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It's not a decompiled copy. A decompiled copy is not useful for anything, as it would have to be recompiled. State of the art decompiles produce incomprehensibl

It's not a decompiled copy. A decompiled copy is not useful for anything, as it would have to be recompiled. State of the art decompiles produce incomprehensible garbage, rarely even possible to compile. In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel. I don't know about fair use, but if the defendants are not in the US, then the concept of fair use is not even necessarily in play.

Hamuko 5y ago
>I don't know about fair use, but if the defendants are not in the US, then the concept of fair use is not even necessarily in play. The suit is filed in California so I imagine that Fair Use, and the rest of the US legal code, is in play.
klodolph 5y ago
It's decompiled and cleaned up. I have personally gone through the commit history of this project and read the source code. It is absolutely clear that this is based on the output of decompilers like IDA Pro and Ghidra. You can see how variables are not defined as ordinary variables, but as hard-coded addresses which are then cast to pointers of the appropriate type. The code is littered with unnecessary casts that are not typical of human programmers, but typical for how you get decompiled code to run. Modern decompilers are a lot better than you might think. Additionally, old compilers produced code that is easier to decompile than you might think. But, here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question: uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockHours = *(uint8*)0x95CDA6; uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockMinutes = *(uint8*)0x95CDC8; uint16 &CClock::ms_nGameClockSeconds = *(uint16*)0x95CC7C; That does not look like code any human would write, if they were reimplementing a game. It looks like the code someone would write if they were cleaning up the output of a decompiler and assigning names to variables and functions which previously looked like "loc_95CC7C" or something similar. Once you figure out the purpose of a function or variable, you hit a button and rename it. > In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel. It's like someone transcribing the screenplay for a movie. The stage directions are going to be different, but it's still the same movie.
- Const-me 5y ago
  > here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question. Do you have a link? I have downloaded all 3 branches (master, miami and lcs), searched for these constants and got nothing. The code you have copy-pasted crashes on Windows with 100% guarantee. You see, lower 2GB (or optionally 1GB with the /3GB kernel switch) of address space is reserved for the OS kernel.
  - GranPC 5y ago
    It looks like that's code from a very old commit. re3 was initially built by injecting code into the regular GTA 3 binary, and slowly replacing methods inside the game with drop-in replacements that functionally worked the same. When enough of these replacements were built, it was then converted to a standalone binary.
    - Const-me 5y ago
      Indeed, git format-patch found them. The magic numbers were present in the very first commit, and removed on 17 Apr 2020. The readme of the first commit said this: The aim of this project is to reverse GTA III for PC by replacing parts of the game one by one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus such that we have a working game at all times. Gonna be interesting to see the 2400 years old thought experiment tested in a modern US court :-)
      - rhn_mk1 5y ago
        If they were caught distributing un-replaced code, the court will have an easier job sidestepping the question.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    It's probably an old commit

Hamuko 5y ago

>I don't know about fair use, but if the defendants are not in the US, then the concept of fair use is not even necessarily in play. The suit is filed in California so I imagine that Fair Use, and the rest of the US legal code, is in play.

klodolph 5y ago

It's decompiled and cleaned up. I have personally gone through the commit history of this project and read the source code. It is absolutely clear that this is based on the output of decompilers like IDA Pro and Ghidra. You can see how variables are not defined as ordinary variables, but as hard-coded addresses which are then cast to pointers of the appropriate type. The code is littered with unnecessary casts that are not typical of human programmers, but typical for how you get decompiled code to run. Modern decompilers are a lot better than you might think. Additionally, old compilers produced code that is easier to decompile than you might think. But, here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question: uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockHours = *(uint8*)0x95CDA6; uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockMinutes = *(uint8*)0x95CDC8; uint16 &CClock::ms_nGameClockSeconds = *(uint16*)0x95CC7C; That does not look like code any human would write, if they were reimplementing a game. It looks like the code someone would write if they were cleaning up the output of a decompiler and assigning names to variables and functions which previously looked like "loc_95CC7C" or something similar. Once you figure out the purpose of a function or variable, you hit a button and rename it. > In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel. It's like someone transcribing the screenplay for a movie. The stage directions are going to be different, but it's still the same movie.

Const-me 5y ago
> here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question. Do you have a link? I have downloaded all 3 branches (master, miami and lcs), searched for these constants and got nothing. The code you have copy-pasted crashes on Windows with 100% guarantee. You see, lower 2GB (or optionally 1GB with the /3GB kernel switch) of address space is reserved for the OS kernel.
- GranPC 5y ago
  It looks like that's code from a very old commit. re3 was initially built by injecting code into the regular GTA 3 binary, and slowly replacing methods inside the game with drop-in replacements that functionally worked the same. When enough of these replacements were built, it was then converted to a standalone binary.
  - Const-me 5y ago
    Indeed, git format-patch found them. The magic numbers were present in the very first commit, and removed on 17 Apr 2020. The readme of the first commit said this: The aim of this project is to reverse GTA III for PC by replacing parts of the game one by one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus such that we have a working game at all times. Gonna be interesting to see the 2400 years old thought experiment tested in a modern US court :-)
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      If they were caught distributing un-replaced code, the court will have an easier job sidestepping the question.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  It's probably an old commit