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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.

Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.

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I play SubSpace (a MMO spaceship game released in the 90s) to this day. It was shut down soon after release.

The original server binaries were left on the original CDROM by a programmer.

Then PriitK, a creator of Kazaa and then Skype and Joost!, went on to re-create the client due to cheating/hacking, naming it Continuum.

Years later the server is reimplemented as A Small Subspace Server (ASSS), making it a complete fan remake of the original game (sans graphics). This is also when we finally got server side mods, everything before that was client only or a hack.

We even got on Stream Greenlight.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

Props for bringing up Subspace! What a fun game that deserves more players! (And a new client ui)

Yeah damn that takes me back.

Thanks, it does. I've been playing since about 2000, came from Cosmic Rift / Infantry when they went non-free.

We're lucky we got Priit to release the encryption/security module so Continuum clients could connect to ASSS servers without the security warning. I doubt it'll ever be updated, someone will have to take up the mantle.

That implies the community that builds around it would not reverse engineer and remake the binaries. Which many already do (to be fair), it just so happens that it's way, way harder when the servers are entirely gone already for a game and you have no way to capture server/client traffic for example. Even if the binaries are flawed, just having those in there and being able to spin up a server to see the packet flow already greatly helps in preservation, much more if you have the binary itself and can also peek at server logic for certain things like conflict resolution, instead of having to guess post-game-shutdown!

> Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.

No need to imagine. Pretty much all of that (minus the last part) happened in Amazon’s New World MMO in the first few weeks.

Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the last part did happen and we just didn’t know about it.

Modern Warfare 2 and 3 have an unpatched RCE. Still available on Steam.

So perhaps replace "die" with "die or turn into a dangerous zombie"?

Either way, the point is that the difference between open-source vs close-source transfers is pretty significant.

> That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.

No, it just means you need need to limit players to a trusted community - but that is usually how things work anyway because malicious players don't need any exploits to make a game unfun.

Having a working implementation means that you have the means to re-make/re-build it from scratch. People are resourceful and would make a implementation without such limitations. Companies on the other hand after years of known vulnerabilities and still selling the game haven't fixed yet:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/gamers-are-fixing-a-video-...

So then you just only play it with trusted friends. It's still better than the current situation

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