Rebellion's Language

[Master_Xan]

WARNING: Serious inquiry ahead. Leave absolutely no joke untold. Beware falling objects, and be sure to tell me I'm an idiot (otherwise that chip starts to get big). This thread is of a technical nature, so please leave your kid sister who still plays with Barbies in the babysitting lounge next door and make sure your brain is in good working order (or discard it entirely to prevent any possible confusion).

 

So, anybody know what language Rebellion was written in? C, basic, what? Or a way to find out? Or a guess? Any clue as to what program was used to write it? A way to find out? A guess?

[budious]

Well I've tried running the rebexe.exe through various decompiler and disassemblers available across the net with very little success. Even if you did find one that could decifer the code, many of the variables and parameters would not be recoverable. Reverse engineering the game would not be plausible, you may as well code a new engine from scratch to work with the game resources.

 

I was actually attempting to disassemble rebed with various delphi decompilers since the readme file claims it was written in delphi v.3 but none have been successful. I tried v.26 and v.22, if anyone else has older versions of rebed on hand, let me know, or xdcc them to me in #swrebellion.

[Evaders99]

Pretty sure its C++ - the staple for most Windows applications

Even if you decompiled the thing, you'd just get a lot of assembly code. No way could you reconstruct the code back into a form that would be useful to edit it

[Master_Xan]

Decompile, or disassemble? From what I know, decompiling would give us code, while disassemble would give us machine language (utterly useless unless we converted that into standard code). Disassembling wouldn't be nearly as good, forcing two conversions, but if we can't decompile then it might be worth a shot. It might be that LA obfuscated the code, which could be why you didn't succeed. How long ago did you try? I can only assume that as the game gets older, there is more chance that someone will have a decompiler capable of cutting through any security they might have implemented, and more decompilers in general are made (so a new one might have more success simply because of design differences).

 

Even with many variables missing, having parts of the code would still be useful. It would allow for a better understanding of the engine, making it easier to work around limitations. Naturally, having the full code would mean actually fixing those limitations, but I'll take what I can get.

 

Oh, and I should mention. Remember the part of my warning where I told you to call me an idiot? Don't be afraid to do just that if I say something stupid, as I'm not particularly experienced with coding issues and have never tried to reverse engineer something before. Trust me, I won't be offended. I might even clap.

 

EDIT: hmm. I've been doing some reading, and I'm beginning to agree with you two more and more (and discovering my own ignorance). Some reading on Slashdot and various other forums is revealing to me that yes, you can decompile, but not only does it leave out variables, and parameters, but also has the code misarranged, and even mixed with assembly. I'm getting the distict impression that its possible, but WAAAY over my head, extremely time consuming, and may not even be worth all the effort.

 

As a sidenote, I really liked a post on this page. If you take a quick look on it, you'll see its an argument for whether decompiling is possible or not. One guy about halfway down the page makes a great argument against it, using all kinds of wonderous logic. A reply to it:

"Been doing it for twenty years. It is easy to do.

Stop trying to use logic... actually do it."

And that, my friends, is good advice. Don't argue something you've never tried with people who have tried it, you'll always loose when they say something eliquent like that.