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Comment by Eji1700 | Hacker News Reader

This game has a couple of interesting notes for me:

1. It's kinda what helped me find a career. I had trouble tolerating work for long enough, and while I could do it, it would get to me. I realized a LOT of the play patterns in this game are mostly optimization and data entry, so decided to take a start there and eventually wound up in tech.

2. It has a really cool, if possibly impossible to now play, fan made version called onlink. To memory it's not a mod so much as a separate application and has a lot more depth (annnnd unfortunately bugs). I know they were working on trying to make a standalone "movie hacking" simulator, but I don't know if that ever got off the ground (Cerberus I believe)

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Apparently the author of the article worked on onlink, https://vertette.github.io/post/helloworld.

Yeah, I'm still working on that! It's making lots of exciting progress we can't wait to show people.

Holy shit i'm super excited to hear that. I remember joining the forums (ferrous moon?) forever ago just to see if I could get help with some bugs and figure out how to get past the harder hacking missions.

From there when the game only sorta worked for me I figured "well someone else has to have made a quality movie hacking simulator" and the answer was "not really no". It seemed really clear that Onlink really understood what made these things fun, and gave them depth, so I hope you can pull it off.

Can we translate it into our native language?

Not sure how easy that is but you can ask on the Uplink Discord or make a post on the Ferrous Moon forums.

There hasn't been a release in a while, but onlink is still in active development.

Last update: March 2019. Not really active

Like I said, no release in a while.

I'm the original author. There's one other that works on code, and Vert (this blog) has been a tremendous help with asset updates.

Turns out however that rewriting the graphical engine takes a while.

Ever considered open sourcing it? Pretty sure some people will contribute, it’s an iconic game

Considered, yes, but Uplink is not open source, and it's not my right to do it either. I know the source is generally "out there" but the legality of that is murky.

Have you tried reaching out to Chris DeLay and asking him about it? He might be okay with it!

Does Onlink use any of the Uplink source, or is it written entirely from scratch? If the latter, it's definitely within your rights to open-source.

Already said it to vert, but just wanted to say I wish you luck. Onlink was tapping into a niche that I think is super under explored and you clearly understood what was actually fun about it.

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