> Ask them to open source the critical libraries, but keep the game proprietary.
> There is a good precedent for "open code but closed license," with Barotrauma being one of the most successful examples. Just dropping your engine code is not going to get a game copycatted instantly.
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know there was a precedent for that. It seems like the only binaries that aren't 3rd-party libraries are split into a file called "libgamename.so" (a library) and "gamename" (the actual executable). That might actually be a feasible. Thanks for the suggestion.
> At the same time, getting your code to a state where one can open source it is not trivial for various reasons.
Yeah, I've heard it's a challenge when multiple companies collaborated on some code, and now one of the companies is defunct, and the copyright status of the code is unknown, so they give up. I hope this isn't one of those cases; I'm pretty sure it isn't.
> Another alternative is to do what countless modders have done: Hack into the compiled code yourself and try to optimize it. This is above my paygrade, but its done more frequently than one would think.
This seems possible. They didn't strip symbols, so you can actually observe the name of many C++ functions and classes using the tool `readelf` or `objdump`. I've opened the game up in Ghidra, and it seems like someone could do it. But, using Ghidra on it seems illegal, and I've never decompiled or hacked a game like that. I'd have to learn about that first. I know that for Cave Story, people used to do binary patching to make mods. Eventually people hacked together a mod loader for it.
Yeah, people have hacked together all sorts of mod loaders for games, even on consoles from notorious companies like the Switch! See the botw modding community.
The only instance I can think of where the dev brought out the lawyers for such an act is Grand Theft Auto V, which is a somewhat understandable extreme case. I can't even imagine an indie dev doing it, for so many reasons.
Yeah, it's amazing what people have done with games whose source code they don't have. I may look into reverse engineering certain aspects. I can already spot certain algorithmic inefficiencies just from the disassembly (e.g. unnecessarily using strings instead of item IDs), but those probably aren't the main bottlenecks.
> There is a good precedent for "open code but closed license," with Barotrauma being one of the most successful examples. Just dropping your engine code is not going to get a game copycatted instantly.
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know there was a precedent for that. It seems like the only binaries that aren't 3rd-party libraries are split into a file called "libgamename.so" (a library) and "gamename" (the actual executable). That might actually be a feasible. Thanks for the suggestion.
> At the same time, getting your code to a state where one can open source it is not trivial for various reasons.
Yeah, I've heard it's a challenge when multiple companies collaborated on some code, and now one of the companies is defunct, and the copyright status of the code is unknown, so they give up. I hope this isn't one of those cases; I'm pretty sure it isn't.
> Another alternative is to do what countless modders have done: Hack into the compiled code yourself and try to optimize it. This is above my paygrade, but its done more frequently than one would think.
This seems possible. They didn't strip symbols, so you can actually observe the name of many C++ functions and classes using the tool `readelf` or `objdump`. I've opened the game up in Ghidra, and it seems like someone could do it. But, using Ghidra on it seems illegal, and I've never decompiled or hacked a game like that. I'd have to learn about that first. I know that for Cave Story, people used to do binary patching to make mods. Eventually people hacked together a mod loader for it.