Any software engineers who work for big companies have any insight on this? Don't these places keep their own source? Or is it just on somebody's laptop that no one's seen since 2015?
I would imagine more bureaucratic processes being the issue here. I can imagine some Rockstar employee tasked with getting the game up on Steam, trying to get the game through official channels to put on Steam, getting frustrated, saying f-it and downloading the Razor 1911 version thinking they removed all the references and then pushing it to Steam.
“oops. I forgot to remove the giant lit up billboard”.
You’re probably right. I think it’s funny that these giant studios all have the wall with a physical copy of each release behind glass, but they can never seen to find them when they need it.
There've been some cases of remastering projects being affected by the loss of some of the source material, such as the Silent Hill HD Project
Which is why I find the negative attitude of so many of these companies toward emulation and fan conservation of abandonware so frustrating, there's a proven track record that they cannot be trusted with the task.
So I was listening to the WAN show, and Luke said that the DRM was stacked with booby traps that broke the game mechanically in a bunch of ways if the DRM was bypassed without also removing them. The crack did; their version didn't.
Even if the source is kept decently preserved, the build environments are usually not. If they still have a machine in the exact state it was in at the time the game was finished, it might be as easy as Project -> Build, but... they almost certainly don't. So that likely has to be rebuilt from scratch, and you'd be very lucky to find any kind of documentation on how things worked.
Game studios tend to have it particularly bad because of how much binary-only engines/middleware (standalone bits like Havok physics/Bink video/etc) they used, how often the game's data and code builds were mixed together in some way and how in some cases the project is designed to build things like console releases at the same time. If you lost the install files for your physics engine, you're probably straight up screwed.
By the time you've figured all of that out, you can be easily hundreds of hours in, with tons of weird little issues that might require different people to solve. Some examples: you might end up needing to build it in Windows XP because no other OS runs all of the software used during the build, any sysadmin is NOT going to be happy installing WinXP on their network so the machine has to stay offline, getting code onto that machine might be a pain due to how Perforce or whatever is used by them, even things taken for granted like a particular version of the DirectX 9 SDK might be hard to find, etc. Sometimes licensing/activation of tools used in the build process is an impossible to solve problem because it needs some DRM dongle or activation server that no longer exists and the software was never publicly available, so there is no crack.
people only care when they’re told to and are being paid to. If nobody told anyone to care about the archival of source code (and build environments) of old projects, then guess what, it’s not likely that anyone is going to do it. Add some good old revolving doors and presto: shit’s fucked
After watching the video the main thought I have in my mind is that the whole issue could have been subverted by building two sets of executables. One with DRM and one without. The DRM free version could then be stored for potential future use. That way you wouldn’t have to necessarily maintain the build environment.
Obviously this wouldn’t have occurred to me if I was building the game, but I hope the companies learned as soon as they ran across the issue the first time.
Man the year of the Linux desktop is rapidly approaching! We now have shady websites that offer the same content available in the operating system with less features, and costs money or spies on you.
Soon enough we’ll have browsers forced on it’s users! I can’t wait to feel like a true Windows user.
bleepingcomputer.com
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