Porting a game?

[neobrain]

(08-22-2013, 06:30 AM)isamu Wrote: Sounds plausible but can I ask where you got the 5 Million dollar USD figure? That is highly exaggerated IMO. I mean, there are several kickstarter games that are launched and developed by only a two or three man team, with startup a sum of less a couple hundred thousand dollars(USD) or so. See The 90's Arcade racer:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/896834116/the-90s-arcade-racer

Did you just compare the development costs of "the 90s arcade racer" with those of AAA titles? o_o

[delroth]

FWIW, in the past I've worked on porting/reimplementing parts of games to PC, and yes, it's hard. For example, http://code.delroth.net/cscript-interpreter is a VM that runs scripts from Tales of Symphonia 2 (and incidentally Tales of Graces, but that wasn't the goal when I started). It took me about 6 months to reverse engineer the VM itself, and that's not including reversing all the syscalls (not done).

If that interests you, I have some notes about the RE process: http://delroth.net/slides/interpreter-re.pdf

[xemnas]

Regarding my estimation, I don't think it's exaggerated at all. When you finished a first-rate game, did you look at the credits? Do you think how much cost to spend with that many people involved? A cost of reimplementing could be less because there is no cost for graphics design, sound tracks, plot, etc. provided that you can extract the assets from the game. Nevertheless, if you want to hire some group to do this with 5 million USD, the development cost must be less than that for them to get profit from this project.

[lamedude]

If you clean room reverse engineered the code and didn't distribute any copyrighted assets it would be legal. The amount of man years required to do that though you would be better off just doing a spiritual successor.

[delroth]

Some people did that and succeeded though: CorsixTH, OpenTTD, OpenMW (in progress).

[lamedude]

OpenMW is an ambitious one, but having documentation helps. Most console games won't have that luxury.

[AnyOldName3]

Also, aren't all of Morrowind's scripts stored either non-compiled, or just partially compiled? I know if you download the creation kit for Skyrim you get the source code for all the vanilla scripts. If you know all the code a VM will get passed, and know what's supposed to happen, that gets a lot of the hard part out the way.

[lamedude]

If there are no bugs/undocumented features, but that would only affect mods.