Jak 2 Playable with OpenGOAL • Hacker News Board

Re: Jak 2 Playable with OpenGOAL

#11

Post by johnnyanmac » Sun, Jul 02, 2023, 3:40 AM UTC

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #2

i wish i could have been a fly on the wall at naughty dog during the development of these games. or better yet, i wish andy gavin would get so unbelievably bored that he would brain dump every last detail he remembers about designing and implementing goal, or share the source. it’s tragic that knowledge and experience will vanish

I am intrigued why other games never tried to make a similar solution to GOAL. I read interviews with GOAL and heard how designers could edit properties on a running build in real time.

Some 2D centric engines have scripting languages to do similar feats, but Im guessing the complexity of games simply outstripped the ability to get tight iteration times.

Re: Jak 2 Playable with OpenGOAL

#12

Post by davexunit » Sun, Jul 02, 2023, 4:13 AM UTC

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #2

i wish i could have been a fly on the wall at naughty dog during the development of these games. or better yet, i wish andy gavin would get so unbelievably bored that he would brain dump every last detail he remembers about designing and implementing goal, or share the source. it’s tragic that knowledge and experience will vanish

Yeah he dumped a fair bit about GOOL, the precursor to GOAL for Crash Bandicoot, but not a peep about GOAL. Funny to see this on HN because I was just looking into all of this yesterday. I wish these old games could get a source release so we could just see the magic. PS1/PS2 era Naughty Dog and Insomniac were on another level. The decompiled GOAL code that's available is neat but it clearly is the code after macro expansion and potentially other passes have been done so it's no substitute for the original source.

Re: Jak 2 Playable with OpenGOAL

#13

Post by phant0mas » Sun, Jul 02, 2023, 7:24 AM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #12

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #2

i wish i could have been a fly on the wall at naughty dog during the development of these games. or better yet, i wish andy gavin would get so unbelievably bored that he would brain dump every last detail he remembers about designing and implementing goal, or share the source. it’s tragic that knowledge and experience will vanish

Yeah he dumped a fair bit about GOOL, the precursor to GOAL for Crash Bandicoot, but not a peep about GOAL. Funny to see this on HN because I was just looking into all of this yesterday. I wish these old games could get a source release so we could just see the magic. PS1/PS2 era Naughty Dog and Insomniac were on another level. The decompiled GOAL code that's available is neat but it clearly is the code after macro e…

I think around the time of Jak 1 development they were acquired by Sony. As long as Sony doesn't shutdown the project, it's good enough!

Re: Jak 2 Playable with OpenGOAL

#14

Post by causality0 » Sun, Jul 02, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #10

causality0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that would be incredible. I've been waiting almost two decades to play Daxter without the stupid-ass design decision to make "up" on the slide pad be slightly to the side of "straight forward" in the game.

That change seems like it would be pretty straightforward to implement in the input handling code of an emulator.

You would think, but nobody's done it. Maybe fixing it that way breaks direction functionality somewhere else, like aiming or menu-ing. For the life of me I have never been able to figure out why the devs did that.