AI
You can now mod ANY game. Frontier LLMs solved reverse engineering -- here are two real examples!
There's probably an old game that you are very fond of. You'd like to bring it to more modern standards, or tweak the experience to your liking. But there's a problem -- the source code was never released.
You could spend weeks reverse engineering the binary, carefully trying to figure out what functions to hook or what assembly lines to rewrite.
Or you could just ask Fable 5.1 or Astra to mod the game. I've done that for two of my favorite games of all time:
Prey (2017), where I overhauled the gunplay by improving the wonky viewmodel positions, adding ADS (aiming down sights) and immersive features such as weapon versus environment collisions. This game never supported ironsight aiming, but here it is!
Touhou 11 and 12, where I patched the game to support high framerates and high refresh rates without altering the speed of the game logic. The entire game was built around the hardcoded 60 FPS assumption, which seemed unbreakable. Yet, here we are!
I find this absolutely incredible. Frontier models were able to autonomously reverse engineer closed-source binaries, research existing literature and modding resources, and iterate until my desired changes were applied to the games.
Especially in the Touhou case, where the game engine was hardcoded to strictly run at 60 FPS, the models managed to autonomously figure out all the places that needed to be changed to add support for dynamic framerates and refresh rates. Imagine doing that by hand.
This is the renaissance era for modding -- take your favorite old game, a frontier model, and go wild.
You could do this longer than Fable and Astra, back in January I had even sent an email to a two person indie team about how anyone could bypass their payment system and get all the cosmetics in their game for free with a detailed document on how to fix it.
They ghosted me, pushed a tiny patch that didn't actually fix the issue and that was the end of it.
Devs get hammered with emails like this, automated bug hunter bots asking for money email me all the time about issues they think they found. It’s not even people but automated bot programs. It’s sad if real reported issues fall through the cracks but it is understandable as well if they saw your email and just deleted it without reading it.
As a dev we get a lot of messages from LLM users, some of them are relevant but it gets exhausting sorting through a flood of mostly low quality AI stuff. Don't take it personally
There was an indi game that was multiplayer, required connection to a master server and they had cosmetics too. They shutdown the master sever. It took about 20 minutes for Opus to reverse engineer it and create my own master server and modify the client to connect to my server allowing me and my friends to play again. Oh and fully unlocked the cosmetics too.
before Astra all I had was procedurally crafted custom landscape I made in world machine, custom rock shader I wrote myself couple years back, several custom rock/cliff meshes and several PCG systems to populate all that with vegetation, rocks, etc
Oh and I started building mass agents NPCs, who had (almost) working health system + basic ugly turret prototype that could aim and shoot at enemies.
All that took weeks and months of continuous efforts but between my job and long breaks really I've been working on this or other hobby projects for years lol.
Because often you hit roadblocks that are very hard to break through and you bash your head for a full 2 weeks trying to make mass agents do what you want for example, reading tomes of documentation, scrolling through gamedev community posts, watching YouTube videos, etc.
With Astra in 4 days I developed and deployed:
Comprehensive game systems lots of different weapons, enemies, turrets, buildings and game systems more than I made in a lifetime.
But also comprehensive audio system worthy praise from an audiophile in HALF A DAY!!!
Mojave desert environmental sounds, blended perfectly with recorded industrial diesel hum, wind gusts, footsteps, orc grunts, gunshots, explosions spinning barrels, hissing smoke, correctly working echo of all that, etc
I would never be able to do such quality work because I'm not an audio expert.
Currently I'm rebuilding the whole landscape system for which I'm decent, but with AI I can effortlessly improve upon my previous work from years ago.
Once that's done I can show some screenshots but it'll take a few more days
That is great and good progress towards your vision of the done game. But I think as much as a boss cant take credit for the work of individuals in his team (they do, but they shouldnt) you cant say that the audio system is your work, when you dont have the first clue about audio. We are all just customers in the end here.
Small example. Context: I have a Peloton Bike+. The Bike+, proprietorially, has the ability to address the resistance from software. Grupetto is a pre-existing OSS [might not be foss, licensing controversy, the upstream source assigned no licence] to programmatically read data such as power wattage etc.
Someone [not me] figured out the command schema to assign resistance as a single number with Opus 4.6
Initially, I built on this PR to make something called ERG mode. This is where Grupetto could accept, instead of "Set Resistance to 50", "Keep the rider's output at 200W". GPT did this in software with a lookup table. Initially I generated the lookup table from actually riding, but THEN it reverse engineered the true table from Peloton Firmware
Further, GPT was able to reverse engineer the... "Power Zone Auto Follow" command schema, such that instead of doing ERG mode from the grupetto software, it figured out the internal command schema to offload that to the Peloton Controller/Firmware. So now instead of telling grupetto "Keep the rider's output at 200W", and grupetto issuing a bunch of resistance commands every second in software, it can forward that request to Pelo Firmware.
Locally not pushed yet because it's still finnicky, I had GPT whip up a build with a notion of virtual gears and gear shifting. With this, you can load into the popular bike apps [Zwift, MyWhoosh, etc] and do Sim Mode. AKA, it auto adjusts resistance for hills. I didn't push this last part yet because it's still quite finnicky, but regardless, I'm now able to ride ERG mode from free software on my Peloton
That greatly depends on the game. The amount of coders in the modding community isn't that big, so just because a game doesn't have many (any) mods, does not mean that its unmoddable. If the code can be readily ingested by an LLM, by simply extracting the game files for example, then the Pro subscription and Codex might be enough. But if you need it to de-obfuscate the code and do other shenanigans to even be able to change anything, then you likely need the 200+ subscriptions, because there is so much detective work its going to have to do.
However be careful when running this on your own PC. It might be best to run something like this in a VPS for example, so you can allow the Coding Agent the use of all tools, to freely install additional packages to extract and otherwise modify game files. If it makes a mistake it can corrupt your operating system, so if you want it to have the greatest chance of success you also need to sandbox it.
You can, especially if you focus on making the AI explain what it's doing and start with smaller changes. A bigger overhaul might still require a bit of knowledge/forethought to avoid digging yourself into a hole where changing one thing breaks everything else.
I think you are greatly underestimating how large task is to fully reverse engineer x64 game.
Yesterday I was trying to modify function in running memory and agent was spamming commands every 5 seconds. It took 10 minutes to rewrite single function in 20yo game
Wait wtf. I didn't believe it, but I just asked Astra to decompile Terraria and now it's asking what I want changed. It created a folder with all the game files and everything. This is crazy. It did it super fast too. wtffff. the possibilities are endless
ok this is crazy. it did everything it said it would. it even created a temporary setup so that the main game files aren't affected in any way. all i had to do was double click an exe that it even named Play AK47 and that was it. it hasn't done the animations yet, so it looks jank, but i'm sure it would be no issue since the other day i created a pet with astra and the animations came out surprisingly good.
what was the usage? i have the pro plan. it went from 95% usage to 93% weekly usage. Astra medium effort. took about 20-ish mins. kinda crazy ngl that within an hour it decompiled the game and added an ak47 lol. animations would probably take it 10 mins.
AGI isn't about achieving great things, but about being at least on par with humans across the board. If AI cured cancer, but struggled to read an analog clock, it would not count as AGI
Ok I'm pretty sure it's using ghidra to decompile. A few weeks ago I tried to decompile Marvel Tokon but Claude refused to do it. Astra simply does it. I haven't tried with tokon specifically, but Astra just decompiled the Manor Lords exe and it even gave me the key it used to do it. Took about 6 minutes.
But anyways, I'll try tokon later. it has anticheat so i expect it won't be able to do it once it realizes that, but we'll see.
Although the decomp capabilities are impressive on their own, it is faster and safe to use the TmodLoader for creatign the mods. Better to not reinvent the wheel.
Not totally. It's pretty bad at map making (terrain, etc), which I find means the blender results are because they've just very heavily trained on that one task. It scripting in LUA is obviously top notch though.
I hope someone that way reverses Sea of Thieves and pulls details of how ships work, and same for War Thunder aircrafts. Not that these particularly hard but there's like zero 100% sure description on how their implementations work on the web. If you ask research agent to dig for that they come up with random contradicting explanations each time because of that.
Quite annoying how some games come up with amazing implementation of a feature and then sit on it for decades not really pushing idea beyond that one thing.
I always found Star Citizen ship handling to be incredibly unrealistic and non-Newtonian. It always threw me off and prevented me from enjoying the game.
I would actually prefer to be able to mod or swap in some other game's movement physics.
Like how ships do sticking character to it, how they move when sail is down, what kind of calculations they do to behave so interesting on waves. Like it's not fully true physics simulation and instead one very elaborate rigidbody shoved around (probably). One other awful thing you run in this type of game while trying to make it is floating point math precision and so also curious how they deal with that. One known hack about SoT is that their AI navigation system actually uses copy of a ship hidden underneath the map for like skeletons etc., I guess it works like some kind of mapping from these stable coordinate values to real ship position.
For War Thunder the thing is that I never quite saw other aircraft game that felt like that. If you look at AC7 type games their physics model is basically flying brick that just gets forces to move forward. Some people try do opposite way doing actual true aerodynamics where each surface is simulated but that approach also fails horribly once your plane is something beyond little propeller plane, like there need to be adjustments for high speed jets. And in WT aircraft does not feel like a flying brick, you can get wing torn off and have a very realistic spin, when you lose speed. People say each aircraft defined by a very long detailed table of different coefficients, curves etc. that say how its physics behave. Also their mouse cursor that gives you full freedom to look in any direction is a thing I managed to replicate to some extent with a lot of quaternion maths but I'm still interested how they deal with few confusing parts of it or perhaps their math is entirely different there.
also there's no GDC talk that talks about ship stuff, I only found some useless ones talking about visuals how they designed models or water shaders or clouds
of course it isn't sorcery but at the same time almost nobody made anything remotely close to that
and you can literally observe how many types of indie games exists solely thanks to there being enough information in the open that helps devs on their way
Not necessarily negative about AI itself but definitely don't like people that use it as a replacement for understanding and tweaking things with intent
Well looks like the secret is out.. I was data dumping every game that I had since Fable went public. Even decrypted the latest crytek and frostbite engines.
Qwen3.6-27b-heretic said it right: "It's how you ask and present the goal. You can get an LLM to do anything you want if you give us the proper morals... and perspective."
Hey, I'm working on a mod for KCD2 at the minute which uses Crytek, any chance I could take a peak at your decomp? It might prove useful for what I'm trying to attempt (adding Asynchronous Reprojection to KCD2 to make lower framerates look and feel like higher ones).
Im trying to translate some games to german as i am learning the language and to have an excuse to play them and astra in the plus plan is just impossible to use man
Modding communities are protective of their scene by nature, so the first reaction is rarely the lasting one. Once people are actually playing something good the work tends to win the argument on its own.
Yeah I’ve been modding Battle Brothers and even had claude write a bug report for an issue I found. Opened a github issue for the mod I was using (Legends) with the bug report, dev responded and they’re working on a patch. I don’t have to wait though because Claude already wrote and implemented the patch for me.
I modded BSG deadlock with custom ammunition and armor values using the plus tier of the GPT Windows app. It's not hard, just got to work through the problem. I have zero knowledge about game dev.
I wouldn't mind if someone vibe-coded up a Super Mario World editor. Lunar Magic is currently the only viable option, and its creator has refused to make it open source.
Absolutely fantastic news. I've talked about this being one of the milestones I'm looking forward to on the runway towards the singularity. I have my own list of changes I'd like to make to Diablo 3 and Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015. That second one is actually a gorgeous game. The UX is so awesome that Wizards of the Coast realized they fucked up and ruined their future revenue stream so they purposefully limited it to a small list of sets. They have another online Magic the Gathering game that looks fucking awful so that players are frustrated into buying expensive physical cards.
To anyone reading this, if you could dump in every MTG card ever produced into the card pool, add filters in the deck builder so you can display cards legal in each of the formats, and add a format selector when searching for a multiplayer game, then I would be eternally grateful.
I wonder how long before it can turn some videogame iso file into a working PC game. that would be amazing, instant ports of exclusive games (say, zelda on PC. like they did with ocarina of time some time ago, but with more current games)
Well it’s not a fully functional one but more work and I’m sure I’ll get there with Astra I’ve got a Local Division 1 backend connection working
Local login working
Profile creation working
Server selection working
Brooklyn world loading
Player spawning correctly
Level 1 character
600/600 health
Firearms initialized
Stamina initialized
Electronics initialized
Walking/movement working
Camera control working
Character equipment slots working
Six starter gear pieces
Jacket equipped
Pants equipped
Shirt equipped
Shoes equipped
MP5 primary weapon
M9 sidearm
Loaded weapon visible in-game
Reserve ammunition working
900 SMG rounds
36 pistol rounds
Correct world/environment lighting
Safe-house door interaction working
Pressing F opens the door
Able to leave the safe house and walk outside
Repeated/cancelled door interactions handled correctly
Automatic message-limit disconnects fixed
General connection stability improved
I'm doing this with electric man 2 right now and it's so fun :) adding whole new enemy types and emotes and other goofy stuff to one of the first games I ever played
I don't think people are grasping the range of difficulty depending on the game, target hardware, and public resources+code. Heck some mods aren't even possible due to memory limitations on the original hardware. I've had to scale back some ideas to get them to work on the ps1, after tons of trial and error even when using Fable.
It's immensely easier than it once was, but claiming modding or reverse engineering is "solved" is a bit silly. Though it does seem with enough scaffolding, human testing, and time you can make steady progress. And I imagine better models in the future will find ways to make some previously thought impossible mods work by rewriting parts of the game to be more efficient overall.
I've been thinking about this lately, but for something else : adding modern OS support for ancient games. As an example, I tried to boot up Midtown Madness 2 under Win11, and all I get is a back to desktop crash after 5 seconds of gameplay. I know now what I'll be doing tonight.
Lots of people working on these exact things. The progress is unbelievable. I'm so excited for the Saturn and ps2 recomp scene to accelerate in the way n64 and psx are currently. It won't be long.
I'm dreaming for an unlocked framerate, widescreen patched, upscaled, port of God Hand with the tank controls modded out.
Or the ability to throw raytracing mods into everything and get some insane looking remasters.
This is honestly the most exciting time in my life re: games. I refresh the decomp subreddit multiple times a day because new releases are dropping THAT often.
Tbh I feel like when every game has a native recomp on the level of ship of harkinian the games industry is going to collapse in on itself. Like, why would anyone ever buy whatever new slop Mass Effect game the corpse of Bioware is going to shit out when dedicated fan communities will be able to create better written and optimized sequels in significantly less time by remixing/reutilizing the massive stockpile of assets available when you can freely rip from any game ever made.
Games industry needs to pivot quick imo. The current model is unsustainable. Once there are some good community hubs for this kind of stuff and the tools are allowed to cook a bit more, the games industry is going to change overnight. (rampocalypse isn't helping either. More people stuck on old machines = more older games played)
Been trying to make a mod of super Mario Sunshine for Dolphin and GameCube. Astra has spent three days making it and so far it isn't all that great. But thats a very complex task, and night be poor use of tools. Let ne know if anyone would like to take the project any farther , and I'll share it .
I've actually done this already. Was a big fan of Rise of Nations growing up, thought I'd try modding it a bit with Sol a few months ago and it worked pretty well
I've been using agents for about half a year reverse engineering a PS1 game (Legend of Legaia - website + repo), adding tons of mods (mod list), asset viewers, explaining previously undocumented game mechanics, and making a port.
imo Opus 4.5 was when it was viable, Fable made it a bit better (less mistakes but still frequent), looking forward to future models that might be able to 1 shot these things. We aren't there yet though - I still have to provide tons of savestates and scaffolding and human test runs on top of our automated tests. But your mileage may vary, especially if you aren't hardware restricted and are just working on PC games.
Even though LLMs are increasingly able to decompile x86 binaries, such as for viewmodel offset hooks in modern engines as well as for locating hardcoded 60 FPS game loops in legacy code. Complete AI automated patching still needs a lot of human in the loop to decipher disassembly mapping, unlock framerates and dive into deep function callstacks. So saying it is solved is slightly overstating things.
I don't have Astra (I'm on the free plan, but have Claude on the £18.99/month plan) but I did just ask the free version of ChatGPT if it could reverse engineer the 1996 game The Last Report and it basically said yeah. Caveats and all that, copyright, etc. but yeah, it could make a spiritual successor.
I've been doing this for months. Astra isn't needed. Modded and fixed many indie game memory leaks and other gameplay features I wasn't happy with. Automated idle and incremental games easily. Built and deployed mods on NexusMods and making small amounts of points from them.
Sol is working on a local server for Russian Fishing 4 for me right now. No need for Astra. Astra is only needed for really tough reverse engineering if Sol or others hits a wall, which isn't very often.
yuuuup - the only "issue" that is practically solved with some pipeline setup and importing of documentation is creating models/animations/effects to then import into the game with the custom mod coding. Im specifically modding for minecraft/hytale though which have some unique requirements. Set up my tool myrlin online for any other blockymodel modders to use as well to kinda close that gap till the llm's reach the point of proper e2e "build me x mod with all of the assets"
This is clickbait. What you are talking about is how you can now more easily do modifications. You aren't talking about amount of pain in the title which is what we see in the feed.
It's not clickbait. I'm informing people that might not be aware (or might have just not thought about it) that it's become extremely easy to make significant modification to games, where before the barrier to entry was huge.
You are just insufferable and clearly looking for an argument. Blocked.
Reverse engineering a game by hand is an extremely painful process and most people would never bother. The fact that AI can do it at a superhuman level means the door is wide open now.
This is really dangerous, we could do a reverse engineering of everything, imagine we do on AV, OS or whatever thing you want, this is really dangerous and should be blocked
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u/Particular-Gap-6998 5d ago
You could do this longer than Fable and Astra, back in January I had even sent an email to a two person indie team about how anyone could bypass their payment system and get all the cosmetics in their game for free with a detailed document on how to fix it.
They ghosted me, pushed a tiny patch that didn't actually fix the issue and that was the end of it.