So they were developing the game by sharing zips of their versions? OMG. There should be a tutorial of minimum Dev knowledge for wanna be new developers. They have very cool ideas, but the way they program…
For example Shadows of Doubt. Was running super bad last time I checked out. I think that too much accessibility to game Dev tools is lowering the quality of a lot of games (in resource hungry sense).
It is still in early access and optimising the game is their current goal according to the road map, though as the whole concept of the game is about simulating every NPC properly at all times it’s always going to be really heavy game to run.
And you are right about accessibility making resource hungry games more common - they allow indies to make projects and use concepts that would have been scrapped as technically non-viable by a publisher before. Shadows of Doubt started development back in 2015, which would have meant reducing the scope of the game until it ran on a PS4. Being indie, they could just do whatever instead, and now it’s going to be enough if they can make it run acceptably on a PS5.
the next dev, Hey this obscure feature probably doesn’t work, should I fix it… No, I’ll just patch “temporary-fix-don’t-use” and let the next guy fix it properly.
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.
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.
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.
Then tell me: what else could the reason be? Why make people deliberately think you’re stupid? What’s the advantage?
And yes, this is a thing that happens literally to thousands of people every day. Almost everyone has a “I didn’t make backups” story. Humans aren’t born perfect - they make mistakes and learn from them. How many doctoral theses do you think are lost every day due to missing backups? Or how much art, how much data in general?
Instead of assuming some evil genius agenda hiding behind their stupid stated reason, you could just try to accept that people make mistakes. But you surely don’t ever make any, so why would anyone else?
That would be a worthwhile idea if any evidence pointed towards it (e.g. any public documentation about legal communications).
Without any evidence, it’s a useless accusation for an explanation that:
has happened in many documented cases, both bigger studios as well as indies
happens to many people every day with similarly important data (just search for new people trying to recover their incredibly important data - it’s a very common occurrence)
is especially likely to happen to fresh developers, which they were
I can accuse you of any number of horrible things, and I’d have the same amount of evidence you have for your accusation. What would this add to the discussion?
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”.
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.”
You're welcome to try other methods but LLMs seem to be working best so far.
With a decompiler it should be pretty straightforward to automatically check for "hallucinations," the compiled code is still right there and you can compare the decompiled logic to the original.
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