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?
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I don’t know how true it is, but apparently it was pretty common back then for developers in Japan to get rid of source code once the game shipped because it took up space and resource. I can’t remember where that came from but it was around the time HD collection released I learned this. Could just as easily be an excuse l, but that is apparently the reason if true
Compiling code isn’t like translating into another language and where you can just transl
When people write code, it’s written with a lot of ‘extra’ to have it make sense. If you want to store some information in a variable, the variable is named after what it does so someone reading the code can follow along. There are also a lot of comments explaining things about code and line breaks and indents to visually organize the code.
The computer doesn’t use any of this, so when the code is compiled it’s all removed. If you reverse the process all of that is lost, and the generated code isn’t ‘organized’, the variable names are unrelated to anything, and you have to grind through it to sort it out.
So as an analogy let’s say you have a recipe for making a cake. If you run it through a compiler, the names get dumped. So when you reverse it you just get words and amounts. If you knew you were making a cake, a baker could probably figure it out based on amounts, but a program like silent hill is more like a series of cook books, where every page is a recipe for something, but you don’t know which thing because even that was lost. You can imagine it would take forever to figure all that out.
With enough time and effort, Konami could have decompiled the original code and reworked it into something usable. It’s been done before; there are many fan projects doing just that. Mario 64 and Sonic Mania are two that come to mind for me (because I’ve used them extensively). The problem is that these projects take… time and effort (Sonic Mania took five years or so). Two things a studio doesn’t want to spend when they can just slap something together much faster.
Konami did not lose the source code. What they lost was the final build of the game. As for thw datamining – you could do that for things like textures, models and sound, but the human-friendly readable code is turned to ones and zeroes in the retail copy of the game, which is readable for the computer.
Source code -> Game is easy.
Game -> Source code is hard.
Its that way partially by design. They don’t want anybody to be able to decompile their game, for obvious reasons. They’ll add encoding so only the console has the library to decode it, obfuscation to make the decompiled code unreadable, etc.
Pushing past all those barriers is very difficult.
How did NASA lose all the original moon landing tapes?
Just think at the super secret recipe for coca cola, everyone can read ingredients that are in, but nobody can reproduce it
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