Thread

1. CoolestBeans · 1790642612 · focus · HN ↗

   > The act of reverse engineering and porting decades old games to modern environments requires a complex, deeply involved set of tasks from multiple disciplines... It's the quintessential deep, skilled knowledge labor profile out there that people understood as a career protected by depth of skill and knowledge acquisition.

   Game development, especially this kind of porting, is an extremely technically demanding task. But it is far more constrained and precise in its requirements than the sort of software development that happens outside of the game world. Most developers deal with vague and (importantly for AI) unverifiable requirements that change continuously as a project develops. AI is not as good of a tool for this type of programming because unlike the tasks demonstrated in the article, there is no verification function an AI can cheaply use to validate if it is approaching completion of the task.

   In the example in the article, the bots can look at the entire memory state of the game, interact with it to see how the state changes, and then repeat the process on their working copy of the port. So long as the overall behavior of the port is getting closer to the original, the AI can validate its getting closer to its goals. Extremely impressive stuff. But this verification loop exists in a closed world. No equivalent exists for most programming disciplines. No equivalent can exist because shifting the requirements to fulfill the vague business goals is an essential job of a software developer.

   So while I am extremely impressed about what AI can accomplish every day, I also have a loud voice in the back of my mind skeptical of the actual economic impact. Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.

   1. applfanboysbgon · 1790642858 · focus · HN ↗

      > Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.

      Game industry generates hundreds of billions in revenue. There is plenty of value in it. The value happens to not be in decompiling 80s/90s games you have no legal right to sell, of course.

      1. georgeecollins · 1790646237 · focus · HN ↗

         There is more value in remastering old games than you might think. And there always has been. One of my first gigs in the game industry was producing an Infocom Clasics CD-ROM at Activision. That’s games from the seventies and eighties re-released in the nineties.

         1. applfanboysbgon · 1790646552 · focus · HN ↗

            If you have the rights to sell them, yes.
         2. ndiddy · 1790649659 · focus · HN ↗

            Was it an issue that Infocom had been shut down? For example for making a version of the Z-Machine for Windows 95 or whatever was current. Did Activision have an archive of all the Infocom development stuff, or were you able to go off of whatever documentation fans had come up with when they were making unofficial Z-Machine interpreters?

            1. georgeecollins · 1790650643 · focus · HN ↗

               Activision bought Infocom. We did have an archive of the Infocom servers which was kind of amazing. I remember notes for an adventure game set on the Titanic. There was a design document for Leather Goddesses of Phobos II.

               1. ndiddy · 1790687427 · focus · HN ↗

                  That's interesting, thanks for sharing!
         3. Toynbeeidea · 1790694455 · focus · HN ↗

            And I was very happy to purchase BOTH volumes, as a long-time Infocom fan! I still have the discs in storage in a box of old cds in my closet. Of course, now I just have the z-machine files on my computer and run them through Gargoyle...

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