[HN Gopher] The Making of Side 7: Gundam Evolution private serve...
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The Making of Side 7: Gundam Evolution private server project
Author : Gamemaster1379
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-04-15 19:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (1379.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (1379.tech)
| squigz wrote:
| "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading
| or linkbait; don't editorialize."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| gnabgib wrote:
| Article title & h1: _The Making of Side 7 | GUNDAM EVOLUTION
| Private Server Project_ (it looks like op is Matthew Stanley)
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! We've changed the title now. (Submitted title was "If
| you put server code in your live-service game client, expect
| private servers")
| Danieru wrote:
| Unreal's highlevel of packaing and managing assets for years
| meant modding was locked off. Unity games often shipped on PC
| with loose files and hacking C# broke after each update but at
| least was an option.
|
| Over time the modding community has leverage this high level by
| building unreal native tools. The net result has been the same
| sort of cross tool use we saw with Gamebryo. Back with Gamebryo
| the Civilization modding shared tools with sid meier's railroads
| and even early skyrim and fallout modding.
|
| Now the Unreal tools mean mods can be done in blueprint and
| should not break after every update like C# based mods. Likewise
| the common pak format used by unreal games (common because
| consoles prefer the pak for faster loading), means mods can
| replace files without overwriting files. Aka, mod conflicts
| become a reference overwrite issue and not a file overwrite
| issue.
|
| As a developer of an unreal based game its pretty nice to know
| modding is no longer locked out. You still need/should provide
| the community with a modkit, but even those the community can
| generate on their own if they care.
| neilv wrote:
| Companies should keep their servers running.
|
| One of the reasons: if you want people to buy your next thing. (I
| was fairly highly ranked online in one of the Ace Combat fighter
| pilot franchise games, and had built a stable of planes in
| another one. But when they shut down the servers for the previous
| installment, after introducing a new one, I found I couldn't get
| interested in investing in the new one, if it was only going to
| get ripped out from under me like the previous.)
| dingnuts wrote:
| this is fair but I would also really love to see the problem
| solved at the regulatory level for companies that go out of
| business, too
|
| all abandonware -- including server code -- should enter the
| public domain when certain criteria are met
|
| hell, the whole practice of rights holders choosing to stop
| distributing media that could be distributed by fans at very
| low cost -- like the Disney vault or the recent fiasco with
| Coyote vs ACME -- is an affront to art preservation and to art
| and to creatives and society in general and should be stopped.
|
| free the media! if you won't sell it, you should have to let
| others distribute it for you
|
| quibble about details but in general stuff like Ubisoft
| deleting The Crew should be illegal
| golergka wrote:
| Server code often includes proprietary third party software
| that cannot be legally open sourced, or depends on licences.
| Do you think game fans will pay Oracle prices?
| exe34 wrote:
| The law can open source any code. It means that in the
| future the companies using such code might decide to use
| code they own or the people selling them that code might
| charge more upfront. But the market will adjust.
| golergka wrote:
| One way of adjusting is never legally releasing the game
| in a country with such laws.
| pmontra wrote:
| If that third party code must go in products that must
| eventually become open source, they won't be able to sell
| that code and it will be replaced by open source one
| because of market pressure.
| dspillett wrote:
| The code owned by the company could be released without
| those proprietary libraries (or code, if embedded
| directly). The game fans would then need make/source a
| drop-in replacement or remove the need (if the 3rd party
| code is something like DRM then they'll do the latter).
| This is of course work, but less work than replacing the
| whole server-side perhaps making it at least practical.
|
| Of course it might not even be as easy as that, depending
| on how the code itself was contracted out and how the
| rights were distributed around parts of a larger company
| that might have since split & merged a few times, it could
| be difficult to make sure such a release only contained
| what it legally can.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I completely disagree that rights holders should be required
| to distribute media or lose the rights.
|
| It essentially means if you create something, it's not yours
| unless you are actively selling it?
|
| As for online games, I think the ephemeral nature and limited
| lifespan of the game should be forced to be very clearly
| advertised at point of sale, not hidden in an EULA.
|
| The fact you can't play them forever isn't a problem, but
| consumers need to be aware. That said I don't know how much
| difference it would make. I think most consumers would not
| care. I know the online games I play will go away one day and
| I still pay for and play them. Why? Because I don't care. I
| was never going to play them forever even if they were around
| forever, so I don't care if they go away. The only difference
| I'd really like to see is a minimum guaranteed service period
| and a full refund if that isn't achieved.
| pricechild wrote:
| > It essentially means if you create something, it's not
| yours unless you are actively selling it?
|
| What is inherently wrong with this?
|
| Why _should_ someone own an idea, just because they had the
| idea first? I think most people would agree with paying
| people for their work, and the benefits to society of
| providing some protections.
|
| But this whole discussion is around where to draw that line
| and you seem to be starting from "ultimate control by
| originator" wheras others would perhaps start at "ultimate
| gift to society"?
| nkrisc wrote:
| We're not talking about ideas, we're talking about
| creative works.
|
| We could do it any way we want, but I don't see the
| problem with not selling something.
|
| I have created creative works. Should I be forced to sell
| them or lose the rights to do so exclusively in the
| future when I see fit?
| pricechild wrote:
| > We're not talking about ideas, we're talking about
| creative works.
|
| I'm not sure I understand a distinction between "ideas"
| and "creative works"?
| Scion9066 wrote:
| At least in the US, having intellectual property
| interests isn't about authors having control over every
| aspect of their works in a moral sense but the public
| benefiting from the investment in and creation of new
| works through a limited-time monopoly (from the
| constitution): "To promote the Progress of Science and
| useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and
| Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
| Writings and Discoveries."
|
| If you aren't selling them or otherwise making them
| available to the public, why should the public/government
| give you any extra control over them in the legal system?
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Let's say you're Pablo Picasso and you have a sketchbook
| from your early years. You get very successful and
| suddenly the public wants to see your sketchbook. You
| want to sell the book, but the law says you don't own the
| rights because you didn't sell it X years ago. So you
| just keep it, and the public doesn't benefit.
|
| Alternatively, the law compels you to give it away.
| Little Bobby Picasso, your five-year-old, brings home
| some stick figures that they drew in kindergarten. In
| order to be compliant with the law, you now have to give
| that drawing to the public after X years, along with
| thousands of others. Presumably also the photos you took
| of Bobby's first day of school, the song you made up in
| the shower that morning, and the bedtime story you
| improvised that night, as they are creative works as
| well.
| Scion9066 wrote:
| In the Picasso example, if the you weren't selling your
| sketches before, then the potential copyright rights were
| likely not the incentive needed to create the work in the
| first place, practicing your craft was. Also, just
| because you don't have a copyright doesn't mean you can't
| sell it. In this use it or lose it hypothetical system of
| copyright, it just means that you can't prevent others
| from using and building off that work. I'll also note
| that even actual modern copyright treats unpublished
| works differently than published ones. In the context of
| the article about live-service games, your sketchbook
| example would be more like an unpublished game like
| 0x10c. I'll agree that there might be reasons to still
| treat published works differently than unpublished ones.
|
| In your second example, again it would be about extra
| exclusivity rights you get from copyright, not anything
| you necessarily need to do for every slightly creative
| act you're involved in. If you were never going to assert
| copyright on those, why should there need to be copyright
| protections provided by the public?
|
| In general, the way I was mainly thinking of this kind of
| potential requirement was for things that have already
| been distributed to the public but then no longer
| supported/sold. I see things being made part of the
| culture by being released but then becoming totally
| unavailable to be one of the worst things that can happen
| to creative works when we now have the technology and
| capability to preserve everything.
| account42 wrote:
| If you create something it is already not yours now.
| "Intellectual property" is not property. You are only given
| a limited time monopoly over distribution in order to
| encourage more creation to further the commons. If you take
| your past creations out of the commons you have broken that
| deal so why should the rest of society keep up their part?
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| full refund as an alternative sounds fair
| antifa wrote:
| > It essentially means if you create something, it's not
| yours unless you are actively selling it?
|
| It would be cool/wise if this rule applied strictly and
| harshly for large game devs with regular mass layoffs and
| massive profit margins, but not to struggling indie devs.
| zamalek wrote:
| > all abandonware -- including server code -- should enter
| the public domain when certain criteria are met
|
| The problem is that 99% of the time it contains licensed code
| from an entity that is not going out of business, and who's
| going to pay the person who has to separate in-house and
| licensed?
| gryn wrote:
| Even if you don't if your game is popular enough they will
| reverse engineer the server-client communication protocol.
|
| The only place where I see that not happening is the future where
| game are 100% streamed and your computers is just a screen +
| controller (stadia 2.0). Then they'll have to settle for knock
| off clones of your game.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| By the time games are 100% streamed, maybe AI will be good
| enough to recreate games just by screen recording. Who knows.
| rpigab wrote:
| In theory, if AI was really crazy good, which I don't think
| will happen anytime soon or at all, it would be able to let
| you play the game, without any code being written other than
| the AI. Describe your game, connect inputs, and the model
| will make up some video and audio output through generative
| diffusion models. The challenge might be that it's way easier
| to do if you can let the AI have time to process each
| request, as opposed to having to react to many inputs per
| second.
|
| It might require the entire power output of a medium-sized
| country to play a game, though.
| planede wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39355944
| account42 wrote:
| Game streaming is not a technology problem, it's a physics
| problem. You'd need to have servers close to any potential
| playes.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I've heard of this, but always wondering: how can these
| reverse-engineering based private servers be accurate?
|
| Like, reverse engineering the communication protocol is easy,
| or at least pretty feasible. But how do you acquire server-side
| data? Like raw probability tables for certain event? Not to
| mention the game logic itself. Some of them obviously can be
| fetched or guessed by using the live server, but it can't be
| comprehensive.
|
| I've (superficially) involved in certain private servers like
| WoW 15 years ago, but AFAIK they just used leaked server-side
| software (usually from a foreign agency) than reverse
| engineering.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| In the absence of hard data you just have to guess - take a
| look at the SWG Emu project. They had to have historians go
| through decades old archived threads to try to reverse
| engineer how the game actually worked, I'm not sure the
| status of the project now but it did indeed take many, many
| years to even come close to a compareable experience to the
| original.
| Sakos wrote:
| > Fortuitously, the creators of "GUNDAM EVOLUTION" provided a
| timely notice about the game's end of service (EOS), affording me
| ample opportunity to start capturing game data packets
|
| This is always one of the biggest issues with trying to make a
| private server. Ideally, we should be proactively capturing game
| data packets and archiving them for every game that has an online
| component, to ensure that somebody in the future will have that
| available if they're interested in developing a private server
| for whatever game.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| I helped push someone to make this happen. Didn't have enough
| free time myself. Glad to see it happen.
|
| Projects like these are great stepping stones into learning how
| to code for younger kids and adults :)
| pacifika wrote:
| Preserving packets. That would be an interesting internet
| archive software project
| misiek08 wrote:
| The game itself looks good. Playing bugger BF 2042 its sad to see
| such polished (comparing to EA crap) product goes so fast into
| EOL :(
|
| Like others said - do you kill your product and probably company?
| Open source it :)
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| I think it's common for multiplayer game engines to implement
| single-player by running a local server on loopback (or via an
| equivalent internal mechanism). At the very least, I believe the
| Source Engine and Minecraft do this. Perhaps Unreal Engine does
| this also, and if so, that might be why the client has server
| functionality.
| Gamemaster1379 wrote:
| For live service games, self-hosting is increasingly uncommon.
| During the Source era of Team Fortress 2, Half-Life Deathmatch,
| etc, self-hosting was certainly a thing. But in the modern era,
| games like Overwatch 2 have no means to be a server or listen
| server. Even "custom games" where you can make your own game
| mode and do fun, arcadey-style things connect to a dedicated
| server.
|
| For things that are "single player", (e.g. Tutorials/Practice),
| I agree with you that it's to be expected that some sort of
| mock-loopback is likely stood up. But what was unusual in this
| situation is the _entirety_ of the code is there, to the point
| it even would bind to a UDP port and handle full bi-directional
| UDP communication.
|
| I would expect that for something like this, they'd include a
| trimmed down version, and not ship the _entire_ thing.
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