Funny story about Crash: Everybody around 30 years old in Slovakia knows Crash Bandicoot. In late 90s - early 00s there was a very popular TV show where you could call in and play the game with your phone (basically just left/right/jump) I spent hours watching it https://youtu.be/v3RYappcWZg
A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
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Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#62The games industry is so stinking bad at archival that it hurts. Very little consideration is paid to using architectures and build tools that can be replicated later. Source code becomes unavailable (as was the case here). Game logic is written using highly platform-specific code that's difficult to emulate. Source textures and other raw resources get thrown out. And not to diminish from the accomplishment of the te…
It is a problem that game development shares with other forms of mass-marketed art: film industry, tv, music... they are all pretty bad at conservation, and were downright atrocious until very recently (I’m sure you heard how the BBC lost the first few seasons of Dr Who — and they are an excellence for conservation in the field).
Simply put, the emphasis in creative industries is to continuously create (eh) new stuff, not revisiting the old. Couple that with inevitable financial pressures, add the cultural distortion of software development culture at large (where everything changes every year or so, and if you are not on the latest and greatest you are dead in the water) and you have a situation where conservation is the very last priority.
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#63Funny story about Crash: Everybody around 30 years old in Slovakia knows Crash Bandicoot. In late 90s - early 00s there was a very popular TV show where you could call in and play the game with your phone (basically just left/right/jump) I spent hours watching it https://youtu.be/v3RYappcWZg
Oh my. And they show a bunch of toy prizes. Did this cost money to call?
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#64Funny story about Crash: Everybody around 30 years old in Slovakia knows Crash Bandicoot. In late 90s - early 00s there was a very popular TV show where you could call in and play the game with your phone (basically just left/right/jump) I spent hours watching it https://youtu.be/v3RYappcWZg
Oh wow this is cool.
Is this real?
Like even though the players die a good deal, it still feels like they can play it pretty smoothly.
I’d love to know the system that got built out for this. I imagine it was detecting tones, but would love any more insight into all of that. An rpg game would have been a good way to overcome any timing issues games may introduce.
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#65Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#66Funny story about Crash: Everybody around 30 years old in Slovakia knows Crash Bandicoot. In late 90s - early 00s there was a very popular TV show where you could call in and play the game with your phone (basically just left/right/jump) I spent hours watching it https://youtu.be/v3RYappcWZg
Oh my. And they show a bunch of toy prizes. Did this cost money to call?
I think it was like regular domestic call and you could won playstation at the end of the month. But since it was super popular, it was crazy hard to get through, I tried, but lines was always busy :)
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Architecture is the last step in this process. The low hanging fruit is "do you still have your source code and original assets? Is any of it documented?" Nobody will ever know if the original code for Crash Bandicoot was written well or not, because in all likelyhood nobody has it anymore. And I don't think you can chock that up to, "well, developing games is hard." We can debate whether or not it's possible to rele…
> The sort of second problem I have with this is the idea that flops aren't worth archiving. So many game companies go out of business after a flopped game (hell, even seemingly successful companies like Telltale Games are going out of business) that I doubt anyone has the energy to care about archival in this instance. > Of course caring about archival makes developing games harder, just like caring about accessibil…
Besides, there are often no entities who can legally keep archives of the work done at a studio when it is closed down.
Publishers should institute a rule for their own sake that says that the deliverable must not only be the full game but also all source files in editable format, including proprietary tools as well as an image of a build server capable of producing a running product when follwing a documented sequence of instructions. But this will likely cause legal trouble when third party engines and tools are involved. I guess this also needs a cultural change in the wohle industry.
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#68They rebuilt a game in Unreal 4. So yeah from the ps1 era almost everything had to be redone from scratch. I fail to see the problem here. Did player expected them to package the optimized lisp virtual machine they had back then in UE4?
Reusing prtions of the gameplay code in a remaster can be feasible. Other remastering projects have managed to go further, although they had more favorable starting conditions. The remastered Full Throttle game is running the original SCUMM game logic without any changes. They instead extended the VM to perform on the fly asset swaps for the remastered artwork and sound.
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#69Funny story about Crash: Everybody around 30 years old in Slovakia knows Crash Bandicoot. In late 90s - early 00s there was a very popular TV show where you could call in and play the game with your phone (basically just left/right/jump) I spent hours watching it https://youtu.be/v3RYappcWZg
Oh wow this is cool. Is this real? Like even though the players die a good deal, it still feels like they can play it pretty smoothly. I’d love to know the system that got built out for this. I imagine it was detecting tones, but would love any more insight into all of that. An rpg game would have been a good way to overcome any timing issues games may introduce.
Yeah, but then it's not exciting.
Re: A remaster with no old code: Crash Bandicoot was rebuilt nearly from scratch
#70The games industry is so stinking bad at archival that it hurts. Very little consideration is paid to using architectures and build tools that can be replicated later. Source code becomes unavailable (as was the case here). Game logic is written using highly platform-specific code that's difficult to emulate. Source textures and other raw resources get thrown out. And not to diminish from the accomplishment of the te…
The systems we run on make it very hard. With emulation, the best way to run an old game is a final binary.
I wrote an iOS 3 game. I have a lovely git repository of code. Is fairly useless as apple won't give me either the OS or compiler I need to run the code.