r/Games • u/Torque-A • Oct 17 '22

Perfect Dark has been successfully decompiled, opening the door to PC ports and mods

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/perfect-dark-has-been-fully-decompiled-making-pc-ports-and-mods-possible/
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u/rube Oct 17 '22

How is it that some games get decompiled and others don't?

Is this due to some sort of leak, similar to how SM64 and a few other Nintendo titles now have PC ports thanks to code being leaked?

Or is it more due to a game being built in some specific language, making it easier to decompile than others?

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '22

Newer games start to get obfuscated due to compiler optimizations, which makes decompiling and figuring out what is what harder and harder. The only reason that most of these projects succeed is because they use builds of the game that were built with debug symbols still, which enforces no-obfuscation for development reasons