This is why the War Thunder fan base is the best, they'll leak top secret military plans just to settle a disagreement on the forums risking court marshall and felony charges.
no a nerd would've released it because that's more interesting.
yeah, what do you even call this?
Teacher’s pet. True Nerds™️would have walked across mount everest barefooted merely to get a lost copy of cut content of the adventures of glup shitto.
Square, snitch, dweeb, suck-up, kiss-ass, scab, or worst of all, R*dditor.
pulling a Jeff Goldberg
Imagine not at least copying it before sending it back
Incredible
The absolute worst was all the R*dditors sucking off OP in the original thread.
blizzard people are absolute freaks
Both!
they might've, ya never know.
Imagine not selling it to the highest bidder and uploading a copy after you get the money
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
Thirty pieces of Reddit Silver
Incredible
Hate these types of gamers with a passion
Redditors are the worst
looking into it looks like he was told to send it back by the blizzard legal team and he asked lawyers if he had to. he did.
not putting shade on him but like fuck being targeted like that, the only way this could've been done would've been to fuckin NOT POST THAT SHIT ON REDDIT
Seems like they got in a storage unit auction and immediately went to asking reddit about it LMAO
Like come on dude. I get being cautious about it, and being concerned about it getting traced back to them if it did leak online. But that's game preservation gold right there.
I hope they at least saved a local copy before sending it back but I doubt it.
Like come on dude. I get being cautious about it, and being concerned about it getting traced back to them if it did leak online. But that's game preservation gold right there.
"I didn't leak it. Some dude broke into my house and stole the CD in order to dump its contents online because I bragged about it on Reddit like a dumbass. My bad."
I have a bunch of old pre-release demos and give aways from the 90s but I doubt they had any source code for games but I think I remember some for software at least.
If they aren't already there, you should rip 'em and throw it up on archive.org or something
I will have a look in a few months when I visit my parents and do just that in case I find anything. 
They could've done both lol
You laugh but getting updoots from redditors for the wholesome chungus keanu 9000 move is priceless.
tasteless: noooooooooo
artosis: YOU HAD THE HIGH GROUND!
help me escape these tulpas
Not on the same level, but I'd love to get my hands on one of those Pokemon distribution carts. None of them are actually useful outside of the Shiny Zigzagoon with a glitch-fix kernal, but it would be special to me.
That Zigzagoon one was the Mario Kart demo or pre-order bonus disc on GameCube I think?
What on earth is source code anyway
Source code is the (nerd) human readable form of software. To run it you put it through a thing called a compiler that translates it into the ones and zeros the computer processor can actually process, and those raw ones and zeros are how proprietary software is generally distributed.
Having the source code means it's easy (for nerds) to change the software or to run it on other kinds of processors.
Hm ok. So one writes source code in a coding language, it gets turned into 1s and 0s. Why can't you go back? Source code gets compiled into a specific order of 1s and 0s, but the same set of 1s and 0s could be made from different types of source code?
it's pretty hard to un-bake a cake
It's like trying to figure out the exact tools used to build a house by looking at the finished house. You can figure out some tools (a hammer, a paintbrush, etc) but it's hard to know exactly. Programs are so interdependent on the components that make them up, guessing isn't a good solution.
Why can't you go back
You sort of can, there are de-compilers like Ghidra that can help with this, but it usually takes a lot of manual effort to properly decode.
the same set of 1s and 0s could be made from different types of source code
Yeah, basically. Companies will also take extra steps to make it so people can't get source code from software, since it's their proprietary IP and whatever.
Like others said, you sort of can. But I also want to add that things like functions names, or comments explaining how a function works, are not needed by your computer when running the program, and thus they get lost after compiling. After running a program designed to reverse engineer a compiled program, you'll be able to see a very dumbed down version; no meaningful function or variable names nor comments explaining the code. You have to figure those out all by yourself.
And add to that that some companies/programmers make some parts of the program difficult to read on purpose, so you have more guesswork to do when reverse engineering, and you've got a giant task ahead of you reverse engineering even small games.
On a side note, the original source code can also just be interesting or funny to read. Valve's source code comments come to mind.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You can go back but it's very difficult. Only the biggest nerds can do it, with great dedication and time. That process is called reverse engineering.
For a very simple example, suppose I wrote some code to add how many apples Jack and Jill have together. The source code might look like
jackApples = 3
jillApples = 4
numApples = jackApples + jillApples
But the computer doesn't care about Jack, or Jill, or apples for that matter. It only cares about numbers. So when the compiler puts it into ones and zeros all those useful names get dropped. And when I decompile the binary (what we call those ones and zeros) what I get back might look more like
var1 = 3
var2 = 4
var3 = var1 + var2
And if I want to change how many apples Jill has it's a whole process of trial and error to figure out which variable is Jill's number of apples.
Now expand that to thousands or millions of lines of code and you begin to see why nerds want source code instead of binaries.
The compiler will see that var3 is just two numbers added together and replace it with 7, which saves having to do an addition every time you run through that code, and is therefore faster. var1 and var2 may be removed from the output as well; shorter code runs faster since you can fit more in the cache. In fact, since var3 is just a number, you can replace every place that it's used with a 7 as well; if you have some functions:
// be careful! if the number of apples is less than six then the UI will not line up properly
auto getTheNumberOfApples() -> int {
auto jackApples = 3;
auto jillApplies = 4;
return jackApples + jillApplies;
}
auto appleWeight() -> float {
return 0.2 * getTheNumberOfApples();
}
... then the compiler will look at all that, delete the lot, and just use 1.4f wherever the appleWeight() function was called. Comment is gone, the decision making is gone, it's impossible to go backwards any more.
I'm not a professional programmer and just a hobbyist, but if you also had a set function that changes jackApples to an input integer, what happens at compilation?
That disables a whole pile of the potential optimisations, of course. You could define jackApples as a "static variable" (as opposed to making it eg. a field in a class or struct):
namespace {
auto jackApples = 3;
}
auto setJackApples(int newJackApples) -> void {
jackApples = newJackApples;
}
The most obvious consequence of this is that jackApples now has an address in memory, which you could find out with &jackApples. Executable programs are arranged into a sequence of blocks when they're compiled, which have some historical names based on what they used to be for:
text section, which contains all of the executable code, and which might be made read-only by the OS.data section, which contains variables that have a known value at startupbss section, which contains variables that we know will exist but don't have a value. Might be zero'd out by the OS, might contain unknown leftover values.Because it's statically allocated, jackApples will be in the data section; if you opened up the executable with a hex editor, you'd see a 3 there.
getTheNumberOfApples() will be optimised by the compiler to return the contents of the memory address plus 4. That still counts as a very simple and short function, and it's quite likely that the compiler would inline it and remove the initial function. The actual process of calling a function is to:
That takes a while, and worse - modern CPUs will try to "pipeline" all the instructions that they know are coming so that it all runs faster. Jumping to a function might break that pipeline, causing a "stall", which slows things down enormously. Much better to inline short functions - the fact that the value is "number in memory address plus four" might be optimised away a little wherever it's used, too.
To add on to what the others have said, the compiler will also optimise your code (which is why professional coders write in common patterns as much as possible, so the compiler can recognise them and optimise).
So many times, you literally won't even have the same program.
Also machine understandable code (assembly or 1s and 0s) is different depending on the processor used. You could give me machine code made for a risc-v processor and I could reconstruct a c program that made it. But if I had the same program compiled for an x86 processor ...
It's Blizzard, if he'd held on to it he'd probably have gotten Inscryption'd
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules