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Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if "runk" was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
I think this probably applies...
So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.
In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc...) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).
There are still updates regularly released for it too!
I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.
Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).
Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.
Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people
Also the guy who fixed GTA Online's ridiculous loading times.
“Yeah, the load times are shit, but they aren’t shit enough to tell some intern to spend two months figuring out what’s going on.”
“What about when some nerd fixes it in a week and embarrasses us when he shows how it was caused by the addition of the shop?”
“We’ll fucking sue, that’s what.”
“What if we just paid him the bug bounty instead?”
“Fine, no need to Streisand this time, I guess.”
Rockstar being actual rockstars in their response :D