I would argue it would hold the crown for best Spider-Man game for some time until the flawed masterpiece Spider-Man 2 (2004) gave us truly amazing web-slinging physics in a sandbox environment, or the less-free-but-tighter-overall Ultimate Spider-Man in 2005.
Still, it's fun enough to just swing around the city that I can just ignore the missions and just play around.
Spider-Man 2000 was still fun. I haven't played the Dreamcast version, but I played the hell out of the PS1 version, unlocking nearly everything in the process.
USM was definitely a downgrade on the freedom/webslinging front, but pretty much everything else was better, and it was a tighter experience. I guess it comes down to whether you're the type who prefers the game with the better overall package, or the game with one killer feature that it does really well and you can't find anywhere else.
https://github.com/isledecomp/isle/tree/master/tools
We've been considering creating a separate project/repository for the tools since they might be interesting for other projects such as yours as well.
Happy to use anything that makes my life easier! I myself also started to prototype some tools - https://github.com/krystalgamer/spidey-decomp/tree/master/to... - but didn't get much far. I see there's quite a bit of overlap so I might integrate them on my workflow
Curious to know about `patch_c2.py` it mentions a bugged warning. Is that patch just to remove the warning or something deeper?
https://web.archive.org/web/20000519112833/https://support.m...
Since the warning is relatively useless we opted to fix C2.EXE so that it is never emitted. It generates a lot of noise during compilation otherwise (if you are using templates).
It really captured the open ended nonsense feeling of sitting down and playing with legos.
Anywayyyyy, will be following this development more closely now. Would be really cool to eventually see some type of level editor for this game, or maybe a multiplayer server (akin to this Bomb Rush Cyberfunk mod: https://thunderstore.io/c/bomb-rush-cyberfunk/p/NotNet/SlopC... )
> Would be really cool to eventually see some type of level editor for this game
So there's already a tool by Zedek that can export the models to blender (not sure about re-importing). I heard that PSXPrev by rickomax can work with the game files but never tried myself. As for level editor, there was this guy that came into the community and made a proper level unpacker + packer, it was primitive but worked much better than anything that I've ever done. Sadly he disappeared but his tool still floats around from what I remember.
> maybe a multiplayer server
I get asked about this a lot :D Multiplayer will be a challenge in the way it handles events, there's a lot of hardcoded stuff. Not saying it's impossible, but it'd require a big re-write of the engine.
Looking at the commit history, I see only contributions by the author “krystalgamer”. Wild.
Rare to find a person with such resolve and enjoyment. Wish this person good luck!
I've had some really good results on x86 since writing an analyzer for an architecture where relocation spots target 4-byte immediate fields inside of instructions is fairly easy. Unfortunately, the PlayStation uses a MIPS processor and writing an analyzer for split HI16/LO16 relocations is proving to be a devilishly tricky problem. I got it to a point where it works well enough on MIPS most of the time, but there's always a new weird edge case hidden inside a function thousands of instructions long where it breaks down...
> Creating libraries, by extracting parts of a program and reusing them in another context;
This seems like a big win when creating (un-)packers for custom formats. For this game after isolating the routine that decompresses the textures it was so annoying to not mess up the logic - https://github.com/krystalgamer/spidey-tools/blob/master/psx...
I’m current self studying calculus. This is exactly the situation I am falling into. I now spend an extra hour and a half or so at work in the lunch room (my workplace is 24x7) and go through the calculus book. I’ve been doing this for 6 weeks or so, and though my progress may seem slow to many (I just got through limits) I understand the material properly.
(In terms of 6 weeks, I did the prerequisites chapters first which took some time, then I had a holiday, and I spent almost a week and a half on the Delta-Epsion definition of a limit - and I do all the problems in the book and there are a lot)
Anyway, I guess this tangent is really unrelated, but I think more people should be embarking on decompilation projects. It's very fun, and it's uniquely rewarding if you manage to get some non-trivial decompilation of code to work properly.
I had one odd use case for decompiling that was actually, as far as I know, completely licit: WebView2Loader. Microsoft distributed the WebView2 SDK as 3-BSD so that you could integrate it into your applications without worrying about licensing, but the glue logic that actually interacts with the WebView2 installation and instantiates the COM objects is closed source. But... since it is closed-source 3-BSD, without a EULA... we can reverse engineer it. It being a relatively small shim, I did just that[1]. This was an easy exercise armed with an interactive disassembler, and since it was relatively simple and very small I didn't need to bother with matching anything: I just roughly replicated the behavior instead. The use case for this was allowing people to make WebView2 bindings that didn't have any external dependencies; the OpenWebView2Loader code was ported to Pascal and Go by others, making it possible to have pure bindings that don't require any C code or external DLLs and can directly talk to the WebView2 installation. There's now a static copy of the WebView2Loader with the SDK, which obviates some of the use of this, but this is still a nice approach for Go where you can entirely avoid CGo or messing with weird object format conversion. (It's way better than my original approach for WebView2 in Go, which is to emulate the Windows linker to link and execute an entirely in-memory copy of the WebView2Loader DLL using a lot of unsafe code. That also works, but it is much more bug prone and frankly horrifying.)
The trouble with decompilation projects is that there's hardly any tooling or literature available on the topic [1], so people usually end up developing custom tooling and methodology on their own to solve their issues. For example, personally I went down the path of delinking programs back into object files in my own project. While I find it quite nifty, it also isolates me on my own desert island and I know of other decompilation projects with totally different approaches in a similar situation.
Decompilation projects can be quite intellectually rewarding, but they are essentially R&D projects in a barely explored field. Wander off the thin strip of beaten path and you're basically on your own in an endless primordial jungle.
[1] At least until decomp.me came along, but that's geared for perfect decompilation only. Any other approach and you're still on your own.
Wow, that's exactly the approach I wanted to take. However, as you've said, there's basically no tools for this, so it's a bit demoralizing.
All of this effort could’ve been spent on implementing features and fixing bugs by super dedicated fans of the games. Instead, there’s a constant fight with code and bloodsucking lawyers of greedy companies who don’t give a single shit about those games.
Most of those aren’t even sold anymore. Destined to rot, because of petty reasons.
You can see bug fixes and new features. There's just a moment where bigger features become unfeasible to be done this way. It's the same dedicated fans that implement new features and fix bugs that then move into decompilation projects.
There will be times where a game source code has been lost in the void... and then you get these godsend people who are able to reverse the game and recreate it.
We need these talented people.
