Got issues with your Clickteam Fusion 2.5 game or app and antivirus false positives? It’s been a problem almost since the birth of Multimedia Fusion 2 back in 2006! A number of threads are constantly appearing on the forums regarding this issue and it does seem to be quite annoying. We’ll cover the issue at hand in this post.

An.UNOFFICIAL. Subreddit for Clickteam Fusion 2.5, Multimedia Fusion 2, and it's standard and developer variants. Also about Clickteam's other products, such as the Install Creator. Game and software creation has never been easier or quicker than with Clickteam Fusion 2.5! Within your first hour you will have learned the basics of the tool. Compile a windows app with a mouse click, Or target additional platforms like iOS, Android, Flash and XNA (Windows Mobile phone and Xbox) with the purchase of our optional exporters. Clickteam Fusion 2.5 is the successor to Multimedia Fusion 2, the company's most well-received software application to date.The Fusion series was designed to be a user-friendly yet powerful drag-and-drop game and application creation program, easily accessible to either those well-versed or inexperienced in programming. Firefly takes advantage of the Event Editor's ease of programming. However even with that advantage, 3d game development can be a daunting task. Clickteam and many of our outstanding users have provided the following Tutorials to help walk you through different types of game projects with the hopes of speeding up that process for you.

What is a false positive?

You have worked hard for months on a game and then boom, out of nowhere comes a random thread posted on Steam or your forum.

My antivirus has detected your game as a virus

How? You sit there scratching your head for hours. How could this be? You compiled your application on your development PC which is clean, you put together the packaged installer on your development PC too. So how could this have suddenly caused an issue?

Other Runtime users. That is the issue.

A false positive means your game/app (executable) has been flagged on the antiviral databases as containing code that resembles what has either been flagged previously or recently. It doesn’t matter if your game is called myawesomegame.exe and the actual issue file from 2015 was called thishorribleapp.exe – they contain the same blocks of code, whether two different games or not.

The Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Runtime

The Clickteam Fusion 2.5 runtime is a very special set of instructions that allow your Fusion 2.5 games and apps to run. To describe this in the best possible form of an analogy is; your game is the shell of a car and the runtime is the engine.

All games and apps designed and developed with Clickteam Fusion 2.5 are all cars. Your new game is a new car. It is still the same ‘engine’ that is running the car and that’s the runtime. So the problem here is, when you compile your standalone application, you are shipping the engine with it. The same engine that 293,293,029 other Fusion 2.5 compiled apps have been developed with.

The engine contains blocks of ‘code’ that allow the Runtime to interpret your Fusion 2.5 events and run them accordingly.

If, someone develops a malicious app with Fusion 2.5 that causes a user to freak out (ie: you take over the mouse or it crashes the OS) then the user will more than likely ‘flag’ it with their currently installed antivirus. Now, the issue here is, it’s not your shell (game) that gets flagged, it’s the runtime and everyone else is using that same runtime, hence why this issue crops up so many times.

Ways to resolve the false positive

There are numerous ways to try and avoid a false positive getting flagged up for your game or application. However, unfortunately there is no absolute method of this. On the flipside, it doesn’t happen to every developer. But in the bad luck running you do get sideswiped by a false positive, there are a few tips I can give you right now in ensuring that your game or app developed with Fusion 2.5 can try and avoid this unavoidable pitfall.

Don’t compress the runtime

The first thing to do is always ensure you ‘UNCHECK’ – Compress the Runtime in your application properties. Ensuring that the runtime is not compressed, it means your ‘shell’ of an executable becomes the runtime. If you compress the runtime, your app remains the ‘shell’ and the runtime is extracted to a temp directory. A surefire way of upsetting antivirus software. So always ensure you do not compress the runtime.

Run Clickteam Fusion Games Only

Sign your Fusion 2.5 apps

Sign your applications. If you are a serious developer who wants protection, it’s a very wise idea in this day and age to digitally sign your applications. You can sign both your executable file and the installer executable too. Code signing doesn’t come cheap however. It does come at a cost and I highly recommend Certs4Less but also search around. This is optional and not mandatory. It just depends how serious your are about protecting your project and reassuring your users.

Use a multi-online scanner then report

There is an abundance of free online scanners available that will scan your installer or executable for you. Some will even run your executable through all the top AV softwares and report which ones are flagging them. You can then use this list to report a false positive to each AV company.

If you need extra firepower, pop a notice on your website, forum or Facebook/Twitter page and ask all of your users to also report the false positive. This should help speed up the process.

Fusion Runtime Conclusion

Apart from those tips, there isn’t really much more I can improvise on. If you don’t think code signing is worth the money or the hassle, then just remember, that to upload apps to the Google Play Store or the iOS iTunes Store, your apps need to be digitally signed, so the same kind of attitude should be taken towards your games and apps too.

Clickteam cannot take responsibility for this, rest assured, if they could I would push but they can’t. This kind of third party behaviour is out of Clickteam’s hands and they shouldn’t be held responsible either. Clickteam develop a fantastic runtime that allows you to distribute your games and apps, so I advise if you are in the game/app development field on a serious development level, the above steps will prove paramount in your quest to ‘fill in’ the unavoidable pitfall when you do come across it.

Happy Developing!

Clickteam Fusion 2.5, or simply Fusion 2.5 is an upgrade from Clickteam featuring a highly optimised runtime and new exporters. It is the successor to Multimedia Fusion 2 and marks an end to the The Games Factory brand. Likewise with Multimedia Fusion 2, there are multiple editions of the software, sharing the same interface but have different runtime agreements and features.

The software is compatible with previously saved MFA files, but once saved, cannot be opened in MMF2. Most extensions will continue working without needing updates from the developer. Extensions that were broken have since been fixed.

Contents

• Upgrading from previous versions
  • New features
• Editions

Upgrading from previous versions

New and refined features have been implemented with Fusion 2.5, here is a summary of them:

New features

General / Runtime

• Dropped the name “Multimedia”.
• Integrated Unicode, HWA and language support.
• Improved User Interface, such as:
  • Better docking features
  • More organised properties window
  • Skins
• Better compression of MFA files (particularly images containing alpha channels)
• Integrated Box2D Physics (7 new objects)
• New expressions for the System Object - Distance and Angle expressions.
• New events for the Timer Object - “Fire event after” and “Fire N events every M events”.
• New “For each object” actions and conditions.
• New “Create by Name” action.
• Faster loops.
• Multiple Touch Object has gesture recognition.
• Debugger size and position is saved, as well as remembering objects in last session.

Frame Editor

• Supports frames larger than 32767.
• Status bar displays size and position of selected object.
• Paint tool (in toolbar) allows placing multiple objects into the frame without losing the selection. (old K&P/TGF1/C&C behaviour)
• Can hide or lock layers from the Layers bar.
• Extension Manager to download extensions from the server.

Event Editor & Event List Editor

• Skins can change the look, colours and icons.
• Scrolling is pixel-precise.
• New “Find Event” / “Find Object” commands.
• Event lines can be temporally disabled.
• Columns and rows are highlighted depending on the cursor’s position.
• Tooltip shows for the current object at the top of a highlighted column.

Expression Editor

• Object list is displayed for easy access for an object’s expressions.
• Menus can pop up either left or right clicks.
• TAB key jumps to the next non-defined parameter.
• New toolbar and features (such as changing font size and formatting)
• Expressions are easier to read by lacking restricting on spaces.
• Working undo and redo.
• New buttons for Random and Random Range.
• Real time syntax checking, with red/green colours.
• New “Where?” button can indicates a syntax error.

Picture Editor

• Files can be dropped into the editor.
• Improved import/export features - such as sprite sheets, setting the hotspot at predefined positions and cropping)
• Drawing colours can be swapped.
• Zoom is now done at the mouse position.
• New “G” button centers to the mass of the image.
• New RGB and hexadecimal colour edit boxes.

Changes

• The software, as well as EXEs produced will no longer run on Windows 9x, Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000. Windows XP SP3 or higher is required.
• Vitalize! and Java has been dropped, but still can be built if Multimedia Fusion 2 is installed on the same machine. A checkbox called “Show deprecated build types” will appear.
• If you had the Unicode exporter for MMF2, it will no longer work in MMF2.
• Exporter installations for MMF2 will require new ones for Fusion 2.5.
• MFA files created in Fusion 2.5 and not compatible with MMF2. The software will automatically create a backup when opening MMF2-based MFA files for the first time.

Interface

As with Multimedia Fusion 2, the editor is split up into various interfaces, used in order to modify different aspects of applications or games.

• Storyboard Editor - For modifying frames and their fade transitions.
• Frame Editor - For modifying the objects, extensions and appearance of a frame.
• Event Editor - For defining the logic of the program, through actions, conditions and events.
• Data Elements - For modifying samples, binary data and external files used in a application.
• Toolbars - A customizable dockable interface throughout the program.

New in Fusion 2.5:

• Skins - For theming Clickteam Fusion 2.5.

Standard/Developer Only:

• Event List Editor - An expanded view to see conditions and actions.

Editions

Developer

Run Clickteam Fusion Games Online

This is the complete version of the software, including a runtime that permits you to distribute credit-free, royalty-free. It also allows the use of Developer only extensions. The user will see a purple logo.

Standard

This still features the same interface from the Developer edition, but is much more affordable and doesn’t work with Developer only extensions and requires the user to credit Clickteam with a “Made with Fusion” logo somewhere in their product. Users who purchase this product will see a red logo.

Free

A freeware version of Fusion 2.5 that exports to HTML5 with limitations. The user is allowed to distribute any creations they create, and it forces a splash when the exported HTML5 application is ran. Users of this product will see a silver logo.

Run Clickteam Fusion Games One

Limitations of the free version editor:

• You cannot load more than 1 application in the editor.
• Global events are disabled, as well as object behaviours.
• You cannot install other type of objects with the Extension Manager.
• You cannot export images with the Picture Editor.
• You cannot export or replace sound samples or music files with the Data Elements editor.
• Plus the restrictions of the limited HTML5 Exporter. ^(Thread)

Comparison

Run Clickteam Fusion Games Onto

While all editions of the product share the same interface, the Developer version has more features and capabilities as well as the royalty, logo and credit free Runtime Agreement and the Free version only works with the limited HTML5 exporter and has other limitations.

Exporters

An exporter enables a user to build an application or game to a different platform. These can be optionally purchased and allow developing for more than one platform (the default being Windows or Mac, depending which editor you purchased). Extensions may be incompatible and/or behave differently with exporters due to code differences, so it is essential to check the compatibility between them first.

See the Exporters page for a list of current exporters.

Mac Editor

Due to heavy roots with Microsoft Windows, it is not technically possible for a native port of the editor. Instead, Fusion is bundled inside a Wine wrapper powered by WineSkin. The exporters available today work on the Mac version with minimal fuss. Some exporter dependencies (such as the Android SDK and Java JDK for the Android Exporter) crossover with OS X’s version, eliminating the need for a separate Windows copy.The Mac Export Module comes built in with the Mac Editor (as well as the normal Windows and limited HTML5 exporters).