I’m honored to be a beta tester for world’s best SWF encryption software, SecureSWF. And when I say, best, I don’t exaggerate by any means as for our latest flash game, Rot Gut, I tested almost all possible ways and with some best decompilers around I tested output of each encyption software and SecureSWF proved to be best, that’s not mean that it can’t get even better though.
With having beta version of 4.0, the full release is just on the horizon and I hope we can use it for our next game, which with the good experience I had with the 3.6, I’ll surely do.
4.o introduced 100 new features (listed here). I don’t want to kid myself or anyone, no one will use all features of any software but some of the additions are very good and most of them meets the eye of the experiences users of 3.6.
One of the good changes is redesigned UI. I wasn’t really a big fan of 3.6’s UI and first time I fired up 4.0 that was what I liked in first blink. UI is better organized and new features are better placed as well. Even though it’s not still following standards of most common Windows softwares, and there are valid reasons for that, but I like it nevertheless because it’s mostly targeted towards developers rather than everyone.
One of the things I was eager to see in the newer version was ability to have multiple encryption options for various things. As most advanced encryption algorithms are slow inherently, it’s good to have multiple options for encryption for different parts. For example now you can choose your encryption algorithm of choice for String Literal Encryption (At the time of writing this preview, there are RC4 and AES available which are keys available from 32-bit to 288-bit !) which is good enough for me.
The renaming engine, which is heart and soul of such encryption software, is improved greatly. In previous major release I had to do some stuff to hint SecureSWF on finding some identifiers but there is no need to do those things anymore, which is a huge help for me.
The renaming tree is improved as well, now you can have rules applied to nodes of identifier trees to apply it to children which is very helpful and time saving.
There are some other additions as well such as being able to automate encryption with Ant but I’m yet to use them.
There is a compression feature there as well which is allegedly improved which helps to remove assets that your final SWF is not actually using but is bundled in it.
So I think that’s it for now, I’ll try to update this review once the final version is released and I’ll be using it more for my next game.