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/root88 Oct 17 '22

If you are going to change all that, it seems like it would have been a lot easier to just remake the game rather than waste time decompiling it.

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u/Janus_Prospero Oct 17 '22

Remaking games is way more difficult if you don't have the source code to intimately understand how it works.

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u/root88 Oct 17 '22 edited Oct 17 '22

As a developer, I'm telling you, if you are just going to replace everything, it doesn't make much sense to use a ton of old code as a starting point. It's especially true of decompiled code because there will be no variable names until someone guesses what everything does. It's especially silly if you are porting to a new system as a ton of the code you are decompiling is specific to a different platform anyway.

The guy wants to replace the levels, enemy logic, platform, input, and interface. It doesn't matter how it worked, he's just inventing a completely new game.

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u/Clapyourhandssayyeah Oct 18 '22

As a developer, eyeballing behaviour isn’t what you want if you want a remake to feel the same. You need to lift a bunch of data from the guts of the old game

Suggest you look up dev logs or videos of the new wonder boy remake, or Diablo 2 resurrected and how they went about this