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Dethrace: Reverse engineering the 1997 game Carmageddon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711067 - April 2023 (38 comments)

Enjoyed hours playing Carmageddon. Thanks, Patrick.

Now if we could have reversing of Death Rally!!

You're welcome:

https://github.com/urxp/drally

That was fast. What about the 1989 classic Death Track?

what about Quarantine?

Desperately hoping they include the Fox & Hounds multiplayer mode, which is some of the best fun I've ever had with a LAN game.

My colleagues at The Digital Village (we made Starship Titanic) spend so much time on that one mode, we mentioned Stainless in the ST credits.

Yeah, this game was crazy on a LAN with friends.

> we made Starship Titanic

oh neat! I was a voracious Douglas Adams reader and when this game came out, I bought a copy. I don't think I could ever get it working on my machine, and I eventually gave up and have probably lost the copy.

Is it worth buying a new one and giving it a go? (I'm on Linux-only these days.)

looks like it's natively supported on Linux, and apparently runs even better running the Windows version under Proton: https://www.protondb.com/app/467290

Yup, and it's available on both Steam and GOG, usually pretty cheap. It's not running the original code underneath - some amazingly dedicated soul spent over a year porting its custom engine into ScummVM, and that's what the versions on sale now use.

And that dedicated soul (dreammaster) would really like to know who wrote the final star map puzzle, because there was sooo much matrix math his head almost exploded :)

Remember taking our pc's (along with 17"crt) to my pals house and playing fox and hounds until 5 or 6am then going to work.

I was the USA champion in this game back when being an esports pro meant winning a Voodoo 2 for your efforts. Best driving game ever, and so much fun.

I remember being epically disappointed about this game when I played it after original release.

Perhaps I was too quick to judge it? I might buy a copy and give it another try.

> Maybe they removed the "a" to be compatible with 8.3 filenames?

My hair feels gray

  start /D C:\DOCUME~2 GRAYHA~1.PPT

And then, on the other end of the spectrum, pour one out for the Steam morons who refuse to start on a case sensitive FS: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0395-A862-13F3-6E...

The very idea of having to keep around a .dmg formatted "Case Insensitive" is just ... what. the. hell.

That's because they don't want to deal with "Steam sucks!!!" posts from people who want to run some game that has hardcoded file paths assuming Windows behavior.

I totally get this.

A very long time ago I was trying to debug a flash website that had been created on a case insensitive Mac or Linux and was breaking on Linux without the source.

Not that long ago I was tasked with cleaning up a Git repo, created on a case-sensitive Mac, that had multiple files with names that collided when checked out on a case-insensitive Mac. That ordeal made me want to hang up my keyboard, move to the country, and spend the rest of my days fixing power lawn equipment.

yuck, I had to deal with something similar once, made double fun by the code being a hot mess of JavaScript dung... original dev was on Windows, new one was on Mac and let's just say it was "fun" tracing through all the upper/lowercase nonsense that wasn't consistent anywhere. PHP can fall into similar traps and I think Java as well...

"It just works."™

I hit this a couple of days ago. I deployed a Sqlite DB from Windows named Orders.db. Code ran fine on Windows. All the code refers to it with a capital. On Linux it passed the "file exists" check and then borked trying to open it. I renamed it to orders.db and everything was OK in the world again.

It is ridiculous because steam linux exists and runs on case sensitive filesystems with no problem. why does only mac get the error? It does not make any sense.

> Dethrace is released to the Public Domain. The documentation and function provided by Dethrace may only be utilized with assets provided by ownership of Carmageddon.

> The source code in this repository is for non-commerical use only. If you use the source code you may not charge others for access to it or any derivative work thereof.

I'm confused. Is the source code in this repository public domain, or not?

Dethrace is just the game engine. It needs maps, car models, textures, sounds, etc. from the orginal Carmageddon game, which is not Public Domain.

That’s not the issue. If the source code is in the public domain, you’re not free to impose additional licensing conditions like “no commercial use”. It’s either released into the public domain or under some license that prohibits commercial usage: it can’t be both.

The art artifacts used by the engine are not part of the source code, and there is no obligation from the game engine to provide you the artifacts. You can either used those provided by the original game (which is licensed under a difference license) or you are free to produce your own and you can release this under CC0 if you wish, but this is anyway independent from the source code. This is a very common practice used by open source games for years.

You’re completely missing the point. We’re not talking about the art assets at all. This issue is that the text (about the source code, not about the art) is contradictory: First it says the code is “Public Domain”, but then it says the code “is for non-commerical use only”. But this is a contradiction. If the code is public domain you can’t impose any restrictions, which is what “for non-commerical use only” is.

My mistake. I misunderstood the question.

Copyright is too long. It's impressive but a waste of talent for people to reverse engineer what should be publicly available source code.

Don't know. When I was a teen I took pleasure in reverse engineering things and I learned a lot.

There's never been a shortage of interesting things to reverse engineer.

Really nice work. Thanks for the share.