The ability to export cases into standalone EXE

[Spocker]

So,

I would like to post here a suggestion made in the French server. I hope it won't intrude on the one who first posted it.
He asked for "A feature to export your game into a standalone EXE to play offline. This would really help when you want to play your favorite case when the server is down, or when there's no internet. The ability to import files from your computer instead of a web link should also be added.
The casemaker itself could also be made into an offline program, like how Scratch did, it could be difficult but it would be really helpful for those who does not want to play in a browser."

It seems like a lot of work, mostly because of the external hosting of sprites. But those are not eternal and it's a real issue to discover a few years later that your sprites are not displayed anymore (it happened to me).
I wanted to add that the main intent would not necessarily be to play others' people trials offline, but to have a backup of your own trials. I'm a bit anxious of when this amazing website will be down for not enough users, and the time I spent working on my trials will be for nothing. Plus I love what I did and I don't want them to just disappear into the vast Internet xD

So paradoxically, this idea of backing your own trial could fix the issue of grabbing assets from Imgur or else, because we would easily put our own assets into our own AAO game folder. I do believe it's a luxury to be able to play other people trials' offline; but I do think it may be a necessity to be able to secure our own trial on our computer.

What do you guys think about it? Should we contact someone or just give an insight to one of the dev team, so they may think about this feature as one of the last (because the casemaker is for me already amazing) but needed one we would love them to work on?

Thanks for reading!

[TimeAxis]

Importing files from your computer is likely never going to happen because it would require the AAO servers to host your files.

I agree with the idea of having some solution for being able to download all the assets of a trial, a copy of the player, and a backup of the trial itself that can be played offline, though.

[Spocker]

Hi,

I didn't mean importing files from our computer to the server or casemaker, I'm fine with the idea of hosting them online. I meant if we can have a backup of our trial such as a tool that can export our trial as .exe, we wouldn't necessarily need this tool to grab the assets from places other than AAO.
Because we would be able, as the idea is mostly to secure our own trials, to put our own files (sound, music, sprites...) directly into the trial game folders on our own computer.

[TimeAxis]

Oh, yeah, I misunderstood, that makes sense. It wouldn't even need to be an exe, just a modified webpage that could be run locally offline in your browser. As far as I know (although I could be wrong), the only PHP stuff that's currently baked into AAO is the stuff for verifying a user's account to see that that they have permission to play (or view/save in the editor) a trial. If that part were just worked around, and all the PHP stuff was removed, with the player being modified to get all the info it needs locally, it could potentially work without needing the user to run their own local PHP server.

Ideally there would be some tool that would not only download all of a trial's assets, but change all the paths so that they refer to the local paths instead of the online ones as well.

[Spocker]

Hi,
Just to follow (because unfortunately this post is now divided in the French and English sections of this website, as I didn't anticipate people to answer as quickly as they did on the French section), Jofe made a very interesting answer too:

Basically if I translate it:
"2. Allowing anyone to download/export data from AAO also raises security issues.
3. The site uses resources (sprites, music, etc.) that belong to Capcom, which raises legal issues. For the moment, AAO is in a bit of a gray area: basically, if Capcom wants to shut the site down, it could. However, it would only be necessary to stop integrating Capcom's content on the site to stop having to worry about this. But there's nothing to stop anyone importing their own resources, which may however be protected by copyright. By allowing trials to be exported and downloaded, AAO would become a relay for downloading copyright-protected content, which would push the site into the red zone."

I mentioned that I don't really know about the security issues, I don't understand this far the technicalities of it, unfortunately.
But I hadn't thought about the question of copyrights at all. I said that maybe (?) there's a way around it, since it would be for completely private use by everyone on their pc? And not for public distribution. I know at least that in my line of work, this difference matters.

[TimeAxis]

That makes no difference, legally. Assets are already downloaded into a user’s cache every time they play a trial. Not to mention there are various sites like court-records or the Ace Attorney wiki that host capcom’s assets directly and haven’t drawn any additional attention for it.

If anything, AAO’s precarious legal situation makes some kind of backup/preservation solution all-the-more necessary. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a built-in part of the site, rather than just some external tool.

[Spocker]

It would be interesting to know what the dev team of AAO thinks about it, but I'm sure they have a lot of other things to do so I don't know if it will ever be possible, and if they even will have the time to check this post.
But indeed I think it would be a must-have!

[applekitty]

I'm not sure if this is a solution or not, but wouldn't you be able to do this if you CTRL + S a webpage?

[TimeAxis]

I'm not sure if this is a solution or not, but wouldn't you be able to do this if you CTRL + S a webpage?

This does not work, no. It fails to load all the scripts. But it's not a bad starting point, since it does automatically download all the images on the page (but not the sounds).

It also does replace the references to the already loaded images with the local versions, but if the scripts were working, it would still try to load them from their online locations.

[Hey]

I'm hoping this happens one day. It'd be a shame if this site was blocked or crashed and we couldn't play any of the cases anymore. If we can't upload it to an exe, is there perhaps any other way?

[DeathByAutoscroll]

It is technically possible to play AAO cases offline via a really convoluted and an absolutely not officially endorsed nor intended method of playing AAO cases.

*breathes in*
So first you need to setup a locally hosted web server, clone the AAO engine repository (check the main page for a link), follow the instructions to get it working, separately download all the official assets from another source and point the engine to them and rename/order/structure them in the exact same way as the current AAO website otherwise there may be different graphics than intended (and good luck with doing that correctly for every. single. character.). To actually play cases you would need to download the case and reimport it into this locally hosted version of AAO which may or may not work with multipart cases. To play them fully offline you'd also need to download all the assets and change the trial data itself to point not to the custom URLs but instead to the locally downloaded files, which will absolutely spoil any kind of graphical or musical surprise the case may hold, and from there one could theoretically play cases offline.
*breathes out*

Quite a faff, but theoretically possible to play cases offline provided you have an internet connection (and none of the upsides like broken links being replaced with working ones by an author down the line) or knowledge of the case already and time to reassign every single link to a local copy of the assets. And this is just the physical process, creating a tool that would make any of these steps easier, let alone enmass, is morally/ethically dubious at best, and would justifiably raise concerns for those who wish for their case to be downloaded, or for assets they spent a lot of time on and don't wish to see used outside of the context of their case suddenly be extremely accessible by anyone who downloads their case.