Let’s make games open source, so future generations can enjoy them
Let’s make games open source, so future generations can enjoy them
As platforms evolve, old games become unplayable. Open sourcing them will help us preserve them for future generations.
A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
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I’m not against it, but it’s not a silver bullet for game preservation. All game engines are unique. Some are heavily optimized for their target hardware. Just because you have access to original source code doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy to preserve it for future hardware.
I mean, there are games that got terrible ports despite dedicated teams working on it full time with access to original source code. It won’t be much easier for the fans taking this on as a hobby project during their evenings.
Only the games with most dedicated fans will get preserved for future generations.
That was true when every studio had their inhouse engine, optimized for their game types.
Today we have 100.000 times more power and "everyone" goes with a prebuilt engine so I don't think your point is valud, any more at least.
That’s true, but there are still many games using in-house game engines.
God of War, Spider-Man, Elden Ring, GTA, Tears of the Kingdom, Doom Eternal, Halo Infinite, Destiny, Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, The Last of Us, Diablo 4, etc.
These are popular games that game into my mind. I don’t think game preservation should be limited to Unreal games.
And also, modern gaming platforms are all very similar. Since last gen XBOX and PlayStation have very similar hardware to both each other and to normal PCs and the Switch is very similar to many Android devices. The wild times where console manufacturers designed crazy custom chips that were hard to port to and from are over and thus the engineers tend to also be more agreeable with different platforms.
Not so sure about that. When you consider time spans.
Currently we can emulate the majority of early games consoles. So theoretically with time and Moors law any hardware will be emulate able in a few decades. With enough information.
The advantage of open source software. Is it can be used with the original binaries to reverse engineer the instruction set even if the original manufacturer wishes to hide it. So with will and effort even the most complex hardware will be able to be emulated on future much faster hardware.
Moore’s law is not a given. It has been slowing down recently.
Current games are made for current day’s design of graphics cards. They are very dependent on pixel shaders for example.
Let’s be hypothetical. Imagine that future graphics cards go all in on ray tracing. Pixel shaders have become a thing of the past and no new hardware support it natively anymore.
Preservers have two options: either try their best to simulate pixel shaders effects through ray tracing, or emulate it through software.
Simulating through ray tracing won’t be accurate. Many pixel shader effects can’t be properly translated to ray tracing. Emulating through software can be hard. I don’t think many games even from 20 years ago can be fully run on modern CPUs.
The direct numerics of moors law may not be definite.
But the principal it defines is. In the future computers will have much more power then they do now.
The reason modern GPUs use things like shaders etc is to allow them to archive massive manipulation of data in more efficient ways specific for the task desired.
Honestly this is why I mention time scale as the main thing that will make this possible. How modern gpus or other specialised processers do the task is less important then what the game code is asking the gpu to achieve.
The idea that at a unknown future date. The CPU GPUs or what ever future tech we have. will never be able to run fast enough to read current cpu or gpu instruction sets. And generate the effect defined using future techniques is not viable as an argument. The only questions are how long and is anyone going to have the motivation to reverse engineer the large but finite instruction sets used by secretive hardware corps today.