does /g/ know where I can start if I want to reverse engineer 90's to early 2000's PC games? There are a lot that I feel had the balance and mechanics done perfectly and would like to see how they did it.
Mainly I'm looking at games like Star Wars Xwing vs Tie Fighter
Lords of the Realm II
Starcraft
Homeworld
Is there some kind of decompiler that would break open the system files for the game?
become familiar with how file formats tend to work. starcraft is a popular game so it's data files probably have tools and specs out that you can read. the older a game is the more likely that game data is to going to be hardcoded into the executable making it impractical to analyze
sounds like a pretty stupid idea in the first place to be honest, if you want to learn about game design or game programming there's far better ways than reverse engineering existing games
You can try looking at source code for games released back then. id software has given many away for their games. There's even an ongoing video series on how to rebuild Quake step by step.
http://philipbuuck.com/handmadequake
>>54858580
Starcraft keeps all of it's assets inside mpq files which are just glorified archives.
>>54858634
Awesome, thanks a lot
>>54858580
>sounds like a pretty stupid idea
If you dont learn from the past, all you're doing is wasting a perfect resource.
Check this site out: http://fabiensanglard.net/. Scroll down a bit, there's some reverse engineering going on. Great stuff in general, guy knows his shit, I suggest you read as much as you can.
man i loved lords of the realm
>>54860525
Yeah me too, then age of empires came along and utterly addicted me.
