> ToS are irrelevant

That's some bad advice. ToS are irrelevant only if you don't expect retaliation from ToS owner, or the costs are trivial.

> Open knowledge is important, especially in video game scenes where elitism is a real issue

Open knowledge? This is reverse engineering someone's cash cow. Kinda like claiming Win 10 code is open knowledge.

Video game scenes? Elitist? It's just a silly option in some medieval sim. There are other games that allow these kinds of things. Massive chalice for example.

By that stretch, why not complain Hearts of Iron don't allow you to create a third Furry side in WW2?

Or if you really want to be part of video game scene make your own. But I doubt you'd open source it. It takes monumental effort.

Did you see indie games? It's veritable farmers market of small games.

> Or if you really want to be part of video game scene make your own. But I doubt you'd open source it. It takes monumental effort.

I have minted a few very active video game scenes with a good culture, open codebases and devs that are happy to help and introduced many people to reverse engineering that wouldn't otherwise have gotten into it, and it's really not as hard as you make it seem. Good resources are easy to write when you're passionate.

You just don't have to be so bitter all the time :)

> Kinda like claiming Win 10 code is open knowledge.

It arguably is and you can plop any Windows binary into Ghidra or IDA and learn from it. There's a huge amount of books and free information on NT internals on the internet.

It's the same with games, just that you might be more invested in your favorite game than in NT internals.

> I have minted a few very active video game scenes with a good culture,

Sure. Nice of you to assume I haven't made any games, and put words in my mouth.

So to repay the kindness, I'm going to assume your games weren't on scale of Paradox games. Because those games shave man decades. That means collaborative effort on a longer timescale. That means people sacrificed their time to make this. And people need to eat.

> It arguably is...

Arguably you could open a beer bottle with your eye. That doesn't make your eye a bottle opener.

In same vein, just because you can reverse engineer something doesn't make it open source.

I'm not bitter, just realistic. Poking a sleeping lion isn't guaranteed to kill you, it's just a stupid thing to do. Especially when you are way weaker than a lion and within his claw's reach.

> "good culture"

I didn't meant that I'm interested in making a demo scene around "good culture", whatever that is. I meant I made games before. Alone and as part of team.

If people come to me with stupid ideas, I'm going to shoot them down. Or at least offer mitigations.

And in my original post I implied:

- Are you rich enough to take Paradox to court? Disregard my advice.

- Are you in a jurisdiction Paradox can't sue you? Disregard my advice.

If neither of these apply, you ARE running a risk of getting sued by them. Which while probably low enough, isn't zero, and might changed based on popularity of your leak.

You may wish to reevaluate your approach to participation at Hacker News.

When I encountered this thread and your insult here, I checked your profile and found many antagonistic and low-value comments over the past few days alone. Your history considerably weakens your position and suggests that I can skip reading your other comments in this thread, and your future comments and posts, without being likely to miss anything curious or interesting.

This does your cause no favors, and will diminish and devalue the weight of your words here at HN over time. Please reconsider your approach going forward.

(I'm not an admin, so you can of course ignore my recommendation if you choose to.)

This comment comes late, but I've recently learned that "just curious" without qualification is a fair indicator of hubris.

A self-described "curious" person will seek out connections where none exists, force others to entertain their "great ideas", and eventually arrive at what looks like knowledge but is merely an illusion borne of their pride.

If curiosity is not balanced by humility, anyone could end up like the GP. Wanting to know, but unable and unfit to know because all their inquiries are perverted by their own unerring, unconscious self-love.

You may wish to bring that up to the site admins, who invoke curiosity as a primary purpose of Hacker News in various places. While it’s legitimate to wonder if it’s a sound direction, doing so here is unlikely to reach their attention. Consider dropping a note to them using the footer Contact link to let them know you’re concerned.

The code runs on your machine. You do not own the game, the idea behind the game or the logic, but you do own the copy of the game on your machine.

You can read and change your copy, regardless of what the ToS says. The owner of the game can retaliate, this is not law after all.

Sure, but if you do it alone, on your computer and not tell anyone, no one from Paradox is going to harass you about it.

Moment you start open sourcing someone's game behind their back, is when they get defensive.

I believe this might be forbidden by the DMCA

IIUC, changes that circumvent encryption intended to control access to copyrighted materials would be forbidden by the DMCA; other changes would not. I suppose we could say the game itself envisions the rules by which we're intended to access its content, but if there's no encryption being circumvented I think the DMCA still doesn't apply. That said, I'm now curious how it defines encryption.

> ToS are irrelevant and you should have published it anyways, under a name different from the one you use on the forums and in-game.

Not right after you were refused permission though, that's too obvious.