Laser Eyes on 22/3/2008 at 23:14
Hey guys at Irrational/2KB, after EA takes over Take-Two (consider it inevitable) how about releasing a patch for System Shock 2 to implement support for standard 16:9 and 16:10 widescreen resolutions.
Now that you know how to do widescreen support right from your experience with BioShock there's lots of Shock fans with widescreen monitors who would love to play it in widescreen glory. It would give the game a whole new lease of life.
I'm sure it wouldn't cost much in the way of man-hours just to make a patch for that one thing.
New Horizon on 22/3/2008 at 23:18
Why not post this on the Irrational/ 2kboston forums. This is a fan site.
Laser Eyes on 22/3/2008 at 23:25
Don't they look here?
TF on 22/3/2008 at 23:44
lol :(
Kolya on 23/3/2008 at 01:49
I think they stopped after we told them what we think of Bioshock and it's copy protection usage prevention.
Anyway, the people here know more about SS2 than anyone on TDFKAI's payroll. If you want widescreen ask someone like Timeslip or Displacer.
I seriously wonder, you've been here since 2003...have you spent that time under a stone?
icemann on 23/3/2008 at 08:51
He probably spent it all in the com chat area.
EvaUnit02 on 23/3/2008 at 15:18
As cool as it would be to have native horiz+ widescreen support, you have to realise how old these games and with whom you're dealing. A group like EA aren't going to care enough to patch a long OOP, 9 year old game. The best we can hope for is a release of the source code, but we aren't going to get that. In the past, the Wing Commander community petitioned EA for them to release the source codes for those respective games, EA said no.
Bjossi on 23/3/2008 at 16:25
The source code can be obtained through reverse engineering, which unfortunately is much easier said that done.
Myagi on 23/3/2008 at 18:04
"obtaining the sourcecode" is probably going to give the wrong idea, even if you had some c++ decompiler that actually worked, what you would get is a mess that's supposed resemble a sourcecode, without any meaningful function/var names or comments and no relation to "the" sourcecode.
The hard part is not seeing that it does "ret = arg1 + loc2653"* somewhere, which is all a decompiler might give you, it's knowing why it's done and what the heck ret, arg1 and loc2653 are, and nothing but original source or hard labor can answer that. Even if someone would put in all the work, you wouldn't end up with anything looking like the original source, just a source that hopefully produced the same exe.
The best chance for any hack/fix like widescreen would be messing around with a dissasembly, and having plenty of spare time.
* obviously an extremly simplified and metaphorical example
Bjossi on 23/3/2008 at 18:44
An experienced programmer with a lot of free time could translate the end result of a decompile to proper compilable code, as far as I know at least. If decompiling would be enough to get the source code, we'd have started using it to our advantage a long time ago. :o