Re: My Decision for player safety, encourage other developers to do the sa
Hi all,
Just a quick note to say that I think that in general, new developers should not use BGT. I said as much already in another post a few weeks ago, in a topic which was about whether or not BGT was abandoned. For all intents and purposes, it is.
Now, to briefly address the issue of virus warnings. I made BGT free several years before I had ever heard of any issues with antivirus programs. At the point whenI first heard about it, the engine had been free and more or less unmaintained for a number of years as I didn't really have any free time to work on it. Nevertheless I naturally considered writing to the vendors in question, but there are some technical considerations that ultimately made me decide against it.
Writing to each antivirus vendor individually is not the right way to solve it; the right way is to get the application properly signed. The issue with that is that BGT games are compiled by appending data to the end of the stub executable which contains the virtual machine, which would break the signing. I doubt whether antivirus vendors would simply give all BGT executables a blanket pass as being safe, as they do not have the ability to inspect the script code that is actually being run.
In short, the reason I do not believe that either signing the executable or writing to the individual vendors directly would be effective is simply because they cannot inspect the entire content of the program since the script is not part of the executable image, and is encrypted to boot. Software such as EXECryptor that is used to protect programs against attacks have similar issues. And so did UPX back in the day. I think most antivirus software nowadays have actually built in UPX decompression code so they can inspect the final code that is going to run, as otherwise there is no way that they would have allowed them through. Indeed, a lot of viruses used to be packaged with UPX which is why it was a big issue for a number of years.
Kind regards,
Philip Bennefall
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