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Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

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Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#171

Post by graphe »

Retr0id wrote: post #169
graphe wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how it works? I read a bit here. https://wololo.net/2024/01/10/it-appears-team-xecuter-are-ba... it seems you can use different game certs to make it launch.

Each physical cart has a unique certificate, signed by a private key held by Nintendo. That certificate is verified locally by the console, against a public key in the firmware. Without CFW, you have no way to bypass that signature verification. In short, the flashcart works by making a full clone of the cart, cert and all. The console doesn't know it's not talking to an original game. That is, until Nintendo's serve…

Thank you for your explanation. I thought homebrew would be possible if you have a legit game, have homebrew then just use the cert to play it and make the game console think it's a game. I think if it like a GameShark, you load it with a cert then you switch the game.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#172

Post by gjsman-1000 »

danShumway wrote: post #148
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t prohibited under the license, but you are prohibited under the contract you agreed to, to get that code. For example, imagine a company hired you to write a library they want to later release as GPL. They still might have rules that you can’t release that library except under certain conditions. The real purpose of the MIT license is not free sharing with the world in this case - it’s so that developers do…

> You aren’t prohibited under the license, but you are prohibited under the contract you agreed to, to get that code. This doesn't make sense to me. MIT is a license to share and modify code. If another license can supersede that and remove rights granted by the actual license, then what prevents any company from releasing their code under MIT and then adding a shrinkwrap EULA that prevents looking at the code or mod…

Do you have free speech? Yes, it's your constitutional right.

But then you become a lawyer and you get some clients. Do you have the freedom to say whatever you want about your client's case, in public? No, you don't. You have given up your right to exercise free speech on those specific issues.

Another example. You have free speech to criticize McDonalds. You can mock them all you like. But let's say, you sign a contract to become a PR Spokesman for them. You then mock them publicly, on their official Twitter account. Can you be sued? Yes you can, and your constitutional right will not defend you.

Contracts are not licenses. Contracts can give licenses, licenses cannot give contracts. In this case, while you are receiving an MIT-licensed work, you are under contract that you will not share this information with anyone. Contracts always supersede licenses. If you do give that information to anyone in violation of your contract, while the license itself means that the creator of the Godot port will not sue you, Nintendo may sue you for the breach because you are under contract with them.

> If that wasn't the case, nothing would prevent a company from taking 3rd-party GPL code, building on top of it, releasing the product as GPL, but then adding additional contractual requirements to get access to their product that prevented anyone from looking at or sharing that code.

Congratulations, that's actually the law right now at a certain level, and what the furor over Red Hat Enterprise Linux was about. Red Hat decided to release open-source code under a contract that prohibits distribution. The initial response was to have companies break that contract, but try to remain anonymous, as the receivers of that GPL code would be theoretically safe. This was later deemed too risky, unworkable, and antagonizing; which is why Alma Linux and others have given up on that approach, and just aim for general bug-for-bug compatibility from scratch.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#173

Post by Retr0id »

graphe wrote: post #171
Retr0id wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each physical cart has a unique certificate, signed by a private key held by Nintendo. That certificate is verified locally by the console, against a public key in the firmware. Without CFW, you have no way to bypass that signature verification. In short, the flashcart works by making a full clone of the cart, cert and all. The console doesn't know it's not talking to an original game. That is, until Nintendo's serve…

Thank you for your explanation. I thought homebrew would be possible if you have a legit game, have homebrew then just use the cert to play it and make the game console think it's a game. I think if it like a GameShark, you load it with a cert then you switch the game.

Everything is signed, there's a chain of trust.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#175

Post by kmeisthax »

djmips wrote: post #144
kmeisthax wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strictness isn't there to keep garbage off the console store. That was just Nintendo revisionism. It's there because they need to know who to sue into a crater if you use developer mode to play pirated games.

I'm not sure you can use developer mode to play pirate games but it's not out of reach I suppose. Seems like a lot of work.

So, on most systems nowadays, retail software is encrypted and signed with entirely different PKI from developer applications. You would have to obtain cracked retail software first, then resign it with your own keys. This is how you run pirated iOS apps now, which is only possible because Apple hands out developer keys like candy. It'd at least be theoretically possible to do the same thing with a console devkit and decrypted games.

This is also narrowly considering only the example of someone trying to pirate new releases for that given system. More broadly, the console manufacturers have class solidarity[0], and don't want you doing anything that might be a copyright violation - even if you aren't hurting them or their developers specifically. You could port over an emulator and steal older games, you could modify new games (even ones you own), or you could make fan games. They want absolutely none of that on their hardware, and the only way to guarantee that is to make sure everyone who touches a devkit is wearing contractual handcuffs.

[0] Vaguely Marxist term for "these people are in the same social situation, therefore their interests are aligned"

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#176

Post by kmeisthax »

derefr wrote: post #162
kmeisthax wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern console devkits don't boot unless they have an Internet connection through the manufacturer's VPN, so buying devkits on eBay is useless now. They started doing this with the Xbox One. The reason why they did this is because of leakers. The Xbox 360's devkits connected to a separate Xbox Live network called PartnerNet, and anyone who wanted to test Xbox Live functionality - e.g. buying games or DLC - needed to…

Interesting! Has anyone gone to the effort to jailbreak the devkits + reimplement open versions of any network services the devkit depends on?

No, you're better off jailbreaking retail units.

That being said, most retail jailbreaks also let you jailbreak development consoles anyway. Development and retail hardware is very close to one another, they differ purely in what debug interfaces are available and what DRM gets enforced.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#177

Post by wk_end »

mardifoufs wrote: post #164
SXX wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indie gamedev company co-founder here: 14 people team, 2 games released + next in progress and signed with publisher. There are few big reasons why you can't just go and use Godot. Publishers. Basically 3 years ago when we made our first game together using Godot it was main reason why we were rejected by some publishers. Now situation can be slightly different, but many publishers still have in-house pipeline that o…

Unity was already massive by its 5-7th year. It had tons and tons of released games at that stage. Not sure exactly why that hasn't happened with Godot but i guess it might still happen, just a bit more slowly.

Biggest reason is that there weren't any decent competitors around as Unity built momentum. At the time it was Unity, a (difficult-to-work-with, difficult-to-gain-access-to, expensive) proprietary engine, or something vastly less feature-filled like Game Maker.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#178

Post by Thaxll »

tombert wrote: post #78

I know "asymptotically close to zero" about game development and the like, so if someone who works in this space could answer this I'd be appreciative: what, if anything, would make you use Unity or Unreal instead of Godot for making a game today? This isn't meant as a passive aggressive question to push some kind of open source narrative, but a genuine curiosity. Since I know basically nothing about the industry, I'…

You're taking the problem in the wrong order, it's more why would I use Godot which is vastly inferior to unreal and unity.

Now what is inferior, well performance is bad, they have their own scripting language which no serious dev would want to use, they have c# integration but it's not on part. Assets, tooling is also inferior, you can't make console game with Godot etc...

Networking wise Godot has not much either.

That's the difference between an open source engine with not much investment and 100's $ put into unreal and unity.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#179

Post by wmf »

danShumway wrote: post #141

> License: The source code is distributed under the MIT License, offering broad usage and modification rights. I might be missing something, but how did they manage to swing this? I thought proprietary NDAs around the Switch's API were the biggest holdups preventing Switch support from being added to Godot itself. I would have assumed this would be free but would require signing some kind of source-available license…

It's not vanilla MIT but some kind of MIT + NDA.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#180

Post by wmf »

danShumway wrote: post #148
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t prohibited under the license, but you are prohibited under the contract you agreed to, to get that code. For example, imagine a company hired you to write a library they want to later release as GPL. They still might have rules that you can’t release that library except under certain conditions. The real purpose of the MIT license is not free sharing with the world in this case - it’s so that developers do…

> You aren’t prohibited under the license, but you are prohibited under the contract you agreed to, to get that code. This doesn't make sense to me. MIT is a license to share and modify code. If another license can supersede that and remove rights granted by the actual license, then what prevents any company from releasing their code under MIT and then adding a shrinkwrap EULA that prevents looking at the code or mod…

what prevents any company from releasing their code under MIT and then adding a shrinkwrap EULA that prevents looking at the code or modifying it? The license wouldn't mean anything.

This has been an intentional feature of MIT/BSD licenses all along. Tons of proprietary products are built on MIT/BSD code.

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