And here we go: Reversing Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition • RedRocket
People have at least 3 major misconceptions about open source:
- The backend (with it’s source code) is not an asset, but a complete liability for the managment of the game. They need to spend millions of wages to get the game refined. Because the code is really bad, bugs are hard to find, and a programmer gets >100.000 usd per year for servicing a complex app like this.
- You can hack the game TO THE MAX without the source code anyway. In the case of the guys from my link above, they used old school “CheatEngine”. There exist even more powerful tools to decompile the app, and analyze and manipulate network packages, which are free for everyone.
I will not elaborate what “someone” was able to accomplish, while playing around with the app for 10h only.
And someone never hacked a game before, nor did someone used any of the tools he needed previously, nor did he had any guide or reference from other people.
That’s why someone knows that the backend code is really bad, by the way. Because you can see the GUI bugs, but under the hood I could have only guessed that it’s the same mess.
At least in the case which I linked, it’s public what has been done.
Also even minor hacks, like full map visibility, breaks every ranked match. - open source =/= no copyright or no license. It’s possible to release the source code to vast extends, and copyright the trademark, the sounds, models, maps, etc. That has been done for e.g. Quake III Arena, which is a leading example for both an AAA game, and software engineering.
The game is remastered into Quake Live, by the way.
I am not saying that the source code should be released right now. But it is a thing, which could be taken into consideration for 2022, if issues don’t get solved.