i wish i could have been a fly on the wall at naughty dog during the development of these games.

or better yet, i wish andy gavin would get so unbelievably bored that he would brain dump every last detail he remembers about designing and implementing goal, or share the source. it’s tragic that knowledge and experience will vanish

I think he has an account here, he will see your comment:D

That runs a risk of infringing on Sony's copyrights and trade secrets. He won't do it.

* * *

Yeah he dumped a fair bit about GOOL, the precursor to GOAL for Crash Bandicoot, but not a peep about GOAL. Funny to see this on HN because I was just looking into all of this yesterday. I wish these old games could get a source release so we could just see the magic. PS1/PS2 era Naughty Dog and Insomniac were on another level. The decompiled GOAL code that's available is neat but it clearly is the code after macro expansion and potentially other passes have been done so it's no substitute for the original source.

I think around the time of Jak 1 development they were acquired by Sony. As long as Sony doesn't shutdown the project, it's good enough!

I love how hyper specific this project is, once complete it will run only 3 games. That is unless some of the code made it to the PSP games.

probably Jak X as well

3 masterpieces*

Oh that would be incredible. I've been waiting almost two decades to play Daxter without the stupid-ass design decision to make "up" on the slide pad be slightly to the side of "straight forward" in the game.

That change seems like it would be pretty straightforward to implement in the input handling code of an emulator.

You would think, but nobody's done it. Maybe fixing it that way breaks direction functionality somewhere else, like aiming or menu-ing. For the life of me I have never been able to figure out why the devs did that.

This is one of my favorite OSS gaming projects going on right now. Three quite good games that used a custom language being taken apart to reverse engineer the language and thus how the game ran.