Over the last year I have seen some really nice exploration posts on HN with people poking around on:
- Splinter Cell
- Deus Ex
- Thief
- Civ
This is great work and will help tell the story of how these games were made.
It would be great if all games after a certain period of time were opensourced like some companies are doing:
https://github.com/electronicarts
https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games?tab=readme-ov-fi...
> It would be great if all games after a certain period of time were opensourced
I would settle for simple copyright expiration in a reasonable amount of time. 70 years after death of author is so wholly unreasonable. Even though so many IPs are now part of the collective cultural consciousness, people can't explore their creativity using them without threat of getting Nintendo'd (even for non-commercial projects!), and entire generations that grew up experiencing them will be dead and gone by the time they enter public domain. It is a travesty that we impose such heavy shackles on human creativity.
You can do whatever if you don't get caught doing it
Software copyright without mandatory source code escrow was always an insanely bad deal for society.
My general experience with decompilation has been very negative (rough and not ready for use)
It feels like tool devs target byte editting more than refactoring decompiled code into something readable - you can't move lines of code, can't flip statement checked in if() for early return
Author of this article mentioned "byte euivalence", and while I'd be fine with functional sameness, I imagine provably-reversible refactor steps would be of great help for everyone
Hm, I wrote a decompiler that does this. Maybe I should work on it more.
Do you think it is possible/easy to de-compile MCLA?
It's possible and made a lot easier if you have a debug build of the game or any build that doesn't use LTO. If you targetted the Xbox 360 version of the game in particular you could use this fork of decomp-toolkit but it's still a work in progress https://github.com/rjkiv/jeff