It’s been recently reported that the Citadel DLC of Mass Effect 1 will not be returning in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remastering due to corrupted files.
Apparently the only source code of the DLC the developers could find was too corrupted to salvage, and so it was cut.
How can that be exactly if I have that DLC on my Xbox 360 right now? What meaningful difference is there between the source code the original devs should have had, and the retail version of the code thousands of fans have?
In: Technology
There’s two kinds of code for a game.
The source code, which is the code that is written by the programmers and is readable by a human.
And the shipped out code, which is not.
The source code is the original coding that has nice named variables, notes, messages, details, comments, reminders, all kind of extra Information that makes it nice and easy to read the code and edit it.
But when you ship a game out and sell it. You don’t want the people getting it knowing how to pick it apart super easily. That how hackers can easily screw with a game. So, the code goes through a laundering process that makes it completely unreadable to humans.
All the same instructions are there for the computer to execute, but variable in the code that might’ve been named some nice before like “Money_counter” is now named, “x1yzwk”, and there are no nice comments or notes or messages left behind for you to read to know what’s going on. Because they don’t want the public to be able to screw with the code.
So, the source code is what got corrupted. Sure there’s many many copies of the DLC Still out there, and you can still it as it is, but the code that was actually readable by humans, ie the code that would let you remaster the game, or update it, or rework it a bit, is lost.
Compiled files are pretty much useless to a developer. Have you ever tried to *exactly* recreate a recipe when all you have is a cooked dish?
what they’re saying is “we lost the recipe for this cake because the paper we wrote it on got wet” and you’re saying “but I have a piece of that cake, cant they make more from that”.
you could go from the finished product and try to work out the recipe from there but that’s something that is far from easy (and called “reverse engineering”)
Source code is written in languages that humans can understand. But computers need machine code which is a binary format. The source code is translated into machine code and that’s what distributed.
Compare it to encoding a piece of text. Say you have a file that says “Hello world” and an encoder that translates it into “#!$%@#$%TFEVQW” and puts that into a different file. That’s what the computer can read and understand. Even if you lose the original file, you still have the encoded version. You can still copy that even if you don’t know what it says.
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