What do you think about Decompilers

[Montycarlo]

I'm doing a small survey to get opinions.

What do you think about decompilers? Do you believe Adobe have made it too easy for crackers?
How many are out there? Have you used one? Have you stole work from decompiling productions previously?

Cheers.

[the1manwiththeplan]

I use them to rip cool effects like explosions and bullet holes
I don't know if thats frowned upon or not but I cant draw explosions to save myself.

[Resrek]

At 10/11/09 01:27 AM, Montycarlo wrote: What do you think about decompilers?

I hate them.

[henke37]

I don't mind them, but I find that they are not good enough for more complex scripting these days, they just fail all the time, if not outright crashes.
Their inability to add support for dumping embeded bytearrays confuses me, it is not exactly a hard task.

[Xeptic]

I love them. Lost all but an swf file of my project once, thanks to someone with a decompiler I was able to get it all back.

[Yambanshee]

I think that adobe should add a decompiler, but something you can switch off with scripting so only you can decompile your work when in progress, and when its done you can turn off the decompiler.

So i like them, but often people use them for the wrong purposes, like stealing

[AntoArts-Admin]

There's nothing wrong with the decompilers, just some people who use them to decompile others work and say it's theirs etc...

[andy70707]

well, theyve saved me a few times when flash has crashed and I havent saved in ages except a .swf, I personally think they are a good idea and that you have the option to protect youre flash, I would never use them to steal stuff, but I used one on quite a few popular games jsut to mess around with them and see how they are made (portal the flash verison was made on like 3-5 frames)

[Assios]

At 10/11/09 03:11 AM, Resrek wrote:

At 10/11/09 01:27 AM, Montycarlo wrote: What do you think about decompilers?

I hate them.

Second that.

[Archon68]

Decompilers are just making it easier for people to steal Flashes. Anyone who uses a decompiler should be shot. Repeatedly.

[Yhtomit]

Well, I used one to recover a collab part for my brother so that he could get it included in it.

[ChillyCheese]

I use them all the time to recover past projects that were lost, sometimes I might decompile someone else's animation to examine, but nothing more.

[GustTheASGuy]

They're useful for recovering animations to FLA format (as opposed to extracting them by manipulating SWFs). Other than that they're not a serious tool if programming is involved.

[7IsUnlucky]

At 10/11/09 01:27 AM, Montycarlo wrote: I'm doing a small survey to get opinions.

What do you think about decompilers?

They're good if you need to get an old movie you made from a website, or get some sprites or something from someone else's

Do you believe Adobe have made it too easy for crackers?

Yeah, but not Macromedia. Macromedia was awesome

How many are out there?

100+

Have you used one?

Yeah, but only the free trial. It didn't give any AS and was all in black and white. Fortunately, all I needed to decompile were Madness movies.

Have you stole work from decompiling productions previously?

lolno

Cheers.

...

[PaperBagMask]

Decompilers are alright. I use them from time to time to look at how an animator works and to see their setup.
It's interesting. I don't actually steal from decompiled flashes, just use them as a reference.

[doctormario]

I generally don't use them, and every time I've been forced to (usually because a client's previous designer is holding the .fla hostage), I've been grossly disappointed. Machine named symbols, lack of code, abandonment of nested animation, or my personal favorite....a frame by frame capture of the movie. Super.

[Magical-Zorse]

I don't mind them. It's fine if you want to see how a certain game was coded, but I frown upon people decompiling games and claiming them as their own.

[Montycarlo]

Thanks guys :D

[adman1993]

I have a decompiler but only for when i lose the fla of something that i need and i always make sure i have a backup swf somewhere just incase :)

[the1manwiththeplan]

Here is a game I made about a year ago.

Its pretty bad Ill admit now play spot the difference with this game submitted about a month later

Its still got the same cursor ball graphics level design and everything I was so pissed he managed to get a better score after decompiling my game and changing the graphics I removed my own game from the portal.

I look back now and laugh because my version didn't even have a preloader how amateur is that.

I still think preloaders are useful though as long as they don't reach the clutches of evil lol

[the1manwiththeplan]

I still think preloaders are useful though as long as they don't reach the clutches of evil lol

Preloaders I meant flash decompilers WTF? lol *facepalm