/vnt/ - Vidya & Tech

>>379
I fully support it, as well as fan-made reimplementations of older games or engines that aren't as in-depth. Projects like those based around games that I like interest me a lot more than any games that are getting released commercially nowadays do. It definitely does help breathe new life into older games. It's especially nice to see cases like Doom and Warzone 2100, where developers have released the source code themselves and added to the longevity of their work. I guess it is more impressive when people have to reverse engineer things themselves though.

>>379
Here's one that I found out about a month ago that's pretty wild: Reverse engineered versions of the PC-98 Touhou games. I've only beat the highly responsive to prayers (haven't played through the rest yet), but the progress log shows just how weirdly these games were put together.
https://rec98.nmlgc.net/

>>382
Holy cow, that's phenomenal. It is difficult to keep track of all the RE projects that are going on lately. I didn't think this was being worked on.
Personally what I like the most about RE-games is that they can be ported anywhere, I have a 3ds and being able to play a game that wasn't meant for it like GTA 3 or Mario 64 is an amazing experience.
Sadly that doesn't mean the implementation of these are completely functional, sometimes they crash, but the mere fact that it's community driven most of the time is a great plus for those wanting to learn how a game works

Reverse engineering = Hot
Modernist portshit = Not

>>384
Don't complain about lack of traffic when you act like an asshole and people with different interests start coming in here then.
I knew making this thread was a mistake

I did some crackmes many years ago and they are very labour intensive, I can only imagine how much effort needs to go into reverse engineering a whole game!

>>384
What do you mean by "Modernist portshit = Not" exactly?
>>385
>I knew making this thread was a mistake
This thread is fine. Don't let that get to you.

>>385
>>387
Heh, looks like this (admittedly laconic) post touched a nerve or two.

To put it in long form:

I'm all for reverse engineering that respects vintage games as vintage. Reconstructing source code (that can be recompiled to the original machine), ROM hacks, format specs, trainers/cheats, bugfixes, general advancement of knowledge on how it was optimized for a certain machine, all that good stuff.

What I'm NOT for (the "modernist portshit") is when it's a case of one of those morons who's always clamoring to game companies that "game X 'needs' an HD remake" decides to do it themself. Pushing bloated system requirements, pushing "upgrades" to CancerOS 10, shoehorning engines that were never meant for GL rendering into GL (or Vulkan or whatever the fuck it is these days), shoehorning everything into Unity (bet we'll see less of that one coming, at least), breaking compatibility with old files, making "fixes" that are actually just "the dev arbitrarily thought this should be changed and made the default if there even is a toggle for it", not releasing file specs they discover, and just generally raping over the game while acting like God's gift for "modernizing" it.

Obviously there's shades between the endpoints, and sometimes there're projects that are sorta good and sorta bad on this scale (i.e. if a project that's otherwise bad at least results in a release of detailed file specs that's a leg up for someone to do something better with them.)

Example of how this sort of shit does real damage for the people who want to dismiss as a pointless rave: I saw an LP of Dark Forces once (this was years before the official re-release, so unrelated to that) where the guy was using some shitty GL port because it "looked fantastic"; all good for the first few missions until he gets to places where some of the later weapons should be and it turns out that whatever moron made the port halfassed it and didn't bother to implement those properly. Nimrod playing the game just blithely assumes that the game was always broken like that, without ever seeming to stop to think that maybe his "looks fantastic" GL crap was to blame, or that maybe the game was getting "too hard" because of the lack of those weapons, because hey, glowy colored lights! And remember, this was on public video, where people could get this as their first impression of the game (wasn't much other footage of DF around at that time).

Anyways, extended rant over.

>>388
I actually agree with you overall. I think remakes should generally keep the same look and feel as the originals or at least have the option to keep them similar. OpenRA is a project I've followed for a long time, but there have been deviations from the original games I really don't like (and there have been a lot of complaints about its balance being screwed up and the overall attitudes of the developers). Conversely, Wargus, the Stratagus Engine remake of WarCraft II seems to be trying to maintain the overall feeling of the original game and allows the player to toggle certain graphical deviations of the original on and off. You can even switch between new and old units stats. It's a small project that hasn't developed the following that OpenRA has had, but I think it finally might be starting to come along. Recently someone even started the Stargus project back up again, which aimed to give a similar treatment to StarCraft but had been abandoned for years. It's still in the pre-alpha phase though. I like the prospect of being able to play games like these on modern hardware or deal with companies like Blizzard and with the addition of added features people have come to expect nowadays. I dislike remakes that are focused on providing "better" graphics or forcing big changes on the player to "improve" the gameplay instead of ones that aim for authenticity while still extending the options available to the player.

Speaking of remakes, I might as well post this Doom image I found a long time ago. I've always found it interesting, although I don't know how well Doom would actually translate to 3D even if it actually looked that nice.