eli5 what is the difference between a decompilation and a disassembly when it comes to viseo games?
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A computer game is a computer program. Computer programs are sets of instructions that hardware chips will execute. Those kinds of instructions are stored in the form of “assembly code”, a language that is closely related to the architecture and language of the machine code itself (what actually interacts with the chips). Assembly code is very difficult to make much sense of even in small chunks, and trying to write or understand a monolithic application program in assembly is an exercise in futility.
Instead programs are usually written in higher level programming languages where logical operations are abstracted in such a way that a human can somewhat easily understand what is being done. The programs composed in those languages need to be converted through a process called “compiling” into machine code/assembly which can be performed by the chips themselves.
Now to your question, disassembly is converting the machine code into a human-readable assembly code. This is at best one level of abstraction up from the machine or microcode. Decompilation on the other hand is converting the byte code back into the original programming language. This will be much more abstract and often far easier to understand.
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