That's correct - OpenRW is a from-scratch reimplementation of GTA3, while re3 is a manual decompilation that's capable of reproducing the original executable (or something very close to it). Both projects are very impressive in their own right.
When re3 went public, OpenRW archived their repository; when re3 was DMCA'd, OpenRW unarchived their repository; and when re3 was sued, OpenRW ceased development.
(This is based on my recollection from observing this two years ago - there may be other factors involved)
Bethesda has, in fact, taken issue with OpenMW in the past [0].
Bethesda at least had a specific reason for going after OpenMW, though. They’re okay with it now under “certain conditions” that I’m sure the OpenMW devs aren’t going to argue with.
Their main ask was that the OpenMW devs don’t advertise OpenMW as a way to play Morrowind on Android (or other platforms besides PC).
And there’s an understanding that OpenMW’s “intention” isn’t solely to be a way to play Morrowind, but also to implement a generic RPG engine and editor that uses Morrowind’s gameplay and file structure. For someone to make their own game with, not using any of Morrowind’s assets. (I’m not sure if any such game exists, though)
"And there’s an understanding that OpenMW’s “intention” isn’t solely to be a way to play Morrowind, but also to implement a generic RPG engine and editor that uses Morrowind’s gameplay and file structure. For someone to make their own game with, not using any of Morrowind’s assets. (I’m not sure if any such game exists, though)"
To be honest, every project of this kind claims that. And in reality, everyone knows 99% of usecases for such engine is to play the original game. Sometimes there are new IPs being created on such engine. For example recently there's been some "boomer shooters" coming out using engines which were made originally to play classic DOOM or Duke Nukem 3D. But such cases are rare.
Clean rooms protect from patent issues, but do little to protect against copyright or trademark actions. The fact that one creates totally new code from scratch means nothing if the end product is too similar to the existing copyrighted work.
> Clean-room design is useful as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent creation. However, because independent invention is not a defense against patents, clean-room designs typically cannot be used to circumvent patent restrictions.
In code, not end product. You can reverse engineer code all day, but your end product better not end up looking identical to the protected work. I could set a thousand AI machines in a clean room generating new song lyrics. Eventually one of them will randomly come up with identical lyrics to a Taylor Swift song. That doesn't mean I now own those lyrics free and clear. "Technically, I didn't copy" isn't a defense when you try to sell an identical product. It can be a defense in patent areas where one wants to argue prior art or obviousness.
You can't copyright the functionality of a software program. Copyright is a fixed expression. You can't copyright a song about heartbreak and you can't copyright the idea of a four function calculator implemented in a GUI.
You may be able to patent the functionality of a piece of software.
The point of the clean room practice is to avoid a literal line for line copy of the original software. It would be entirely legal to say, write a song from the perspective of Taylor Swift about her feeling sad and betrayed after a breakup.
But analogies are dicey because the law treats functional software differently from literary expression.
Precedent here is vTech reimplementing the Apple II BIOS and Phoenix reimplementing the IBM BIOS and Connectix selling a PlayStation emulator for a fraction of the price of a PlayStation.
Except if you are going for obviousness you want to start with people who haven't seen the patented material. You put them in the metaphorical clean room and then argue the patent invalid because some rando people came up with the same solution to the problem. And for prior art you need a group of "clean" people who were using the process/device prior to the patent, which is especially useful when dealing with trade secret material that, fearing a leak, a competitor is trying to patent. You need people clean of any taint from that competitor.
Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. Cir. 1992)
"Nintendo can show copying by proving that Atari made literal copies of the NES program. Alternatively, Nintendo can show copying by proving that Atari had access to the NES program and that Atari's work — the Rabbit program — is substantially similar to Nintendo's work in ideas and the expression of those ideas."
No, clean rooms are a mechanism that allows a team to avoid copyright infringement by ensuring that the developers have never seen the copyrighted code.
The code avoids copyright, if it is actually different. The end product doesn't if it is still similar to the copyrighted work. Use a computer to rewrite Harry Potter all you want, but if it comes up with the same book it doesn't matter how you got there.
That's not a clean room implementation. A clean room would be having a description for the game of quidditch (game rules are not copyrightable just like specifications for software) and then writing a background story to explain it without ever having read a single word of Harry Potter. If that comes out anywhere similar to the Harry Potter books I'd be utterly amazed.
>> If that comes out anywhere similar to the Harry Potter books I'd be utterly amazed.
Considering that "Harry Potter" is not an uncommon name in the UK (I've met two) nor is the concept of a wizard school, or riding broomsticks, or house teams, I suspect that AI today might be able to generate something that would get Rowling's attention.
Rowling has been sued multiple times for the similarity of Harry Potter to previous books using those themes. She won every time. The bar for copyright infringement is not "a single piece of the book is similar" or even "a one sentence summary of the two is similar."
"Clean room" reverse engineering basically has you with two completely separate groups of developers. One group will decompile and analyze the target software, and build a detailed specification of how it works. The second group, with legal, sworn documents that they have never seen even the machine code of the target software - uses those specifications to build the "clone".
To be fair to Bethesda, they provide all the tooling you would need to make your own Elder Scrolls game with Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, et al..
Modding a Bethesda game is literally getting into the innards of the game itself and changing or replacing bits in it as you please, at least until we get into hooking in DLLs which is a whole different story.
Of course publishers are going to keep these old IPs under lock and key, because they've now figured out they can slap new graphics on it every few years and re-sell it to us at full price.
Not really. No legal protection is able to stop an overzealous litigant from suing you. The real test is whether they win the case, not whether they can file one. Unfortunately, most people don't have the means to defend such a lawsuit, so they get bullied out of their legal rights.
These companies know very well these independent groups, even if it's on their legal bounds, can't afford a legal defense team and actively exploit that to abuse them away.
re3 is a very dubious legal case. They decompiled the game with debug symbols and then did a (aiui) non-clean room reimplementation of the code, based on the decompilation.
It is protected legal activity to decompile a binary and study the source.
It is protected legal activity to study some source code, describe it, and have someone who never saw the source reimplement the code described.
It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary.
re3 is somewhere between the latter two, and (again aiui from looking into it 2 years ago) they didn't have a clean room step.
It's probably a good thing no one will litigate it. It seems highly likely to be illegal and reasonably do. It would be a bad thing to spend money on.
> It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary.
But it is not straightforwardly illegal (according to Microsoft et al) to decompile source code, train an LLM on it, generate the source code, recompile it, and then distribute the recompiled binary.
One easy 947 quadrillion tensor-operations lifehack
"It is straightforwardly illegal to decompile source code, recompile it, and the distribute the recompiled binary."
According to what? If the rules are so poorly defined that way then maybe it's not a bad thing to disregard them.
Because simply decompiling source code and then recompiling it isn't a simple one-step thing in the way you suggest, not even close.
It's the distribution step that's illegal, since you don't own the original binary. If you can't distribute the original binary, why can you distribute a modified version of it?
If you wrote a bash script which decompiled and recompiled the original binary, that would be your property to distribute as you like
You are right, however it's likely that OpenRW was also impacted by Take-Two's actions towards Re3 given that its development also ceased around the same time.
I'm surprised there are no open source GTA 2 clones (either straight-up or just similar games of that style). The total topdown PoV with rotating sprites seems like it would be ideal for low/zero budget enthusiast projects.
I have been looking to play GTA2 for a long time - I have such good memories of it.
For any on mac who are looking - it is available for free from Porting Kit (which is a Wine-like platform). I am assuming they can install it for free since they're some sort of side project of GOG and I presume they have the original binary from when it was released for free
The trailer looks super cool. Kind of like a cross between the actual GTA2 and Crimsonland which sounds an awesome mixture. But their website appears dead indeed while all the download links Google can find lead right there :-(
Crimsonland! There's a blast from the past. There was a free v1, supposedly a tech demo, and it was the epithome of relaxing brainless blasting. Then a paid v2 came out, and I never saw v1 back. Bummer.
There is a video of a guy reviewing some of the code.
It’s quite readable. The game was much simpler back then, some special casing was made (eg Catalina copter). But it’s a cool look behind the scenes
Since you were in the industry, was RW the first big 3rd party engine?
I know it’s common now, and seems to have really taken off in the Wii/PS3/360 era. My understanding is it wasn’t in the PSX generation (at least early?).
It was everywhere in the 90s that I remember when I was a game dev. I don't know if you would call it a game engine? We just called it a 3D engine back then. Back then at least I only remember it doing the graphics, no physics, animation, sound, etc?
It must have started off as a purely software renderer as I can remember trying to compete with their published stats on tris/sec.
No? RW have/had the immense success as an engine used in more than a dozen commercial games (compared to idTech1/2/3), but it's usage explodes in 2001, with 18 titles, compared with 4 in 2000.
I'd love to see the Burnout games somehow remade and/or open sourced.
Looking into it, I found one instance of a reimplementation attempt[0], but it isn't clear to me how far along it is. There's some discussion of it here [1].
GTA3/VC/SA, Manhunt and Bully ran on RenderWare. They made their own engine for GTA4 (and also for their pingpong game and RDR1 iirc) and I "presume" the games since.
They also made their own engine for the other games you mentioned. RW is more of a rendering layer than anything else, it has no gameplay logic, scripting, audio logic associated with it.
Back when the name OpenRW was coined, there was a much more widespread belief that RenderWare was the engine GTA3 runs on. At some point people realised that's nonsense, GTA3 doesn't have an engine (all code was written specifically for GTA3), and so they had to come up with something that's not RenderWare related.
Did it really look that bad? There wasn't even a shadow underneath the character?
I always find it a bit sad when I see pictures of old games I used to play. My memory of them seems to automatically "upgrade" how they look to modern standards. Then when I see them it's shocking and disappointing to see how wrong my memory is. I'd rather leave it as a memory.
Somewhat sadly it seems memory works that way. It's as if over time it gets compressed and generalized in some way.
Maybe it depends on the person, but for me personally I have difficulties imagining what my parents looked like when they were 20 years younger, apart from reciting some specific photos.
When someone I see daily gains or loses weight slowly over time it's hard to remember what they looked like in the past.
I had a good mental picture of my now deceased cat in my head, but when I got a new cat of with a similar color and fur, the mental image of my previous cat slowly got replaced with how my new cat looks.
LCD's are crap when it comes to colors. The new HDR monitors seem to be better, but playing old DOS and Windows games on an (non HDR) monitor is a pain.
I am very courious how many colors from those 16 milion of 24 bits are LCDs able to reproduce. My LCD seems to be able sometimg less than 16 bits (65535).
Good LCDs (i.e. native 8-bit IPS) have been available for a very long time. No-compromise gaming IPS's (120hz+, backlight strobing) - for more than 7 years. Decent 60hz ones (and even 76hz - 2209WA with overdrive) - for far, far longer. Yes, there's still the IPS glow, A-TW polarizer-equipped panels are almost impossible to look up in the first place. Yes, the black level is still pretty bad, unless you have a stacked matrix reference Sony or something. Yes, cheap 16-bit-with-bad-dithering TN less-than-sRGB-gamut LCDs are not great, but so were the el cheapo shadow mask CRTs.
Yes, but my cheap LCD monitors I use for work have endured I reckon at least 3 years of continuous operation over the space of 7 years. What will an OLED that costs probably 5x as much look like after that much time?
It's strange, even though the graphics of San Andreas definitely don't look good, this somehow looks worse to me. It's like smoothing out the outdated models and making them higher resolution makes them seem worse. Not blaming the developers of this, just surprised that a much stronger engine ends up looking worse somehow, maybe it's just the initial shock?
* Fidelity level (in terms of resolution, color amount and similar) needs to match with the amount of information within drawing. One example of this are some of the games during transition from EGA to VGA which allowed to use more colors. Just slapping a color gradient on everything doesn't necessarily look better than more stylized look carefully using a limited color pallet.
* Inconsistent quality level. While some of the assets are much higher resolution, not all of them are. This makes the older assets look worse compared to everything being equally low resolution. The mismatch can be caused not only by asset quality level but also lighting techniques.On hand you have sharp high resolution shadows on the other there are still some low quality textures and geometry.
* Higher resolution textures makes it easier to notice bad texture tiling and low resolution geometry. With a high resolution textures perfectly projected on low polygon it's much easier to tell how blocky they are and where the edges are, compared to using more blurry textures.
It's most likely because the game seems to use the textures from an existing installation. You can't just enlarge textures and have them look the same.
I'm sure they could do some AI upscaling, but that probably wouldn't improve the situation much. GSG tried that for the Definitive Edition, and look how that went.
It would be interesting to see a new texture pack made for it, which focuses less on nostalgia and more on fidelity.
I'm honestly shocked how game companies can refuse free money by remastering old popular titles. And when they do actually do it, they do it so cheaply that the resulting product is just godawful.
Case in point: Warcraft 3 [1]. This remaster was not only awful technically but Blizzrad changed the ToS on third-party maps so they owned all the IP because they didn't want a repeat of the Dota fiasco where Dota 2 sprange from a WC3 map and Blizzard basically lost the MOBA war.
Rock Star not so long ago released an awful remaster of the GTA3 trilogy [2]. These games are beloved. It's hard to believe they could screw up such an easy lay up but they did.
There seems to be an all too common thread of outsourcing to third-party contractors on the cheap, little oversight, no internal accountability, limited oversight and honestly not really caring.
But as we see people write emulators to play dead games on dead platforms. People remaster existing games largely for free. It's crazy to drop the ball so hard on something with such a huge inbuilt market.
I don’t think Blizzard/Rockstar’s scenario necessarily applies here, Frank Cifladi has a GDC talk[1] about how the financial argument for remastering older IP can prove tricky. The enthusiast might not be happy with a bare bones, economically-sound port, so it can be challenging to market to them.
Digital Eclipse gets around it by making nicer ports on the cheap, but I think a long-term solution would be a low-cost way for rights holders to keep older games in circulation without effort.
Have they really changed the ToS that much? My understanding was that by EULA the content you create through Warcraft 3 World Editor always belonged to Blizzard and Reforged hasn't really changed much in that aspect.
On the other hand, a lot of custom maps for Warcraft 3 were based on external IPs (Dragonball Z maps etc) so it's not something Blizzard can claim anyway.
Even when transitioning to Dota 2 they had to purge some of the more obvious IP things that existed in Dota 1, such as the sorceress character named "Lina Inverse" became "Lina".
It wasn’t for a while, they released a “definitive edition” which is available. They took the old versions down somewhat prematurely before releasing the remasters. A small number of people got some attention being disproportionally upset about this.
This minimizes things a bit. The definitive editions got torn apart for being ugly and poorly developed. It was a better experience to use the originals and mod them in many cases. This original version is still not available and people are still upset about it. Looks like the DE version of GTAIII currently has a 6 out of 10 on steam so it probably hasn’t been improved since release.
I have played the DE version of GTA 3 (in fact I just finished) and it wasn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be. In fact I would say it's a better experience than the originals for those who haven't played them. Of all the bugs I've experienced, almost all of them were in the original release, which I played extensively.
It's best to ignore youtubers and generally disagreeable nerds from reddit and all those places. They feed on hate.
> I have played the DE version of GTA 3 (in fact I just finished) and it wasn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be. In fact I would say it's a better experience than the originals for those who haven't played them. Of all the bugs I've experienced, almost all of them were in the original release, which I played extensively. It's best to ignore youtubers and generally disagreeable nerds from reddit and all those places. They feed on hate.
While I don't disagree with your experience at all of it being better than the originals, that is unfortunately just part of the issue here. The background is that Take Two has been very litigious, and a number of high-quality mods are no longer relevant due to their actions.
I may be misremembering the details but iirc there was a very high quality GTA4 graphics mod that essentially gave the game "modern" graphics that too was forced to stop due to legal issues(to say nothing of the GTA3/VC etc mods). GTA 5 loading times were very high until a single guy fixed their shitty code with a mod.
Take Two isn't just poorly managed or have poor code quality (which they do), they are also hostile to users wanting to modify their game. A good bit of the criticism here isn't specific to the game itself (which for eg may be fine once it loads) but rather their behaviour.
considering all of the moral hand-wringing over the content of the GTA games there's some sort of deep irony over the fact that the developer is apparently not super ethical.
or maybe it's not irony, but the opposite of irony. maybe it's totally predictable and shouldn't take anyone by surprise at all.
To be fair, even though I disagree with Rockstar on removing them from the store, you can still play the originals if you already owned them on Steam. Unlike the recent scandal with Assassins Creed where they removed it from your Steam library.
> Steam removed games that people legitimately purchased from their personal libraries?
The sad reality is that you purchased a license under terms that allow them to do whatever they want- it’s not really your personal library. Unless a government were to pass a law and fine them about it nothing will happen- it’s what you agreed to when you use services like Steam.
I still have them in my library. I haven’t tried playing it recently but Vice City and San Andreas both play fine on my steam deck as the PC version and as emulated PS2 games. If the PC versions work with proton today then should they be able to run as long as proton is still supported?
Hm... it's up for me? If you just tried cloning, I linked directly to the web view of the VC branch, since that's what they asked for. This is the clone link https://git.robbyzambito.me/mirror/re3.git
Hmm, just checked and it seems that it doesn't work when I'm connecting through some Mullvad VPN exits, but works when I disconnect. Oh well. I assume you have something like fail2ban.
I have not cleaned it up for release or anything, so it's a bit messy, but feel free to use it under the licence terms of cgit (GPLv2.0-only) and if you don't mind, put an attribution somewhere, like at least at the top of the CSS file.
EDIT: You will also need this in your <head>, otherwise you won't have a mobile-friendly layout:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199879
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640