Hi, I'm a member and contributor of the Argentum Online (AO) community, the first MMORPG from Argentina, which is Free Software; which, although it's not 3D, it's really addictive and has some dozens of thousands of users.

Really unluckily AO was developed in Visual Basic (yes, you can laugh) but the former community, so imagine, the code not only sucks, it has zero portability.

I'm planning, with some friends to rewrite the client, and as a GNU/Linux frantic, want to do it cross-platform. Some other people is doing the same with the server in Java.

So my biggest problem is that we would like to use a rapid development language (like Java, Ruby or Python) but the client would be pretty insecure. Ruby/Python version would have all it's code available, and the Java one would be easily decompilable (yes, we have some crackers in the community)

We have consider the option to implement the security module in C/C++ as a dynamic library, but it can be replaced with a custom one, so it's not really secure.

We are also considering the option of doing the core application in C++ and the GUI in Ruby/Python. But haven't analysed all it's implications yet.

But we really don't want to code the entire game in C/C++ as it doesn't need that much performance (the game is played at 18fps on average) and we want to develop it as fast as possible.

So what would you choose in my case?

Thank you!