Invisible wrote:
 > Both of those only support graphics. A game also needs sound, complex 
keyboard access, realtime control, etc., all of which varies by platform.

I have often wondered how much of the development effort of a game goes into
1) Overall concept
2) Level design
3) Art and sound and motion capture and etc assets
4) Portable (like AI) coding, and
5) Engine-specific (DirX vs OpenGL) coding.

It really would seem to me that porting the graphics to a different platform 
for a relatively large game (like, say, Half-life) would be a fairly small 
part of the problem.

 >> Reverse-engineering is not generally illegal.
 >
 > Sure. The fact that the EULA says "you may not reverse engineer this" 
doesn't make it illegal at all. No sir.

Not in the USA. Copyright law is federal law. EULAs are state law. Copyright 
law overrides state contract law. See Prolock v Copywrite. This may all have 
changed since DMCA, of course. I am not a lawyer.

> Given how painfully difficult it is just working out how to *use* the Win32 API,

Think of it as a full-time job, and it's not so hard.

> the chances of somebody correctly implementing a clone of it seem vanishingly small.


It doesn't have to be identical functionality. It only has to be "correct." 
If everybody programming stuck exactly to the published documentation, you 
wouldn't have to reverse-engineer anything at all. So all you have to figure 
out is what undocumented behavior particular breaking programs are relying 
on, and then make your code have the same results.


-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message