Decompiling

[Renegade]

Olaf...you do realize this is a re-run, right?
We've had this exact conversation multiple times in the past, and it hasn't changed since.

If anybody wants to start a full, open port of YR to C++, all power to him.
I, personally, am not gonna spend the next five to ten years doing that and supporting it afterwards.
(OTTD was announced 2003, iirc, so no, that's not an exaggeration.)

Point is, writing a complete, working port on par with the stock game takes a shitload of time and work. It's not a job you can do on a random weekend. If someone is willing to invest that time and work, that's great, and I'm sure several of the community's coders would lend a hand here and there. But there's a vast difference between coding a feature every few months, and committing yourself to working with Westwood's madness for years to come.

So the question really isn't "what goals would you like to achieve?". The question is "are you masochistic enough to practically start from zero and spend another five years on this?".

As said: This ain't a new discussion, and all these arguments have been heard before.

[XTF]

We've talked about starting from scratch before, but I don't remember talking about OpenTTD/Dune-like ports/tools.
After seeing OpenDune's progress, I was wondering about the status of decompiler tools. It's a bit surprising there are no good open source tools in this area. Or I'm not aware of them.

[~Guest~]

As Renegade pointed out, rewriting the game from scratch would take 5-10 years (probably longer because the code is dozens of times more complex than Dune). And like AlexB pointed out, it's really likely now bugs will be introduced during this project. You're better off requesting parts of the RA2/YR source code from EA, considering Apoc gave the TT team small, specific parts of the C&C Renegade source code.

Also considering you're allowed to host an online only version of RA2 on the strike-team website, you're better off hosting a modded version of Yuri's Revenge that emulates RA2, that would allow you to use YR++ and Ares source code in your patching project. For some basic anticheat you could move the addresses (hooking addresses and changing the logic slightly will also break most cheats using them most ofthe time) of sensitive locations around and test this with known cheats, although there are a few open-source more proper anticheat projects that you could use as examples of better anticheats methods (like memory scanning).

[XTF]

We've requested the source code, but that didn't work out. We're using an automatic SS uploader now to combat cheats.

[DCoder]

I'm curious, what cheats do people use these days?

[XTF]

Fog/map hack/revealer is the hardest to detect and gives you a big advantage. The hack comes with full psycic lines.

Disconnecting and out of sync errors.
Training presidents (or other units without met requirements).

[Graion Dilach]

Blargh... shroud revealer is not even a hack. DeeZire used a Fog-of-War shroud.shp and there's no way to detect that.

[XTF]

That's why now we're using an automatic SS uploader.

[DCoder]

A checksum of shroud.shp content can be taken and included in each frame's checksum. That would desync immediately if any player uses it, but not if all of them do.
Spawning units that should not be available can be worked around by catching the network event that reports unit creation and checking if creating it should be possible at all. I don't recall how crate goodies work, but I'm pretty sure that can be handled as well.
Psychic lines could be detected if the frame checksum code is changed to generate a checksum from more properties than just xyz and facing, like it normally does. But that would take some serious processing power...
(Funny thing, the game does have a detailed checksum calculation function for all objects, but it's not normally used, AND the PsychicDetectionRadius flag is not included in it anyway. -_- )

[XTF]

The SS uploader doesn't require the other parties to have the same code. So I'll stick to that.