloud simply don?t exist outside of Steam.

Furthermore, constantly updating your game with upgrades and content leaves the pirates in the dust ? they are relegated to a featureless game with no community of players.

I agree, steam is the way to go. antipiracy measures don't work much, but it does allow you to sell a few copies before the pirates kick in

the best thing is to make it easier to buy than to steal. if you can click 2 or 3 times, enter a credit card number, pay 10 bucks or less, and be playing the game in minutes. alot of people will buy,

the main thing though, is to have enough web presence that they hear of your game from your site or someone linking to you before they see it listed on a torrent site

yeah yeah! that too!

yeah, in a more complex game, it wastes alot of time to preview the whole thing

there is a workaround for this:

first clone the object

disable rotations in the clone

when it's time to toggle rotation, you spawn the nonrotatable object

disable collisions between them, and destroy the original

this cap demonstrates this. of course, don't draw an arrow on your clone or it'll be obvious what you're doing

tada!

SOLVED!:

tada!

you have to disable collisions with other objects. I also had tried what deadeye said. I guess physics detects the collision even if you destroy the object first. not sure if this counts as a bug. you have to disable collision each time the new object is spawned however. or maybe it's destroyed. if someone can clear that up for me, I'd appreciate it. I suppose some expirementation might shed some light, but if someone already knows, I'd prefer not to go through the trouble. Does disabling collisions only work for the life of an instance? so if I destroy all box2s does that mean that box1 won't have collisions disabled to it? or is it that if I destroy all box1s, it forgets disabled collisions? or does it only disable collisions for current instances that in the playing field at the time? etc etc etc....either way, you can't just disable the collisions in the start of layout event. thanks for the answers guys, I had forgotten about collisions altogether after my initial test until I read the replies

due to the overwhelming response I thought I'd give an update to the question. I realized this only happens when replacing an object with a new object. I thought it might just be the result of starting an object from a stopping position, but this cap here:

here

shows that it's not. if anyone has any insight as to why the first cap does that shifty thing. It'd be much appreciated.

hmmmm. there'd be no way to add atoggle for the new way so it wouldnt affect old caps?

if you want to move the light source around to where your mouse is on the screen for instance

when you do set light x and set light y in bumpmapping

you can't :

set light x to mousex and

set light y to mousey

you have to:

set light x to (mousex-sprite.x)/sprite.width

and

set light y to (mousey-sprite.y)/sprite.height

or your lightsource will be in a totally different part of the world

I'm saying it'd be nice to just be able to put mousex and mousey and be done with it

OR, just be able to use the light object to automatically control the light source for bumpmaps

I was trying to post a response to this post about rotation when I realized a glitchy kinda thing about physics I had noticed before but not so pronounced. why when I set velocity does the object shift position slightly before applying the velocity?

click for cap

in the above cap file, you'll see when you apply velocity to this object it's changes position, if you remove the line that sets velocity it's obvious even though there's a swap of objects it hasn't moved...I can't figure out any logic to where it moves either so I can't shift it back.. besides setting object position breaks the physics engine. but if you click over and over it seems random where it shifts to

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who uses bumpmapping as much as I do, but it'd be cool if you didn't have to translate the screen coordinates every time for bumpmaps and heightmaps.

it's not that hard to type every time, but I can't think of too many occasions when you'd want to think in the raw form anyway. I suppose all the scenarios needed to work it out correctly can't be built into the fx file, so maybe another light object with a toggle for bumpmaps, and you just move that around. one or two bumpmaps might not seem like a big deal, but if you want the entire game to be bumpmapped, and multiple colored lightsources and stuff, it's starts to get tedious to copy/paste that or retype it every time

thanks dead

still doesn't really make sense though

but I can work with it