Comment by slopinthebag
14 days ago
seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff.
the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision.
[1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w
[3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...
I saw someone say that we're going to go back to a situation like the 70s where software is technically copyrightable but there's no reason to bother. Maybe Stallman's dream will finally come true.
that would be the absolute dream imo. true ownership of the code running on your system.
Who is going to write that software if there is no reward.
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It isn't true ownership if you depend on an LLM you don't own to modify the code in ways you don't understand. That's just proprietary software with extra steps.
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I think GTA6 will be the real test for how capable these agents are. Some of these mods use well-known emulation methods, and some of these binaries have probably been ingested by the LLM numerous times.
I don't mean to discredit LLM capabilities, it's just that these examples are heavily favored by what's already documented online.
Wine-style PS5 emulation has advanced far enough that I would bet money on there being a pirated GTA6 PC release based on the PS5 version available within six months.
Six months is a long time! I was honestly prepared to see more aggressive timelines when I wrote this comment :)
I'm currently working on OpenBFME[0] and I can assure you, enough LLM power guessing at the code in the binaries is enough to get the code for anything
[0] https://github.com/Open-BFME/
love to see it
btw this is the actual solution, not that whole stop killing games movement. not regulation.
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yeah for sure, and more modern games will probably be more difficult as well. but even so, games feel like one of the harder things to reverse engineer compared to most business software. yes there is the backend component, but that's mostly just crud.
LLMs have changed the obstacle of doing something from (time, attention, expertise) to (time, attention, tokens).
I don't see what's unique about GTA6. It's just larger in scope if you wanted to decompile or greenfield a custom engine.
But at the end of the day you'll be able to unpack the assets yourself and immediately have the worldmap running in a browser in Three.js. And once you're there, you can vibe-code any game you want on top of it.
At the very least, it will be a binary that hasn't yet been consumed by the LLM, so it's an interesting test!