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Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

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Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#41

Post by RetroSpark »

SifJar wrote: post #39
huffmsa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo has the source code for most everything they've made. You don't become a 150 year old company without fastidious bookkeeping. Now if they'd just pay the emulator people a bucket of cash to make officially supported emulators that run on the Switch and all future hardware (without having to rebuy the titles), they'd make so much money they'll be around for the next 300 years.

> pay the emulator people a bucket of cash > without having to rebuy the titles How does this lead to making "so much money"? Purely from hardware sales?

I assume the suggestion isn't that Nintendo should give the games away. Just that if you buy a game on the Switch you shouldn't have to buy it again when you upgrade to their next console.

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#42

Post by Smithalicious »

Waterluvian wrote: post #2

I love these discoveries but I dislike the guaranteed follow-up by game conspiracy theorists who don’t appreciate how games are built. For any game, the odds are that it has unused assets or partially completed systems that hit the cutting room floor.

I've always considered these theories to be a genre of speculative fiction, somewhere in between creepypasta and a real theory. I thought it was generally understood that these things are more for the sake of entertainment than real investigation?

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#44

Post by MaximumMadness »

noodlesUK wrote: post #24

It’s so interesting to see what didn’t quite make it into such culturally important works. It’s a shame that for most classic games, the source code will never be released. I wish that after a while, and things were no longer commercially viable, code would be released. I get that’s kinda how copyright was meant to work with books and similar, but the code is never published, so nobody has it to preserve it for poste…

Many newer games are still built on top of that source code to a certain degree as well. I remember recently reading about how Bungie built the engine for Halo 1 and pieces of it have been used in every single game in the series since then.

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#45

Post by ClikeX »

madsohm wrote: post #30
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

I love these discoveries but I dislike the guaranteed follow-up by game conspiracy theorists who don’t appreciate how games are built. For any game, the odds are that it has unused assets or partially completed systems that hit the cutting room floor.

Please tell us more. Why are the assets not simply deleted when the developers realize it's not needed, especially on a N64 cartridge to save space?

I'm going on a limb here and assume the codebase wasn't as easy to manage back then. They missed a lot of fancy tooling to review it.

Also, as a developer (game and webdev), there's tons of leftover stuff. Most of which is assets. For games, the artists would've put them in the codebase at some point. For web, it's usually just forgotten when removing features.

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#46

Post by ColeyG »

Waterluvian wrote: post #2

I love these discoveries but I dislike the guaranteed follow-up by game conspiracy theorists who don’t appreciate how games are built. For any game, the odds are that it has unused assets or partially completed systems that hit the cutting room floor.

Right, this is something I've been talking about on other forums as well. I can almost see the thumbnails already circling Luigi's model with a shocked expression....

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#47

Post by ColeyG »

wirthjason wrote: post #23
dylan604 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

# Nah, commenting out is better in case decisions are reversed. # Once it's deleted, there's no way to get it back. # Version control isn't reliable.

# JIRA: L-2401 # Dev-only code. # Fixme: delete before release.

Most software isn't released anymore. Most times pipelines will gobble up your changes and ship immediately after review. I don't see how this would work for your team.

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

dylan604 wrote: post #21
briga wrote: post #7

Delete your unused code, people

# Nah, commenting out is better in case decisions are reversed. # Once it's deleted, there's no way to get it back. # Version control isn't reliable.

> Nah, commenting out is better in case decisions are reversed.

But worse in all other cases. If your decision process is such that that weighs in favor of cluttering your codebase with dead code, that's a problem.

And, actually, since the commented code almost certainly isn't being maintained and uncommented for testing as the rest of the codebase evolved, it's probably not even better in the case that decisions are reversed.

> Once it's deleted, there's no way to get it back

There's rewriting it in light of the actual requirements and current state of the rest of the code base.

> Version control isn't reliable.

Neither is unmaintained, commented-out code dragged along with your code base. If your VCS isn't the vastly more reliable of those two things, that's a problem you ought to address.

(Of course, at the time of Mario 64, the calculus might well have favored a different approach.)

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#49

Post by huffmsa »

RetroSpark wrote: post #41
SifJar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay the emulator people a bucket of cash > without having to rebuy the titles How does this lead to making "so much money"? Purely from hardware sales?

I assume the suggestion isn't that Nintendo should give the games away. Just that if you buy a game on the Switch you shouldn't have to buy it again when you upgrade to their next console.

Correct.

I won't buy virtual console stuff because it won't carry over.

I'd happily buy their whole catalog if I knew it was mine forever.

Re: Luigi Model found in Mario 64 source code

#50

Post by dylan604 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
dylan604 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

# Nah, commenting out is better in case decisions are reversed. # Once it's deleted, there's no way to get it back. # Version control isn't reliable.

> Nah, commenting out is better in case decisions are reversed. But worse in all other cases. If your decision process is such that that weighs in favor of cluttering your codebase with dead code, that's a problem. And, actually, since the commented code almost certainly isn't being maintained and uncommented for testing as the rest of the codebase evolved, it's probably not even better in the case that decisions are…

Man, you took that comment seriously. Doh!
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