QL was our first game and although it was a big disappointment losing the source code it was lost at a time before we understood decompiler and auto-formatter software.
The time at which the source code was lost is irrelevant for decompilation, decompilation uses the binary files. Those are the files that are out there being played right now.
Until recently decompilers tended to produce rough and useless code for the most part, but I'm looking forward to seeing what modern LLMs will bring to decompilation. They could be trained specifically for the task.
You’re missing the point of the comment you’re replying to, which is that the devs don’t understand decompilers RIGHT NOW, and it’s formatted in a tongue in cheek way similar to their current comment about VCS
I’m all for AI, but there’s gotta be a better way for machines to become intelligent. Not just “training and predicting without any thought in the process.”
I think you’re reading more into the statement than is there. Their studio was founded the same year this game released, with only one of the two founders described as a programmer. I’m pretty sure they mean “we” as in “the two guys that founded the studio”.
Why? I was the programming director of a game dev club in university and so many people didn’t know how to use git and I had to teach them. The number of university or early hobby projects that have been lost is probably essentially uncountable.
lmao your brain is so fried that you cannot understand that people making a game for the first time 10 years ago might’ve not understood the importance of proper version control and backup.
My favourite game off all time, Homeworld, got remastered years ago. Its fantastic follow-up, cataclysm could not be included in the renaster. The reason? Lost source code. No backups, studio got bought, diveded, merged, shut down and nobody thoight it prudent to safeguard that what they bought; the code and ip.
Might be personal bias, but I see “you’re inexperienced” as “learn some more and come back later” and “you’re incompetent” as “get out of my sight and never come back”.
To be fair to the developers, they do elaborate a little further in the comments:
Hey everyone, We appreciate the sudden enthusiasm for our game. When we launched it in 2015 into early access and 2016 into full, we were at the vanguard of asymmetrical games. It was exciting, but it was also our first step down the Dunning Kruger curve. QL has bugs that we cannot fix, shaky net code and overall sloppy design. We left the game up for this long so that players who had friends that wanted to play, could still get a copy. However it has been 9 years with minimal to no activity. So we felt it was right to remove it now.
I don't know enough about this game or it's community to comment much, but the devs don't seem to be bad guys - seems like a story of naive developers making a mistake, but doing their best for their community with what they had. For a niche online game with no DLCs, 9 years is hardly a bad run.
Probably depends on the background as well. They could have hardware running (multiplayer server) that gets so little activity that there is no benefit and only loses them money.
It also doesn’t look like the game has steam integration.
Then why not release the binaries for running such server? I’m sure a group of people could figure out how to decompile and make a change so the game attempts to connect to a different master host
Well, i mean i would be all for that but in reality it might not be that easy. It could rely on dependencies that are proprietary that cannot be shipped or provided with the project.
It could alone be that the connection is hard coded in the game itself so instead of just booting up the server and being able to play you would now have to do something to the game itself too that it finds your server. Nothing really that cannot be addressed, I mean people could do that with ragnarok online private servers but not something your normal gamer could do.
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