I’ve heard many times that the reason the Silent Hill remaster collection didn’t turn out so well was because Konami lost the original source code and had to re-create it. But I don’t understand how that is possible. If they were selling copies of Silent Hill, why couldn’t they just take a single disk of it and datamine the source code off of it? How could they possess the game without possessing the game’s source code?
In: 1563
Source code is different than the compiled code.
Think of it like a recipe for a cake, and a baked cake.
Having a cake, or even eating it and being able to tell “flour, eggs, butter, vanilla, sugar” doesn’t necessarily tell you how to make the cake. You can get some info from this, but generally not an entire full recipe and steps from it.
Source code is the exact text of the programing language that is human readable, “if hp = 0, then player = dead” (not a real language, but an easy example).
It is then fed through a compiler that translates it to “machine speak”.
Like mixing it then baking it in an oven so it can be eaten.
Compiled/object code is what the computer makes sense of.
You can reverse engineer some things from compiled if you’re really dedicated and skilled, but even then it’s not an exact match and things can get messed up. You lose variables, notes, etc which would then need to be un-borked.
In the previous example, it would end up like “if [unknown variable] = 0 then…”
But games have a lot of variables. Player locations, loot values, damage, HP, ranges, light values, player speed, etc.
So now unless that’s fixed the game is broken. Which *can* be fixed, but it’s often easier to recreate the game.
As a side note, it’s why source code leaks are a big deal for programs. For games as an example, it would describe how the game works, including things like anti-cheat.
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