Aren't those links about a completely different project with a completely different name?
Aren't those links about a completely different project with a completely different name?
That's correct - OpenRW is a from-scratch reimplementation of GTA3, while re3 is a manual decompilation that's capable of reproducing the original executable (or something very close to it). Both projects are very impressive in their own right.
When re3 went public, OpenRW archived their repository; when re3 was DMCA'd, OpenRW unarchived their repository; and when re3 was sued, OpenRW ceased development.
(This is based on my recollection from observing this two years ago - there may be other factors involved)
Very sad to see.
OpenMW is a very similar project for a game of the same vintage - Morrowind. Still in active development (last commit 1 hour ago as of writing).
To think Bethesda would be fine with openMW, but rockstar had to shut down openRW.
Openmw is a clean room implementation. Bethesda could throw a legal fit regardless but it would be indefensible for them to do so.
Clean rooms protect from patent issues, but do little to protect against copyright or trademark actions. The fact that one creates totally new code from scratch means nothing if the end product is too similar to the existing copyrighted work.
No, clean rooms are a mechanism that allows a team to avoid copyright infringement by ensuring that the developers have never seen the copyrighted code.
The code avoids copyright, if it is actually different. The end product doesn't if it is still similar to the copyrighted work. Use a computer to rewrite Harry Potter all you want, but if it comes up with the same book it doesn't matter how you got there.
That's not a clean room implementation. A clean room would be having a description for the game of quidditch (game rules are not copyrightable just like specifications for software) and then writing a background story to explain it without ever having read a single word of Harry Potter. If that comes out anywhere similar to the Harry Potter books I'd be utterly amazed.
>> If that comes out anywhere similar to the Harry Potter books I'd be utterly amazed.
Considering that "Harry Potter" is not an uncommon name in the UK (I've met two) nor is the concept of a wizard school, or riding broomsticks, or house teams, I suspect that AI today might be able to generate something that would get Rowling's attention.
Rowling has been sued multiple times for the similarity of Harry Potter to previous books using those themes. She won every time. The bar for copyright infringement is not "a single piece of the book is similar" or even "a one sentence summary of the two is similar."
In Sony v Connectix a judge found that software designed for compatibility deserved less protection than literary works.
That's literally the exact opposite of reality:
> Clean-room design is useful as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent creation. However, because independent invention is not a defense against patents, clean-room designs typically cannot be used to circumvent patent restrictions.
In code, not end product. You can reverse engineer code all day, but your end product better not end up looking identical to the protected work. I could set a thousand AI machines in a clean room generating new song lyrics. Eventually one of them will randomly come up with identical lyrics to a Taylor Swift song. That doesn't mean I now own those lyrics free and clear. "Technically, I didn't copy" isn't a defense when you try to sell an identical product. It can be a defense in patent areas where one wants to argue prior art or obviousness.
I'm just pointing out that your statement was 100% incorrect in every single possible setting.
A clean room is NEVER a possible defense for patents and it is sometimes a possible defense for copyright.
Except if you are going for obviousness you want to start with people who haven't seen the patented material. You put them in the metaphorical clean room and then argue the patent invalid because some rando people came up with the same solution to the problem. And for prior art you need a group of "clean" people who were using the process/device prior to the patent, which is especially useful when dealing with trade secret material that, fearing a leak, a competitor is trying to patent. You need people clean of any taint from that competitor.
You can't copyright the functionality of a software program. Copyright is a fixed expression. You can't copyright a song about heartbreak and you can't copyright the idea of a four function calculator implemented in a GUI.
You may be able to patent the functionality of a piece of software.
The point of the clean room practice is to avoid a literal line for line copy of the original software. It would be entirely legal to say, write a song from the perspective of Taylor Swift about her feeling sad and betrayed after a breakup.
But analogies are dicey because the law treats functional software differently from literary expression.
Precedent here is vTech reimplementing the Apple II BIOS and Phoenix reimplementing the IBM BIOS and Connectix selling a PlayStation emulator for a fraction of the price of a PlayStation.
You’re 180 degrees backwards.
Copyright infringement requires copying.
Patent infringement does not require copying.
There's a famous case on this exact issue.
Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. Cir. 1992)
"Nintendo can show copying by proving that Atari made literal copies of the NES program. Alternatively, Nintendo can show copying by proving that Atari had access to the NES program and that Atari's work — the Rabbit program — is substantially similar to Nintendo's work in ideas and the expression of those ideas."
They can still take you to court for a cost which is negligible to them, but not to OpenMW developers.
... In countries with broken legal systems.
... i.e. all of them.
What does clean room mean in this context? Never decompiling the target?
"Clean room" reverse engineering basically has you with two completely separate groups of developers. One group will decompile and analyze the target software, and build a detailed specification of how it works. The second group, with legal, sworn documents that they have never seen even the machine code of the target software - uses those specifications to build the "clone".
Usually clean room mean those writing the code and people who decompiling are different people. So code is written against specification.
So no it's unlikely to actually be fully clean room project, but written from scratch.
To be fair to Bethesda, they provide all the tooling you would need to make your own Elder Scrolls game with Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, et al..
Modding a Bethesda game is literally getting into the innards of the game itself and changing or replacing bits in it as you please, at least until we get into hooking in DLLs which is a whole different story.
OpenMW is a brand new engine though, built from scratch.
I might be confusing it with the project that seeks to remaster Morrowind in Skyrim, then.
Yeah the modding community is pretty insane.
There's also "Skyrim, Home of the Nords" which is an effort to re-create pre-Skyrim (the game) lore about Skyrim... in Morrowind.
Bethesda has, in fact, taken issue with OpenMW in the past [0].
Bethesda at least had a specific reason for going after OpenMW, though. They’re okay with it now under “certain conditions” that I’m sure the OpenMW devs aren’t going to argue with.
Their main ask was that the OpenMW devs don’t advertise OpenMW as a way to play Morrowind on Android (or other platforms besides PC).
And there’s an understanding that OpenMW’s “intention” isn’t solely to be a way to play Morrowind, but also to implement a generic RPG engine and editor that uses Morrowind’s gameplay and file structure. For someone to make their own game with, not using any of Morrowind’s assets. (I’m not sure if any such game exists, though)
[0]: https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Bethesda_Emails
"And there’s an understanding that OpenMW’s “intention” isn’t solely to be a way to play Morrowind, but also to implement a generic RPG engine and editor that uses Morrowind’s gameplay and file structure. For someone to make their own game with, not using any of Morrowind’s assets. (I’m not sure if any such game exists, though)"
To be honest, every project of this kind claims that. And in reality, everyone knows 99% of usecases for such engine is to play the original game. Sometimes there are new IPs being created on such engine. For example recently there's been some "boomer shooters" coming out using engines which were made originally to play classic DOOM or Duke Nukem 3D. But such cases are rare.
>when re3 was sued
The day reverse-engineering legal protections failed.
re3 is a very dubious legal case. They decompiled the game with debug symbols and then did a (aiui) non-clean room reimplementation of the code, based on the decompilation.
It is protected legal activity to decompile a binary and study the source.
It is protected legal activity to study some source code, describe it, and have someone who never saw the source reimplement the code described.
It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary.
re3 is somewhere between the latter two, and (again aiui from looking into it 2 years ago) they didn't have a clean room step.
It's probably a good thing no one will litigate it. It seems highly likely to be illegal and reasonably do. It would be a bad thing to spend money on.
"It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary."
According to what? If the rules are so poorly defined that way then maybe it's not a bad thing to disregard them. Because simply decompiling source code and then recompiling it isn't a simple one-step thing in the way you suggest, not even close.
Next you will suggest that stealing original artwork and laundering copyright through generative art ML systems is not illegal...
Well, you wouldn't steal a car /s
Well, you wouldn't steal a car /s
false equivalence
It's the distribution step that's illegal, since you don't own the original binary. If you can't distribute the original binary, why can you distribute a modified version of it?
If you wrote a bash script which decompiled and recompiled the original binary, that would be your property to distribute as you like
Decompilation is also illegal in broken countries (which is most of them)
I find this hard to believe..
> It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary.
But it is not straightforwardly illegal (according to Microsoft et al) to decompile source code, train an LLM on it, generate the source code, recompile it, and then distribute the recompiled binary.
One easy 947 quadrillion tensor-operations lifehack
Not really. No legal protection is able to stop an overzealous litigant from suing you. The real test is whether they win the case, not whether they can file one. Unfortunately, most people don't have the means to defend such a lawsuit, so they get bullied out of their legal rights.
This
These companies know very well these independent groups, even if it's on their legal bounds, can't afford a legal defense team and actively exploit that to abuse them away.
Of course publishers are going to keep these old IPs under lock and key, because they've now figured out they can slap new graphics on it every few years and re-sell it to us at full price.
Worth noting that in case of the lawsuit they settled, with terms likely being "don't do it again".
https://www.pcgamer.com/take-two-dismisses-lawsuit-against-g...
You are right, however it's likely that OpenRW was also impacted by Take-Two's actions towards Re3 given that its development also ceased around the same time.
Despite being called OpenRW they never tell you where the name comes from, only that it’s an attempt to write the engine from scratch with clean code.
But why RW? Did the GTA games run on RenderWare?
This is one gem from the project, a partial reimplementation of RenderWare: https://github.com/aap/librw
This is from re3, not OpenRW.
librw started long before re3.
I would love to see the first few Burnout games given the modern re-implementation treatment, but EA would probably behave the same way as Take2.
I'd love to see the Burnout games somehow remade and/or open sourced.
Looking into it, I found one instance of a reimplementation attempt[0], but it isn't clear to me how far along it is. There's some discussion of it here [1].
[0]: https://github.com/reburndev/reburn3
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/REGames/comments/15ymbtq/an_open_so...
I think the GTA 3 family of GTA games did, yes. They were PlayStation 2 games first, and RenderWare was relatively common for PS2 games.
Source: worked in game dev using RenderWare on PS2 back then
Since you were in the industry, was RW the first big 3rd party engine?
I know it’s common now, and seems to have really taken off in the Wii/PS3/360 era. My understanding is it wasn’t in the PSX generation (at least early?).
It was everywhere in the 90s that I remember when I was a game dev. I don't know if you would call it a game engine? We just called it a 3D engine back then. Back then at least I only remember it doing the graphics, no physics, animation, sound, etc?
It must have started off as a purely software renderer as I can remember trying to compete with their published stats on tris/sec.
> RW the first big 3rd party engine
RW is RenderWare, it's not a game engine.
> really taken off in the Wii/PS3/360 era
No? RW have/had the immense success as an engine used in more than a dozen commercial games (compared to idTech1/2/3), but it's usage explodes in 2001, with 18 titles, compared with 4 in 2000.
> PSX generation
Too early.
It's "Open ReWrite". That's what the description of the Github repository says.
Yeah but that’s clearly a backronym.
Back when the name OpenRW was coined, there was a much more widespread belief that RenderWare was the engine GTA3 runs on. At some point people realised that's nonsense, GTA3 doesn't have an engine (all code was written specifically for GTA3), and so they had to come up with something that's not RenderWare related.
GTA3/VC/SA, Manhunt and Bully ran on RenderWare. They made their own engine for GTA4 (and also for their pingpong game and RDR1 iirc) and I "presume" the games since.
> Bully
Just a heads up that a Bully sequel (trilogy?) is in the works:
https://www.xfire.com/ex-rockstar-games-employee-leaks-bully...
They also made their own engine for the other games you mentioned. RW is more of a rendering layer than anything else, it has no gameplay logic, scripting, audio logic associated with it.
rewrite
Yes, the early 3D Grand Theft Auto games (III, Vice City, and San Andreas) ran on RenderWare. [0]
I'm surprised there are no open source GTA 2 clones (either straight-up or just similar games of that style). The total topdown PoV with rotating sprites seems like it would be ideal for low/zero budget enthusiast projects.
There was "Greedy Car Thieves" but I can't seem to find a working official website, probably dead.
The trailer looks super cool. Kind of like a cross between the actual GTA2 and Crimsonland which sounds an awesome mixture. But their website appears dead indeed while all the download links Google can find lead right there :-(
It is still available as Street Arena on steam.
Crimsonland! There's a blast from the past. There was a free v1, supposedly a tech demo, and it was the epithome of relaxing brainless blasting. Then a paid v2 came out, and I never saw v1 back. Bummer.
A lot of needless explosions, but very cool nonetheless
Yeah GTA2 was one of the most fun games I've ever played. Sadly it isn't even available on GOG, let alone open source...
GTA1 and GTA2 were released for free as Rockstar Classics and you should be able to find a copy on the Internet Archive, if not on Rockstar. Cheers!
Wow. Thank you. I didn't know.
They gave GTA2 away for free officially at some point, which might have reduced a desire for it. That's my only guess.
I have been looking to play GTA2 for a long time - I have such good memories of it.
For any on mac who are looking - it is available for free from Porting Kit (which is a Wine-like platform). I am assuming they can install it for free since they're some sort of side project of GOG and I presume they have the original binary from when it was released for free
So presumably anyone else with a Win system could get it from GOG (actually looks like you can get it here - https://gta.com.ua/rockstargames-classics-free-download.phtm... )
There is newer one battle Royale and multiplayer I can't remember the name. It's on steam came out in the last couple of years.
GTA2 was a LAN party favourite.
You are so so so right. I've only ever seen a few out there.
There's Retro City Rampage (which also has a DOS version) and Shakedown Hawaii.
This is an open source game from my childhood which is somewhat similar: https://github.com/suomipelit/ultimatetapankaikki/
"GTA 3 is no longer available on the steam store"
It wasn’t for a while, they released a “definitive edition” which is available. They took the old versions down somewhat prematurely before releasing the remasters. A small number of people got some attention being disproportionally upset about this.
To be fair, even though I disagree with Rockstar on removing them from the store, you can still play the originals if you already owned them on Steam. Unlike the recent scandal with Assassins Creed where they removed it from your Steam library.
> Unlike the recent scandal with Assassins Creed where they removed it from your Steam library.
Do you have a link with more information? Steam removed games that people legitimately purchased from their personal libraries?
> Steam removed games that people legitimately purchased from their personal libraries?
The sad reality is that you purchased a license under terms that allow them to do whatever they want- it’s not really your personal library. Unless a government were to pass a law and fine them about it nothing will happen- it’s what you agreed to when you use services like Steam.
Another reason to keep backups.
Heres a HN thread on it:
I still have them in my library. I haven’t tried playing it recently but Vice City and San Andreas both play fine on my steam deck as the PC version and as emulated PS2 games. If the PC versions work with proton today then should they be able to run as long as proton is still supported?
> Unlike the recent scandal with Assassins Creed where they removed it from your Steam library.
The desire the "purchase" games decreases with each passing day.
This minimizes things a bit. The definitive editions got torn apart for being ugly and poorly developed. It was a better experience to use the originals and mod them in many cases. This original version is still not available and people are still upset about it. Looks like the DE version of GTAIII currently has a 6 out of 10 on steam so it probably hasn’t been improved since release.
I have played the DE version of GTA 3 (in fact I just finished) and it wasn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be. In fact I would say it's a better experience than the originals for those who haven't played them. Of all the bugs I've experienced, almost all of them were in the original release, which I played extensively.
It's best to ignore youtubers and generally disagreeable nerds from reddit and all those places. They feed on hate.
> I have played the DE version of GTA 3 (in fact I just finished) and it wasn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be. In fact I would say it's a better experience than the originals for those who haven't played them. Of all the bugs I've experienced, almost all of them were in the original release, which I played extensively. It's best to ignore youtubers and generally disagreeable nerds from reddit and all those places. They feed on hate.
While I don't disagree with your experience at all of it being better than the originals, that is unfortunately just part of the issue here. The background is that Take Two has been very litigious, and a number of high-quality mods are no longer relevant due to their actions.
I may be misremembering the details but iirc there was a very high quality GTA4 graphics mod that essentially gave the game "modern" graphics that too was forced to stop due to legal issues(to say nothing of the GTA3/VC etc mods). GTA 5 loading times were very high until a single guy fixed their shitty code with a mod.
Take Two isn't just poorly managed or have poor code quality (which they do), they are also hostile to users wanting to modify their game. A good bit of the criticism here isn't specific to the game itself (which for eg may be fine once it loads) but rather their behaviour.
considering all of the moral hand-wringing over the content of the GTA games there's some sort of deep irony over the fact that the developer is apparently not super ethical.
or maybe it's not irony, but the opposite of irony. maybe it's totally predictable and shouldn't take anyone by surprise at all.
I know they took out this reference, probably because they didn't know what it was for:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...
Does anyone have a mirror of ReVC project?
Seems to be down.
Here is my mirror, it should have all the commits: https://git.dawidpotocki.com/mirror/re3/
Is this a fork of cgit? Do you have the source? It's lovely :)
Edit: I see, it's just some CSS. New question: Is it FOSS?
Yep, just some CSS.
I have not cleaned it up for release or anything, so it's a bit messy, but feel free to use it under the licence terms of cgit (GPLv2.0-only) and if you don't mind, put an attribution somewhere, like at least at the top of the CSS file.
EDIT: You will also need this in your <head>, otherwise you won't have a mobile-friendly layout:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
class BiualStyle(Style):
background_color = "#000000"
highlight_color = "#222222"
default_style = "#cccccc"
styles = {
Token: "var(--code-cyan)",
Whitespace: "",
Comment: "var(--code-blue)",
Comment.Preproc: "",
Comment.Special: "var(--code-red)",
Comment.Hashbang: "var(--code-magenta)",
Keyword: "var(--code-yellow)",
Keyword.Declaration: "var(--code-green)",
Keyword.Namespace: "var(--code-magenta)",
Keyword.Pseudo: "",
Keyword.Type: "var(--code-magenta)",
Operator: "var(--code-yellow)",
Operator.Word: "var(--code-yellow)",
Name: "",
Name.Class: "var(--code-cyan)",
Name.Builtin: "var(--magenta)",
Name.Exception: "var(--code-green)",
Name.Variable: "var(--code-cyan)",
String: "var(--code-red)",
Number: "var(--code-magenta)",
Generic.Heading: "var(--code-green)",
Generic.Subheading: "var(--code-magenta)",
Generic.Deleted: "var(--code-red)",
Generic.Inserted: "var(--code-green)",
Generic.Error: "var(--code-red)",
Generic.Emph: "italic",
Generic.Strong: "bold",
Generic.Prompt: "bold var(--code-blue)",
Generic.Output: "var(--code-gray)",
Generic.Traceback: "var(--code-blue)",
Error: "border:var(--code-red)"
}Thanks a lot!
Hm... it's up for me? If you just tried cloning, I linked directly to the web view of the VC branch, since that's what they asked for. This is the clone link https://git.robbyzambito.me/mirror/re3.git
Thanks for your mirror though
Hmm, just checked and it seems that it doesn't work when I'm connecting through some Mullvad VPN exits, but works when I disconnect. Oh well. I assume you have something like fail2ban.
Does it have any significant changes/improvements compared to the original version? Does it compile “easily”?
Ah, nvm, it's all mentioned in the README: https://git.robbyzambito.me/mirror/re3.git/tree/README.md?h=...
Did it really look that bad? There wasn't even a shadow underneath the character?
I always find it a bit sad when I see pictures of old games I used to play. My memory of them seems to automatically "upgrade" how they look to modern standards. Then when I see them it's shocking and disappointing to see how wrong my memory is. I'd rather leave it as a memory.
LCD's are crap when it comes to colors. The new HDR monitors seem to be better, but playing old DOS and Windows games on an (non HDR) monitor is a pain.
I am very courious how many colors from those 16 milion of 24 bits are LCDs able to reproduce. My LCD seems to be able sometimg less than 16 bits (65535).
Good LCDs (i.e. native 8-bit IPS) have been available for a very long time. No-compromise gaming IPS's (120hz+, backlight strobing) - for more than 7 years. Decent 60hz ones (and even 76hz - 2209WA with overdrive) - for far, far longer. Yes, there's still the IPS glow, A-TW polarizer-equipped panels are almost impossible to look up in the first place. Yes, the black level is still pretty bad, unless you have a stacked matrix reference Sony or something. Yes, cheap 16-bit-with-bad-dithering TN less-than-sRGB-gamut LCDs are not great, but so were the el cheapo shadow mask CRTs.
Great OLED screens are on the market now, too. They look absolutely incredible; once you go OLED, you don't go back :)
Yes, but my cheap LCD monitors I use for work have endured I reckon at least 3 years of continuous operation over the space of 7 years. What will an OLED that costs probably 5x as much look like after that much time?
Somewhat sadly it seems memory works that way. It's as if over time it gets compressed and generalized in some way.
Maybe it depends on the person, but for me personally I have difficulties imagining what my parents looked like when they were 20 years younger, apart from reciting some specific photos.
When someone I see daily gains or loses weight slowly over time it's hard to remember what they looked like in the past.
I had a good mental picture of my now deceased cat in my head, but when I got a new cat of with a similar color and fur, the mental image of my previous cat slowly got replaced with how my new cat looks.
All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ.
Wrong game
Oh shoot, you're right!
Though there is a train following mission in GTA3 too!
San Andreas in Unity, if anyone is interested. You can't do anything more than walk around, drive, and shoot though.
It's strange, even though the graphics of San Andreas definitely don't look good, this somehow looks worse to me. It's like smoothing out the outdated models and making them higher resolution makes them seem worse. Not blaming the developers of this, just surprised that a much stronger engine ends up looking worse somehow, maybe it's just the initial shock?
It's most likely because the game seems to use the textures from an existing installation. You can't just enlarge textures and have them look the same.
I'm sure they could do some AI upscaling, but that probably wouldn't improve the situation much. GSG tried that for the Definitive Edition, and look how that went.
It would be interesting to see a new texture pack made for it, which focuses less on nostalgia and more on fidelity.
I can think of a couple reasons.
* Fidelity level (in terms of resolution, color amount and similar) needs to match with the amount of information within drawing. One example of this are some of the games during transition from EGA to VGA which allowed to use more colors. Just slapping a color gradient on everything doesn't necessarily look better than more stylized look carefully using a limited color pallet.
* Inconsistent quality level. While some of the assets are much higher resolution, not all of them are. This makes the older assets look worse compared to everything being equally low resolution. The mismatch can be caused not only by asset quality level but also lighting techniques.On hand you have sharp high resolution shadows on the other there are still some low quality textures and geometry.
* Higher resolution textures makes it easier to notice bad texture tiling and low resolution geometry. With a high resolution textures perfectly projected on low polygon it's much easier to tell how blocky they are and where the edges are, compared to using more blurry textures.
To save everyone the trouble – the last commit is 2 years old.
Around the time re3 got public interest.
Specifically, shortly after re3 was done and got public attention - i.e. compiled to exe and no longer required the original gta3.exe.
I'm honestly shocked how game companies can refuse free money by remastering old popular titles. And when they do actually do it, they do it so cheaply that the resulting product is just godawful.
Case in point: Warcraft 3 [1]. This remaster was not only awful technically but Blizzrad changed the ToS on third-party maps so they owned all the IP because they didn't want a repeat of the Dota fiasco where Dota 2 sprange from a WC3 map and Blizzard basically lost the MOBA war.
Rock Star not so long ago released an awful remaster of the GTA3 trilogy [2]. These games are beloved. It's hard to believe they could screw up such an easy lay up but they did.
There seems to be an all too common thread of outsourcing to third-party contractors on the cheap, little oversight, no internal accountability, limited oversight and honestly not really caring.
But as we see people write emulators to play dead games on dead platforms. People remaster existing games largely for free. It's crazy to drop the ball so hard on something with such a huge inbuilt market.
[1]: https://www.resetera.com/threads/i-still-feel-absolutely-awf...
[2]: https://screenrant.com/gta-trilogy-definitive-edition-remast...
Have they really changed the ToS that much? My understanding was that by EULA the content you create through Warcraft 3 World Editor always belonged to Blizzard and Reforged hasn't really changed much in that aspect.
On the other hand, a lot of custom maps for Warcraft 3 were based on external IPs (Dragonball Z maps etc) so it's not something Blizzard can claim anyway.
Even when transitioning to Dota 2 they had to purge some of the more obvious IP things that existed in Dota 1, such as the sorceress character named "Lina Inverse" became "Lina".
I don’t think Blizzard/Rockstar’s scenario necessarily applies here, Frank Cifladi has a GDC talk[1] about how the financial argument for remastering older IP can prove tricky. The enthusiast might not be happy with a bare bones, economically-sound port, so it can be challenging to market to them.
Digital Eclipse gets around it by making nicer ports on the cheap, but I think a long-term solution would be a low-cost way for rights holders to keep older games in circulation without effort.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N3KhMOk_6HE&t=538s&pp=ygUMR3Rh...
There is a video of a guy reviewing some of the code. It’s quite readable. The game was much simpler back then, some special casing was made (eg Catalina copter). But it’s a cool look behind the scenes
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SebVNodMV4Q&pp=ygUjR1RBIGRldmV...
This one was very enjoyable, too. It was an ex-Vice City developer reviewing the re3 source code.
He's actually reviewing re3 which was the project DMCA'd by R* and involved manual decompilation rather than a complete reimplementation.
It's an interesting video to watch to get his perspective though.
>In its current state it is not possible to complete the game using OpenRW, or make any significant progress through the game.
Plus last commit was 2 years ago.
why even post this?
it gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
There is a similar project for Morrowind called OpenMW. It runs great on Linux.
So many better games, people go for the game that can be used as example of a failed society.
It's worth pointing out that this project has not seen active development for a couple of years, since Take-Two sued the developers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199879
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640