Loading external assets from Server

[flash2070]

Hello,
I'm creating an MMO Game using SmartFox Server + MySQL + memcached
in the game world there is planty of objects and clothes for the characters.
ofcourse all those objects should be on the server, and the client load them dynamically (the assets = swf files) with URLLoader class

there is no doubt about the above-mentioned thought, but my question is about the implementation. I guess it should be an HTTP server (Apache/Jetty etc..)
and the clients gets a list of URLs. is it right?
what security issues should I pay attention to? for example, I don't want that everyone will have the ability to download my assets and steal my graphics.

I will appricate your help
thanks alot (and in advanced)

flash2070

[Democre]

In the SFSObject/SFSArray docs there is a section called Byte Arrays, which mentions briefly that these could be used for external swf files.

Hope this helps...

[Lapo]

Well, this is a little bit complicated. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to fully protect your art data.

The problem is that anyone with a bit of experience can use the advanced features of moder browsers and see exactly each and every file being downloaded. This means that all your gif/jpg/png/swf requests can be sniffed.

With SFS2X you could hide some of the most important assets in the socket data. This way the browser won't know and it will be very difficult to find, but if you have Megabytes of data I wouldn't recommend that.

What you need to do is put the binary data of an image or SWF file in an SFSObject (as byte array) and send it to the client. On the client you can use a Loader object to transform the bytes back into a readable Flash asset. ( loadBytes() is the name of the method? I am going by memory... )

[flash2070]

cool. thank you Lapo for the great answer !

Well, this is a little bit complicated. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to fully protect your art data.

The problem is that anyone with a bit of experience can use the advanced features of moder browsers and see exactly each and every file being downloaded. This means that all your gif/jpg/png/swf requests can be sniffed.

With SFS2X you could hide some of the most important assets in the socket data. This way the browser won't know and it will be very difficult to find, but if you have Megabytes of data I wouldn't recommend that.

What you need to do is put the binary data of an image or SWF file in an SFSObject (as byte array) and send it to the client. On the client you can use a Loader object to transform the bytes back into a readable Flash asset. ( loadBytes() is the name of the method? I am going by memory... )