Why is it that game Devs are able to port games to pc but people aren’t able to do the same outside of emulation that take a while and doesn’t always run the best. I don’t know much about game development or computers, why is it so difficult/impossible?
In: 8
Devs have access to the human-readable source code, modders do not.
A dev would write code like this:
walkToFridge();
getBeer();
walkToSofa();
Then this code gets translated by a compiler into a ton of much more basic instructions that the actual processor can understand. To stick with the fridge/beer analogy, instead of just those three lines, the compiled code for a human would have hundreds or thousands of instructions specifying which muscles need to be tensioned and relaxed for how long and in which order.
Imagine thousands of lines like this:
tension(muscle1, 40N, 0.3sec);
relax(muscle7, 0.1sec);
relax(muscle3, 0.2sec);
tension(muscle2, 12N, 0.25sec);
…
It’s easy to understand what’s happening in the first bit of code, but with the second bit of code it’s impossible to tell what the human is doing. He could be playing golf or riding a bike or anything else that involves using his muscles.
What’s more, these instructions are specific to the hardware, in this case a two-legged human. If you tried to run the same compiled code on a dog, he wouldn’t get very far because only two legs are moving.
In order to port the code to a dog, the dev would just use a different compiler that spits out dog-compatible compiled code, and possibly make some adjustments to the human-readable code.
A modder would have to take the muscle instructions for a human and then somehow change them to be appropriate for a dog, if he even understands what exactly the code is doing.
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