Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game Source Code Collection

archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 90 posts

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#61

Post by dleslie »

xingped wrote: post #37
jimminy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't go missing. Square had an institutional policy that had them deleting source once projects were mastered and shipped, through to the early 2000's. FFVII-FFIX, Parasite Eve and numerous other games lost their source. What's been recovered has been occasionally the code from contracted PC ports.

Why did they have such a policy? That seems crazy!

That was also their golden era for quality products.

I cannot claim to know why they did this, but my educated/experienced guess as a long-time game developer is that _someone_ thought it would be best for the teams not to rely upon existing projects when creating new ones.

Imagine if painters always started from their previous painting rather than a blank canvas; or if a home developer always started with prefabs of their previous home. You'd get American suburbs and Ikea prints.

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#62

Post by userbinator »

monocasa wrote: post #53
fireattack wrote: post #51

Something I want to ask for quite a while: what is the copyright status of Archive.org? Is it legal? I'm asking not just for this source code collection: they host lots of DOS and console games on their website, which I highly doubt are in public domain or under a free license. They also have lots of scans of some recent publishings (particularly in my mind, I knew they have plenty of Japanese manga magazines from th…

They're officially a library in California which gives them a ton of carte blanche wrt to copyright. As for the status of their particular actions, I think it's a lot of grey area.

I believe they also have a team of lawyers, which helps greatly too.

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#64

Post by abecedarius »

dleslie wrote: post #61
xingped wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they have such a policy? That seems crazy!

That was also their golden era for quality products. I cannot claim to know why they did this, but my educated/experienced guess as a long-time game developer is that _someone_ thought it would be best for the teams not to rely upon existing projects when creating new ones. Imagine if painters always started from their previous painting rather than a blank canvas; or if a home developer always started with prefabs of…

Imagine if we did this for operating systems. I want to believe.

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#65

Post by mntmoss »

borge wrote: post #43

Unrelated; but I always find myself drawn to game development, yet I have no desire to work in the industry. Does any other programmer feel the same, and do you know why?

I think I can sum it up in a Yogi-Berra-ism: The game industry is very industrialized. If you work on a commercial product, most of your effort goes towards making a product, and any specific details of the game are often a small part, one in a series of checklist features. And it's easy to dismiss assets when working on a little graphics demo, but the assets often take as much or more design insight than the code(which for most gameplay behaviors tends to boil down to finite state logic, timers, and lookup tables). What you most often get paid for as an industry employee is to churn out assets and simple behavioral scripts in quantity, so even though there are interesting problems at the top end of the field, you are probably not working on them for most production cycles, or only working on them for a short period.

As such, it's easy to tinker on a game and hyperfocus on a small aspect, but a different story to finish one in the way that most commercial games feel finished, both as software and in terms of filling in the blanks.

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#66

Post by girvo »

fireattack wrote: post #51

Something I want to ask for quite a while: what is the copyright status of Archive.org? Is it legal? I'm asking not just for this source code collection: they host lots of DOS and console games on their website, which I highly doubt are in public domain or under a free license. They also have lots of scans of some recent publishings (particularly in my mind, I knew they have plenty of Japanese manga magazines from th…

They also have a remarkable amount of music albums and ebooks that are available for download, for basically brand-new things, too!

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#67

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

efiecho wrote: post #16

I love the Internet Archive, but I absolutely hate the website redesign they made a few years back. Before navigation was so simple and sane, but unfortunately they had to update because the site was "too old" and this was during the "mobile trend" that was going on at the time, which resulted in infinite scrolling and other mobile stuff that makes using the website a pain, even after all these years.

I agree. I also think they need to redo the tagging/category system they currently have in place. It's super unintuitive and there are so many duplicate or useless tags.

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#68

Post by splatzone »

guiambros wrote: post #38

Gotta love Jason Scott and his work to preserve computer history. From the list: Leisure Suit Larry Source Code Reading Excerpt https://archive.org/details/Leisure_Suit_Larry_Source_Code_R...

I'm not sure I understand what he's doing here. Is he reading out the whole source code to the game as a performance art piece so he can share it without infringing copyright laws?

Re: Game Source Code Collection

#69

Post by flashman »

Bekwnn wrote: post #49
knodi123 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does any other programmer feel the same Of course. > and do you know why? Because games are fun, and programming is fun, and programming something that will be fun for other people is fun. But the games industry is crowded, and highly profit-optimized, and you just instinctively know that getting a tour of the budget sausage factory wouldn't bring a true sausage lover any significant pleasure.

The games industry being crowded is a bit of a myth, though initially breaking into it does present a barrier. Lots of studios seem hungry for anyone with experience. Though, a lot of the actually interesting projects are crowded. Which is a real concern if that's the only type you want to work on (I'm in that camp...) Like programming, once you have a few years under your belt, things really open up.

> Lots of studios seem hungry for anyone with experience.

That's because once someone has experience, they can 3x their salary outside the industry.

Post reply on HN