The gaming industry is pretty infamous for doing a crap job of archiving things, especially in the old days. The textbook case of this was when a hard drive containing the source code for Asteroids and Pong was thrown out by accident some time in the 90’s or 00’s. Even if it was well preserved, THQ is a dead company, Pandemic as well. Pandemic was bought by EA and died roughly around 2009 or 2010, and THQ itself fell apart in 2012-- that basically means if the source code was still around by the time THQ was going out of business, it’s been gone for 5 years at least. Nordic did mention that they have one of the games’ source codes; unfortunately, the one in particular was one of the crappy Xbox 360 era entries that nobody remembered nor wants to see again.
There were stories of Double Fine scrounging up old hard drives from LucasArts just to get the master-render cutscenes for Grim Fandango (so they wouldn’t look like they were on a CD-ROM game from 1998) to make the remaster, and even then, they weren’t able to get the original 3D assets, meaning they couldn’t re-render the cutscenes or backgrounds.
It may be possible to hack the original Xbox version or PS2 version for the backwards-compatibility releases. These games aren’t being properly ported, though… they’re being emulated. Unless Microsoft announced Xbox backwards compatibility on Windows 10 out of nowhere, it’s not happening… and I’ve already watched the MS E3 conference. They didn’t.
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Timesplitters is definitely dead for the time being, but there is a fan project that seems to be on so-so/“eh” legal terms.
TS Rewind Community Project
I’ve been watching that project for years @CptMold. It’s creeping along, but the consensus last time i checked was that cryengine was too difficult to use compared to unity and unreal engines. Crytek promised not to mess with the project so long as they did it in cryengine. They seem like they might be losing momentum.
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The sounds and textures included with the game can be recovered, but they’ll not be the master files, they’ll be compressed, low-res, etc. They generally won’t have enough data to update them to a modern standard without recreating them from scratch, using the originals only as a guide.
While most executables can be “decompiled” to produce code in the original language, the result is often quite different from the source code, because decompiling doesn’t undo the compiler’s optimizations, which can significantly change the structure of the code. The decompiled code will also be missing comments and variable/function names, which that are very useful to programmers seeking to make changes and updates. Such code might be equivalent to the source code when compiled, but making changes to it to e.g. update the mechanics, insert new assets, use new rendering techniques, etc is impractical, to the point where a full-on from-scratch remake is often easier than trying to figure out the decompiled code.
Even when the source code is available, it can be easier to do a remake, because the code is outdated, platform-specific, poorly-structured, or even just plain unfamiliar.
Edit: Forgot to mention, many parts of games aren’t even “coded”, but consist of data files that are parsed by the engine at run time (if you’re lucky) or compile time (ouch). Level data, enemy data, puzzle data, quest data, all that stuff is usually not hard-coded. The tools to create and parse these files might be as lost as the source code, especially for older closed-source engines, and there’s no decompiling this stuff unless the format is human readable (it often isn’t) or well-documented (it almost always isn’t).
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It didn’t seem like a “too complex” problem as much as support not really helping them. They kept getting every new engine version going to try and bring in featuers that were promised, nad said features kept getting delayed. The big one they wanted was PBR.
I’m amazed at the momentum it has knowing they switched engines then switched back again. Hopefully it’ll have more stable footing soon. I think as soon as they get their first playable build, they’ll start drawing in more support, because I can imagine a large part of the problem is that the results they currently have don’t justify [if I remember correctly] five years of work.