this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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So there are multiple sites&groups that pirate video games especially on PC. I was wondering if there are places on the internet where you find source code for games especially the highly modifiable ones like Half Life 2/Portal and Skyrim. Or groups that crack into the source code of games (or even software in general), not only for PC maybe PS, XBox or mobile too, and share it. I just wanted to see some code samples of games or their engines, maybe I get hooked into video game design. Shout out to Valve for sharing a lot about the creation of Half Life 1

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[–] backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone 45 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Everything is open source if you can read assembly

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Machine code tells you what it's doing. Source code tells you why.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Only if they wrote why in it though, plenty of people (unfortunately myself included) fail or forget to add meaningful comments or they let their comments go stale when making changes by forgetting to update them (I do it a lot too), and some people also use horrible function names that don't make any sense.

So it only really applies to source code intended to be released where care was made to ensure it would be readable, it might not apply for source code never intended to be public, such as stolen, leaked, or posthumously released. In this case the only real benefit is that it can be recompiled on different architectures provided there isn't a dependency issue preventing that.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

Source code without comments is still way easier to read than machine code.

And there are very likely comments anyways.

Multiple Devs will work on the same code for years and of course they need or at least appreciate comments.

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