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by toxicFork
2811 days ago
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Thank you for this lovely write up, it reminds me of the joy of reverse engineering. It teaches us a lot, it is how I got into the industry. Nowadays it can be a bit more challenging - at least for high budget productions as the games can be a lot more complicated, and there are anti piracy measurements in some which means it requires a bit more effort into seeing the information - for example all strings would be encrypted. Modifying anything at all could mean the game will not start or it will crash on purpose. Similarly for multi player games, with anti cheat protection. Nothing is impossible though ;) Indie games should have relatively low barriers to entry, however :) |
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Absolutely. I played a lot of games and often prolonged their attraction by simply digging into their data files and fiddling with them. I remember writing a terrain editor[1] for "4D Stunts" after looking at the data format in the 3 existing terrain files. Or discovering a dragon in the original "Quake Test" release after reverse engineering the MDL file format and writing one of the first viewers for it. It was certainly a huge motivation seeing the visual result of your work in action. The relative simplicity of the games really helped with that, just like you said.
[1] Here's a screenshot I just took after running it again in DOSBox for the first time in probably 20 years: https://i.imgur.com/z7ZSM0J.png.