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Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

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Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.

[dead]

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

My take was more along the lines of: it wouldn't be convincing enough, if anything it would be too clean and perfect.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#34
post #22

I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code. I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine. Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com a…

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher level approximation that matches the flow/logic/structure - but the code will never be anywhere near close to the original source code. I could write the same C++ program in 3 different ways and get identical assembly, how do you go back to the exact source? The answer is that you don't.

Here's the same simple program, written in 3 different ways, producing identical binary compatible code: https://godbolt.org/z/qWrc8fEnn

How does the AI know whether it should produce back the snippet #1, #2 or #3? It does not. It cannot.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#36
post #6

Maybe with the source code, I'd be able to figure out what the hell happened in the last ~2 hours of the game.

Kojima saw the writing on the wall so speak, and told us what the future held in a series of metaphors and dense monologues.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s, what, 25 years old? There have been many sequels, prequels, remastering. The economic benefits of this IP are largely exhausted; that it is now leaked to the commons isn’t an alarming thing.

The game just had an update to support the Switch 2 only 2 months ago. It is still being used commercially.

Konami willing, they'll drag the IP to their grave. Lest we forget MGS3's first remaster... for Pachinko parlors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsJ4QgBpQN8

Recompilation efforts raise the bar for future re-releases, and incentivize proper remaster efforts like MGS Delta instead of the half-assed Master collection. I would love to see Konami thrive as a company and get more people interested in MGS, but their recent re-releases don't deserve to be priced at $60. Their monopoly of the source code feels like an existential threat to both future preservation and high-quality MGS remakes, it's healthier for Konami to simply let it go at this point.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

Does the TP decomp use AI to achieve their speed?
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