one of these is the leaked official, original source code of Pokemon Emerald and one of these is a decompile made by hobbyists trying to reverse engineer what the game is doing
and you know I wouldn't be posting this if they were not, apparently, switched at birth.
@0xabad1dea if One needed to write a lot of code fast the second takes hugely fewer key strokes, especially for a project that is never going to be read by another person once shipped? eh.
@0xabad1dea I guess when you've been working on "old" systems like the SNES and the Gameboy, you probably get used to using numbers instead of variable names
@0xabad1dea I feel like we'd have a lot more actual game source releases if people wouldn't cherrypick segments of code from leaks and say that this points to issues in the company nearly 20 years later...
@wintery I uh, I don’t think one girl on mastodon saying “game freak doesn’t like to name variables lol” is why Nintendo does not release the source code of its games
and this is… not cherry picked, at all. the whole thing is like this
@0xabad1dea as someone who is intimately familiar with some specific reverse engineered vs ninty source code, yeah this happens quite a lot lmao. I don’t think I’ve seen many that were this ridiculous, but I’ve seen some pretty bad ones lol
The Yoshi’s Island source is an absolute nightmare. At least the SMK source isn’t horrible (it’s actually pretty fine in most regards) but there’s a couple things that are just disgusting.
@0xabad1dea I think it technically leverages things that aren't guaranteed by the standard, but if my assumption of what's going on here is correct, I much prefer to see classes or structs set up for this instead of the bare pointer math with a magic number offset plus casting/dereferencing. Assigning/reading a named member is much nicer imo. All of that RE code is still leagues better than the original source tho jfc that's a nightmare, my commentary here is being picky at best I'll admit lol
@0xabad1dea A pattern I've noticed in a lot of code written between 2000 and 2005 (post dotcom bubble burst) is that it is intentionally obtuse. This was a job-security strategy, and one that works, sadly. Not sure if it's the case here for a game from 2004, but sure is a coincidence.
@gregdavis@0xabad1dea It's not really a thing in video games as most games - especially back then - didn't reuse code from previous games so you wouldn't really be gaining any job security from doing so since it would all be rewritten again the next game anyways. I could imagine Pokemon itself being an exception to that, though but haven't looked at its source to say.
@jay@gregdavis@0xabad1dea I call bullshit. I have pulled apart 3 Natsume games (Japanese Natsume, not US Natsume) for the Gameboy from 2 separate game franchises and there are clear signs of code reuse.
@andwhyisit@gregdavis@0xabad1dea I'm not saying it didn't happen back then at all, it just wasn't a super common thing back then, especially not like today, where code reuse is a goal for cost/time savings.
@gregdavis I doubt that's the case here as Japan is noted for having a much more "employment with a company is for life unless something goes really wrong" attitude - and also that Game Freak specifically is notorious for mountains of code written very quickly that miraculously just barely work
@0xabad1dea@gregdavis People generally don’t get fired because anything to do with code. The higher ups don’t know you and are just looking at some sheet. Boom. You are gone. Everyone’s expendable.
I suspect Game Freak is stuck in a rut and refuses to try any new ways of doing things. They could probably do with some new engineering leadership. <— Armchair guess mind you.
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