[comagoosie]

I reverse engineered Paradox's binary format for their save files. Part of this process is extracting a table of 16 bit ids to text representations. I asked Paradox if I could open source this table, but they replied that I was already breaking the ToS. The solution I've come up with is to open source the logic but commit the table as a gpg encrypted payload (for which only I have the key).

So you could say that Paradox is sensitive when it comes to people poking around or pushing boundaries.

[meibo]

ToS are irrelevant and you should have published it anyways, under a name different from the one you use on the forums and in-game.

Open knowledge is important, especially in video game scenes where elitism is a real issue, stopping people from getting into great hobbies that I'm sure many only got into due to that one person that didn't give in to elitism and bothered to listen and to answer questions.

[Ygg2]

> ToS are irrelevant

That's some bad advice. ToS are irrelevant only if you don't expect retaliation from ToS owner, or the costs are trivial.

> Open knowledge is important, especially in video game scenes where elitism is a real issue

Open knowledge? This is reverse engineering someone's cash cow. Kinda like claiming Win 10 code is open knowledge.

Video game scenes? Elitist? It's just a silly option in some medieval sim. There are other games that allow these kinds of things. Massive chalice for example.

By that stretch, why not complain Hearts of Iron don't allow you to create a third Furry side in WW2?

Or if you really want to be part of video game scene make your own. But I doubt you'd open source it. It takes monumental effort.

Did you see indie games? It's veritable farmers market of small games.

[meibo]

> Or if you really want to be part of video game scene make your own. But I doubt you'd open source it. It takes monumental effort.

I have minted a few very active video game scenes with a good culture, open codebases and devs that are happy to help and introduced many people to reverse engineering that wouldn't otherwise have gotten into it, and it's really not as hard as you make it seem. Good resources are easy to write when you're passionate.

You just don't have to be so bitter all the time :)

> Kinda like claiming Win 10 code is open knowledge.

It arguably is and you can plop any Windows binary into Ghidra or IDA and learn from it. There's a huge amount of books and free information on NT internals on the internet.

It's the same with games, just that you might be more invested in your favorite game than in NT internals.

[Ygg2]

> I have minted a few very active video game scenes with a good culture,

Sure. Nice of you to assume I haven't made any games, and put words in my mouth.

So to repay the kindness, I'm going to assume your games weren't on scale of Paradox games. Because those games shave man decades. That means collaborative effort on a longer timescale. That means people sacrificed their time to make this. And people need to eat.

> It arguably is...

Arguably you could open a beer bottle with your eye. That doesn't make your eye a bottle opener.

In same vein, just because you can reverse engineer something doesn't make it open source.

I'm not bitter, just realistic. Poking a sleeping lion isn't guaranteed to kill you, it's just a stupid thing to do. Especially when you are way weaker than a lion and within his claw's reach.

[SCHiM]

The code runs on your machine. You do not own the game, the idea behind the game or the logic, but you do own the copy of the game on your machine.

You can read and change your copy, regardless of what the ToS says. The owner of the game can retaliate, this is not law after all.

[Ygg2]

Sure, but if you do it alone, on your computer and not tell anyone, no one from Paradox is going to harass you about it.

Moment you start open sourcing someone's game behind their back, is when they get defensive.

[afiori]

I believe this might be forbidden by the DMCA

[dllthomas]

IIUC, changes that circumvent encryption intended to control access to copyrighted materials would be forbidden by the DMCA; other changes would not. I suppose we could say the game itself envisions the rules by which we're intended to access its content, but if there's no encryption being circumvented I think the DMCA still doesn't apply. That said, I'm now curious how it defines encryption.

[anoncake]

> ToS are irrelevant and you should have published it anyways, under a name different from the one you use on the forums and in-game.

Not right after you were refused permission though, that's too obvious.

[jzebedee]

"Ask for forgiveness, not permission"

[sandworm101]

Dont ask. Do. Exploration is a right, not a sin to be forgiven.

[dmichulke]

I'll try that line with my wife but I have that feeling that she won't like it

[saagarjha]

The obvious caveat is that with people consent comes into the picture.

[stfnpopop]

So we are back where we started, no?

[Ambroos]

Code is not people.

[jcranmer]

I've definitely seen discussions of the binary format on the forums in the past. I wrote my own script for figuring out what the table for the 16-bit IDs was, but I've never committed the result anywhere.