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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Most likely the whole engine and the bare metal game without the arts/graphics and music/sound. That's how a lot of opensource clones work.

For example OpenTTD [0] was reverse engineered and you have 2 options to actually play the game

- either have the original game and use the arts/graphics and music/sound data from the original files

- use the open source remake of the arts/graphics and music/sound

The 2nd option where a lot of open source clones fail. It's one thing to have the engine and the bare metal game but the actual arts/graphics usually takes more time to recreate. That's where OpenTTD is really successful because you can just download the game and play.

As another example an open source clone of Red Alert already exist [1] but it's just the engine. To actually play you need the original arts/graphics

0 https://www.openttd.org/

1 https://www.openra.net/

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To just make it playable you can just have any bunch of people with suitable tools make placeholder art, a sprite that says "TANK" on it is good enough for the tank moving code to run.

But that looks really bad, and to make it look good (as almost any even mid-budget video game looks) you need an art director who can deliver consistency. For a small game that art director might also just make all the art, so it ends up consistent that way, but games even from the C&C era are too big for that to be realistic, so now you've got several (and maybe hundreds of) volunteers making art and they need to obey that director's stylistic vision or the result is something that lay people can see is "wrong" but they aren't sure exactly why.

There's a little element of this in the programming side. One guy who stubbornly insists on calling loop variables 'x' another insists they should be named 'k' and three others who don't care can already get heated. Or maybe you've run into somebody who believes code should use character U+0009 for indentation instead of using U+0020 as god intended. But the players won't notice that part, whereas if the art isn't consistent that's very visible and detracts from the experience.

>Or maybe you've run into somebody who believes code should use character U+0009 for indentation

"The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning." John 3:8

"These shall ye use of all that are in the charcodes: whatsoever hath US-ASCII in the keyboards, in the memories, and in the disks, them shall ye use.

And all that have unicodes in the keyboards, and in the memories, of all that move in the disks, and of any living thing which is in the extended ranges, they shall be an abomination unto you."

That effect is pretty visible even in the successful open projects like Wesnoth. Love it to death, like much of the art in isolation, but sometimes you get pretty jarring clashes in style.

At least with OpenRA you can legally download the original game content ISO CD images (EA released them as free(beer)-ware a while ago) - the only thing missing is about half of the single-player campaign missions as OpenRA can’t play the original game missions directly so the project’s contributors recreate them by-hand,

> you can legally download the original game content ISO CD images (EA released them as free(beer)-ware a while ago)

Is it possible to download these ISOs from EA today? On Origin, Red Alert is only available as part of the Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection, which isn't free of charge.

It was mirrored on FilePlanet IIRC. This was about 8-9 years ago though.

its missing missions? my openra has missions, i thought it would have been complete. only thing i noticed its missing is the so awful they are amazing videos

> its missing missions? my openra has missions

Only about half of the missions

If I remember correctly, in the early Days of OpenTTD you basically were lost without the files from the original. It took quite a while for the artwork to catch up and finally surpass the original.

The solarus engine is undertaking similar steps currently. It was originally released with a zelda fan game and alongside(but not included with) an a Link to the Past asset pack. Recently though the devs have been working on open source/CC replacements for all the proprietary graphics and sound.

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