2 ms·

Why wouldn't those be possible to reproduce?

Pannoniae 6d ago
"assign all these pointers to the correct types, a wrong guess leads to different COMDAT folding" "get the order of local variables in this function right, otherwise the register allocation doesn't match. Oh and there's 150 local variables just in this function, good luck trying them all" "Find out the translation unit boundaries exactly (assume there's no pdb otherwise this is trivial) and after doing so, figure out the order they were compiled in, otherwise it won't match" "brute force the compilation flags for the project and if you're done, also bruteforce it for the CRT or any other middleware which usually came prebuilt so it doesn't match the main game" Should I continue;)
- mitxela 6d ago
  Indeed it's a shitload of work. It's also possible and has been done. You don't have to only use global brute-force - you could also reverse engineer the compiler. The OOT/MM decomps achieved completeness without //COMPILERDIFF.
  - Pannoniae 6d ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not very well-versed in game decomp scenes) but aren't all those bytematched decomps from 90s or at the latest early 2000s games? They didn't have global optimisation (MSVC introduced it in VS .NET or 2003 I think and many games didn't use it until later) So these are mostly problems with more advanced compilers yk
    - dezgeg 5d ago
      Correct, N64 and PS1 era projects can essentially always be strictly tackled one function at a time. There are very minor things (like string literal sharing) where some earlier function can affect later function, but the workarounds are comparatively simple. On the other hand, I have heard even old MSVC is a nightmare. Various things are affected by hash table ordering (so the names of variables matter in some situations), stuff like order of #includes mattering, etc.
      - Pannoniae 5d ago
        Yuuuup exactly. I guess this is masked because old 90s games are often more culturally significant so people haven't found these problems yet but yes, these are serious challenges.

"assign all these pointers to the correct types, a wrong guess leads to different COMDAT folding" "get the order of local variables in this function right, otherwise the register allocation doesn't match. Oh and there's 150 local variables just in this function, good luck trying them all" "Find out the translation unit boundaries exactly (assume there's no pdb otherwise this is trivial) and after doing so, figure out the order they were compiled in, otherwise it won't match" "brute force the compilation flags for the project and if you're done, also bruteforce it for the CRT or any other middleware which usually came prebuilt so it doesn't match the main game" Should I continue;)

mitxela 6d ago
Indeed it's a shitload of work. It's also possible and has been done. You don't have to only use global brute-force - you could also reverse engineer the compiler. The OOT/MM decomps achieved completeness without //COMPILERDIFF.
- Pannoniae 6d ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not very well-versed in game decomp scenes) but aren't all those bytematched decomps from 90s or at the latest early 2000s games? They didn't have global optimisation (MSVC introduced it in VS .NET or 2003 I think and many games didn't use it until later) So these are mostly problems with more advanced compilers yk
  - dezgeg 5d ago
    Correct, N64 and PS1 era projects can essentially always be strictly tackled one function at a time. There are very minor things (like string literal sharing) where some earlier function can affect later function, but the workarounds are comparatively simple. On the other hand, I have heard even old MSVC is a nightmare. Various things are affected by hash table ordering (so the names of variables matter in some situations), stuff like order of #includes mattering, etc.
    - Pannoniae 5d ago
      Yuuuup exactly. I guess this is masked because old 90s games are often more culturally significant so people haven't found these problems yet but yes, these are serious challenges.