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Comment by gryn | Hacker News Reader

Even if you don't if your game is popular enough they will reverse engineer the server-client communication protocol.

The only place where I see that not happening is the future where game are 100% streamed and your computers is just a screen + controller (stadia 2.0). Then they'll have to settle for knock off clones of your game.

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I've heard of this, but always wondering: how can these reverse-engineering based private servers be accurate?

Like, reverse engineering the communication protocol is easy, or at least pretty feasible. But how do you acquire server-side data? Like raw probability tables for certain event? Not to mention the game logic itself. Some of them obviously can be fetched or guessed by using the live server, but it can't be comprehensive.

I've (superficially) involved in certain private servers like WoW 15 years ago, but AFAIK they just used leaked server-side software (usually from a foreign agency) than reverse engineering.

In the absence of hard data you just have to guess - take a look at the SWG Emu project. They had to have historians go through decades old archived threads to try to reverse engineer how the game actually worked, I’m not sure the status of the project now but it did indeed take many, many years to even come close to a compareable experience to the original.

You cant tell if they are accurate really if you do not have sources. You can tell however, if the game plays nicely and accurately when connected via such a server. fyi, a lot of servers, and it looks like this one too, mainly serve to authenticate do license stuff and then do matchmaking or discovery for players to find other players. they dont actually host a game session.

By the time games are 100% streamed, maybe AI will be good enough to recreate games just by screen recording. Who knows.

In theory, if AI was really crazy good, which I don't think will happen anytime soon or at all, it would be able to let you play the game, without any code being written other than the AI. Describe your game, connect inputs, and the model will make up some video and audio output through generative diffusion models. The challenge might be that it's way easier to do if you can let the AI have time to process each request, as opposed to having to react to many inputs per second.

It might require the entire power output of a medium-sized country to play a game, though.

Game streaming is not a technology problem, it's a physics problem. You'd need to have servers close to any potential playes.

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