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The compiler was never meant to be a source code obfuscating tool anyway, the real sea change is Copyright being ignored. I've always wanted Copyright to go away, but it's going away in a way different than anything I'd imagined and I don't know what to think about that.
The obvious upside is we can sort of return to a time when every game was openly moddable. 25 years ago almost every hot game was a mod of another game.
It's not really copyright that you want to go away. It's corporations exploiting the work of individuals. There are countries that have much saner, a lot more ethical laws around it.
The AI issue here is their theft, and since the theft is not addressed, it's going to get ugly, and the big game producers will just lock games behind networks , so unless you're online and likely paying a subscription, you ain't gonna be pLaying thaT game.
Copyright is going away in a way that only benefits AI companies. WE still get burned at the stake for downloading shit from limewire even if we're training our own AI models.
It's not like we need to individually train our own AI models, a few groups could do it and release for everybody else. Like Anna's Archive.
I appreciate that at least we are all reeling from the implications of it all.
I think that's a very interesting point about the compiler, companies have really leaned on that as a way to obfuscate code, some folks seem to think compiled is as good as encrypted? Just another lock on the door, I guess, and a free one at that.
I think it does make a ton of sense that an llm would be so capable at decompiling code... it's basically just translating? But having decompiled some stuff myself years ago, it's still sort of amazing to see such a tedious process automated.
Bleh, too many conflicting feelings... yes, let's hope we reclaim some bits of culture taken from us! And let's cross our fingers that copyright is destroyed in a manner that actually benefits people....
I think that’s a very interesting point about the compiler, companies have really leaned on that as a way to obfuscate code, some folks seem to think compiled is as good as encrypted? Just another lock on the door, I guess, and a free one at that.
Well, (depending on the language) compilation is a 100% lossy conversion. So when a game gets 'decompiled' with an LLM like this, they're not restoring the original code. It's just generating new code with the same behavior, which is functionally the same. People doing this generally wasn't considered infringement, but it's clear that having a machine automate it is a big problem. Even if we ignore the fact that the output of an LLM is legally tainted/grey area, the scale at which it can happen now means we need new laws to deal with it.
This is basically doing to software what the internet did to piracy. That led to the DMCA, which as shitty and corrupt as it is, at least succeeds at some of its main goals.
It's not LLM decompilation is LLM de-obfuscation
We have been able to de-compile pretty much anything for alomg while now, what's been harder is making sense of what comes out of it.
this right here.
the adobe suite re-release is a much bigger deal than just pirated software. it's the first time we commoners have been able to use the models they trained with our stolen content to steal something back, and it's glorious.
The two being conflated c o n s t a n t l y pisses me off
I don't think that's actually true. I think it's more just AI propaganda. Most of the so-called "advances" that I've seen advertised seem to be far less than they seem when you dig deeper, often relying heavily on previous, human reverse-engineering efforts or simply being injection points built into wrappers for the actual binary game code. It's just suddenly cool and polished looking because AI padded it out with a bunch of fragile and flaky filler code whose only purpose is to make it look finished and beautiful at first glance when it actually isn't. The typical AI gameplan, in other words.
Every single month another hidden advertisement for AI companies surface. This is another one.
Can we please just skip the middle-man and start open sourcing everything instead of burning all the world's resources to achieve the same goal?
Best I can do is ban software decompilation.
Oof I got a lot of conflicting thoughts on this. Going to need another coffee to mull this one over.
My reaction as well to seeing all of this.
There is noting awesome about what AI does.
It could fix your spelling, at least.
The irony!
No, kiddo. It’s apple’s enshitification that causes this. When they rolled the on-device autocorrect that used to be near perfect into an off-device AI based bullshit disaster- this is the result. I now have to spell-check and check for wrong autocorrections because AI has fucked that up too and it cannot be turned off or reverted.
So, thanks for helping prove my point.
I turned off autocorrect on my iphone at least a decade ago but left spellcheck on so I still get the red lines if I mess something up. It sounds like that could benefit you.
What's is the token cost to decompile one of these games? I want to fix a game breaking 'bug' in an old game are we talking $10s or $100s to make that happen?
No idea about AI costs, but there's many humans who would do it for free, if you let them know what the issue is.
That one specifically - the game is ruined by parking, you run out of space for car parks long before you really fill up the mountain.
The car parks have coach spaces, but the seem to be broken and never appear. Either fix coaches or remove parking completely.
Will look into it when I have some time next week.
Given it’s a game from 2004, it should be relatively easy to decompile, so if you’re the kind of person happy to tinker - it could be a great project to self-host and try to get done yourself?
That way the only cost is time, and a little bit of electricity.
I only just looked up some of the basic requirements, as it’s piqued my interest in trying to decompile something myself over the Christmas break!
I know a few games that are sorely out of date by active developers and the devs are always like "I don't have time" or "It's not that important" or "It's too hard."
And I'm like, why don't you release the code you prick, you don't care, so why are you still lording over it.
So this could be awesome.
Lol sounds like some of our internal teams.
They don't have time to support the things they built or to have people help them build it, but they refuse to make the repo internal so that others in the org can help them with it. Instead, they just act like bottlenecks.
Another exciting area is open firmware synths. specifically the $70 fm-1 (I think Pi based) is blowing up with synth engines/groove box apps. Its exciting new area for OSS. Its scary for closed synths.
Are these AI decompiled games any good? I heard the Adobe ones looked good but we're actually really slow and buggy
Most of them are really good. The Adobe ones aren't actually decompilations, they're just AI-generated apps that try to copy the same functionality which is why they're so buggy and unfinished. The AI decomps/recomps should be functionally the same as the original games, usually with some edits to uncap the framerate and make it work with higher resolutions.
I've been thinking about this a lot too, because of seeing all these decompilations (with all the implications that comes with, as you point out some of them), but also because my own "learning LLM tooling" project was reverse engineering Civ IV, and rereleasing in a 64 bit engine with more accessible controls at the expense of 3d (sort of like Unciv).
I did not do a decompilation, especially because the core of the game has restrictive-licensed source released, but i was able to build clean specs from that source, and then with as clean of context of possible, stage the production and testing of features. I honestly don't know how you'd prove a classic clean room implementation with LLMs (and definitely not in a one shot), and i can't really prove my implementation is clean either.
I really hate the direction of all this stuff (so so much), and i hate that my disabled ass feels compelled to learn such tools so I am able to feed myself. But I did try to have some good come out of it (generic reverse engineered specs, basic accessibility framework, game automation framework, and i definitely learned a lot, plus it does work pretty ok)
I haven't been able to figure out a way to release in a way that fits my ethical framework, without also resulting in people insulting me (which I don't have a lot of room for in my life right now). I'll happily take suggestions though!
I'd love for this to not be wasted effort, especially because of the accessibility enhancements for a beloved but proprietary game.
They already decompiled indiegames demo and used that to build a clone of it and ship it, faster than the indie dev can finish their game. It's definitely an awful situation for small indie dev because they not only have to compete with bigger budget, their peers, and the f2p market, now they have to compete with cloners
Maybe open source licenses are completely unenforceable now. Maybe critical software and hardware can be easily hacked into now, and we haven't realized just how bad it is yet. Maybe everything will have more invasive DRM on it soon. Who knows. We're about to find out in the next few months.
Oh my god, anything but DRM. It freaking sucks and only ruins experience to normal users
As some else discussed, apps where most infrastructure is on the server just for the sake to protect code might be popular. Which means even more reliance on the internet.
Not scary at all for open source games! Or open source software. What, AI os going to decompile linux and 1000 AD?
The only way I can see the industry of intellectual property - and hence all large-budget commercial games - surviving is if laws change to regard the efforts of AI analysis as breaching some of the established DMCA laws.
I’m sure we often regard those laws as horrendous, though I sometimes wonder if people would agree if they saw Epic Games publish “Meincraft” 3 days after Minecraft gets its first major news article, and leave Notch in the dust.
This is very conflicting.
I daily a macbook, and so games aren't that readily available. To be able to play something like the original Syndicate (1993, SNES and other platforms) or Shadow Hearts: Covenant (2004, PlayStation 2) on my mac would be awesome. I'm very much a patient gamer, so there are so many old titles I'd very, very happily play through again.
But there's no way this would be restricted to old, dead platform games.
AAA games now cost millions or even, according to GTA 6 rumours, over a billion to make. If a studio publishes a game, and a week later there's a free AI clone of it, then there is no more AAA games industry. Actually, that also follows for some of the awesome indie games I've loved and enjoyed. How can you make money selling copies of your game if there's a free, or massively undercut, version of it available? Obviously most gamers would like to support creators, but in this economy? They'd probably rather eat and pirate games.
Pirate.
P-AI-rate?
Pir-AI-te?
It means one of two likely pivots if you ask me: the resurgence of highly locked down consoles with hardware protecting the data, or - and this is the most likely path - devs will just resort to making online only games, where lots of the content is streamed in while playing (I mean assets, not the display output - though don't doubt the latter, if it ever becomes feasible enough I'd posit that devs would migrate to that as well).
Think a "live-events" driven game where every pre-determined period of time you download the assets for that period.
Fortnite-ification of gaming, basically. :(
I've always kept up on recomps and decomps of games I like to put on my Steam Deck, but recently it's been hard to do with so many coming out and of varying quality! Quiver Launcher has been really useful for keeping track, and it lists how much AI was used for the projects, too. I'm going to try out Super Mario Eclipse tonight.
I guess we will see big studios push gaming as a service again? I honestly wouldn't care too much since I haven't been interested in Triple A games for a while now. (except for some exceptions ofc) As long as they keep my indie games unaffected!!
Scary implications aside, video game decomps are so cool! I honestly feel like we have enough games to last humanity. And having them all in their best form possible is kinda cool, soon we can run all time classics and built our dream console out of an raspi 5, with mods keeping it fresh.
I fear this might be another push for live service shit or even game streaming. I absolutely like services like GeForceNow as an option to play games on less ideal hardware. But I wouldn’t want to be forced to that.
Could they do this to port vintage old mac games?