6 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] thread
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...

What splinter cell thing did you see?
Do you think it is possible/easy to de-compile MCLA?
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

Not sure if you're a .NET/C# person, but PDBs are a bit different tho in that they contain full debug information and you can absolutely decompile a .DLL + .PDB combo. Very successfully even in the case of obfuscation.
(comment deleted)