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OpenTS is a new open-source reconstruction of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 6 points 2 months ago (11 children)

"AI models — Codex, Claude, and DeepSeek — substantially accelerated the final phase. They were given disassembly, decompiled pseudocode, surrounding reconstructed source, engine context, compiler errors, and binary-diff feedback, and helped interpret functions, generate candidate implementations, and iterate toward closer matches. Their output was never treated as authoritative: every candidate was reviewed by developers, compiled, compared against the reference executable."

As expected: slop.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I’m less opposed to AI assisted development if it just a fan or two building free, open source ports that makes older stuff more playable. Now if it’s a full-priced corporate remaster, then I start to take issue with AI reliance.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    The problem is that if it's not a clean-room/Chinese wall reimplementation, then it isn't Free Software regardless of what license they try to slap on it. In order for a Free Software license to be valid the person choosing the license has to be the copyright holder to begin with, and if it's a derivative work of the proprietary original -- which it is, if it's created by feeding the original into an AI -- then they aren't!

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    As expected? There's been a few high profile RE efforts recently of games of the era without AI tooling. The Mario 64 decompile effort from a few years ago being the most notable. While I'm not surprised to see an AI disclosure here (I would assume agents are a very useful tool for this particular work), this just as readily have been an entirely human passion project.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago* (4 children)

    Yeah, "as expected". The project showed up out of nowhere five days ago and is clearly vibe-coded to fuck and back. The talk of how "oh, it accelerated development, but we checked everything, we swear" is obvious bullshit like it is with basically all of these dime-a-dozen, dead-end slop projects that are showing up everywhere.

    No, it would not "just as readily have been an entirely human passion project", because those take months to years, and you therefore hear about them organically as they're in development; they don't show up out of the aether to get a few paragraphs' mention on an obscure Linux blog. Even from a statistical point of view, those passion projects are vanishingly few compared to the slop projects.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I know it's five days old and made heavy use of AI. My comment is that before hearing about it, it's deeply cynical to expect it to be AI driven.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    before hearing about it

    while* hearing about it. The only introduction is a bulleted list of what the project is and isn't that Liam copy–pasted from their docs. Nothing about any anticipation; nothing about how long it had been in the works; nothing about the authors; no link to a release blog or previous story discussing it in any way; nothing about finally being in a playable state/anything related to the dev cycle. Liam talked about it like it popped into existence (true) and they were just hearing about it for the first time (true).

    Combined with what I said above, it's just basic media literacy that I'm reading about a dead-end throwaway project.

    it's deeply cynical

    I gave it a shot by reading the article, which was more than it deserved.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    while* hearing about it.

    Think we just have a different take on the meaning of 'expect' is all.

    nothing about finally being in a playable state

    "... appears to work on Linux with Proton 11 as captured in my screenshot above"

    copy–pasted

    heh

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    “… appears to work on Linux with Proton 11 as captured in my screenshot above”

    The emphasis in that point was the word "finally", not "playable state". As in "it's finally working after x amount of time" like you'd expect with a project that takes any appreciable time to get working.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    As expected? There’s been a few high profile RE efforts recently of games of the era without AI tooling. The Mario 64 decompile effort from a few years ago being the most notable.

    Those are just as bad, if not worse. Decompiling the thing just means the generated source code is a derivative work of the proprietary original. You can't put a Free Software license on that!

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    There is no clean room implementation of a discrete title that would not run afoul of Western copyright and trademark law. If you want to release Super Mario 64, as it was made, you will not have a free license to do so until it enters the public domain. You can release Supra Wario 63, with all it's not quite the same assets, and argue that you can get away with it. The value of these projects is not the licensing.

    Now, worse? This scenario would actually be improved if the AI were to do the whole implementation? Because it would apply a FOSS license where a human could not? This is nonsensical.

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