Ridiculous Question

[FloatingFatMan]

Yes, and I'm absolutely certain that NCsoft has a copy of that.  If they ever claimed that they don't, I'd call them a liar, because as I think I said above, that would be like Pepsi telling someone that they lost the recipe to Mountain Dew.  I simply don't believe it; such a thing would be too valuable.  If it were written in 1980, it might be plausible, but companies today keep everything that might even hint of being worth something someday, and working source code with 10 years' worth of updates is worth millions.

In my office, we have backups of our sourcesafe db going back to 1995, when our company was formed.  There's even early VB3 prototyping code in there.

There's almost zero chance NCSoft have destroyed the game or server code and associated assets.

[Kaos Arcanna]

In my office, we have backups of our sourcesafe db going back to 1995, when our company was formed.  There's even early VB3 prototyping code in there.

There's almost zero chance NCSoft have destroyed the game or server code and associated assets.

Perhaps not, but as Paragon doesn't exist anymore, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the assets were not kept particularly well and are either lost or damaged now.

Heck, NASA taped over recordings from the early moonlandings so it's not entirely possible shortsightedness can beat common sense.

[duane]

If the process gets to the point where it is discovered the data is too incomplete to put back together I would still like to see the intellectual property purchase happen and hopefully land in the hands of a company that would make 2.0 happen. 

[Surelle]

If the process gets to the point where it is discovered the data is too incomplete to put back together I would still like to see the intellectual property purchase happen and hopefully land in the hands of a company that would make 2.0 happen.

Me too!  APR  FTW!   It's way better than never getting our city back at all, and I want the CoX i23 rez AND the APR approved equally as much.

[Styrj]

Me too!  APR  FTW!   It's way better than never getting our city back at all, and I want the CoX i23 rez AND the APR approved equally as much.

Here! Here!  I'm all for that!  I would love to have CoX I(any number) available to play. ;D

[Rejolt]

Ok, can someone who knows about disc images and what poor shape actually means answer this?: Would poor shape mean the code that runs the AI has been broken? That sounds like the major sticking point here. CoH ran all of the background numbers and AI from it's servers, etc. (if I'm stating this wrong, sorry!). You can't just run a home version without a server that can run the ENTIRE game.

I recently re-watched Matt Miller's Youtube interview after CoH's closure and he pitied the person(s) would have to follow up all the strings and things they had to do to get the game running as well as it did.

If the disc image is in bad shape are we talking graphically weirdness, loss of ragdoll, invisible characters (remember that bug when it was enemies that wouldn't show up?!) or are entire lines of code that make the actual game go just wibbledy, wobbledy, scrabbley bits of noodles all piled up chaotically now?

EDIT: Anyone have examples of re-launched games that suffered from a damaged image?

[johnn477]

It sounds to me as if most of the technical problems are solvable once the IP is available.  As to the business side of things, most negotiations take longer than anyone imagines.  Unless there is a REALLY pressing reason to move quickly.  I would imagine that there isn't for any of the principals.  Nothing appears to be on fire.   I have no issue with waiting and understand the need to maintain face for all concerned.  I think we need to acknowledge that we're probably not a priority for NC Soft, but they really won't waste time on a negotiation that has no chance.  It's not in their best interests to string Nate and his team or the community along.  They will simply say, " sorry not doable" and move on.  The fact that that hasn't happened means that they're all still talking.  And that's good.   I'd really like to fly again.

[FloatingFatMan]

Ok, can someone who knows about disc images and what poor shape actually means answer this?: Would poor shape mean the code that runs the AI has been broken? That sounds like the major sticking point here. CoH ran all of the background numbers and AI from it's servers, etc. (if I'm stating this wrong, sorry!). You can't just run a home version without a server that can run the ENTIRE game.

I recently re-watched Matt Miller's Youtube interview after CoH's closure and he pitied the person(s) would have to follow up all the strings and things they had to do to get the game running as well as it did.

If the disc image is in bad shape are we talking graphically weirdness, loss of ragdoll, invisible characters (remember that bug when it was enemies that wouldn't show up?!) or are entire lines of code that make the actual game go just wibbledy, wobbledy, scrabbley bits of noodles all piled up chaotically now?

EDIT: Anyone have examples of re-launched games that suffered from a damaged image?

It's not a video tape, you won't get bits not quite right, or glitches. It will either work as before, or not work at all.  The problem then will be figuring out WHY it's not working, and fixing that.  However, any disc image made of the server is likely to be a precise snapshot of the entire server HD. Restoring that to a new server would require almost identical hardware otherwise it will not boot when restored, so work will have to be done on it after restoration to repair the Windows installation.

[MWRuger]

It's not a video tape, you won't get bits not quite right, or glitches. It will either work as before, or not work at all.  The problem then will be figuring out WHY it's not working, and fixing that.  However, any disc image made of the server is likely to be a precise snapshot of the entire server HD. Restoring that to a new server would require almost identical hardware otherwise it will not boot when restored, so work will have to be done on it after restoration to repair the Windows installation.

This has been my thought as well, but since we don't know for sure what is in the snapshot we'll just have to hope that is all we need. If it is, wouldn't they be able to get it running with VMWare? That would at least let the team see how it works so they could get it working on a modern OS.

[Arcana]

I concur too. As professional developer, reverse engineering horribly complex code and DB schema is just a part of your everyday skillset.  Boring as hell, time consuming, but not especially difficult to anyone competent at their job.

What Tony is referring to, and what you're referring to, is not the same thing as what I was referring to.  What I was referring to was not whether it was literally impossible, but whether it was possible for NCSoft to claim they had the source files but were unable, as a practical matter, to hand to an acquisition team a functioning server.  And that's not difficult because all what you're describing are steps I know are hypothetically possible, but may not be for any of the people at NCSoft involved with the acquisition in any reasonable amount of time for them.  Its not as simple as pushing a button and converting the pieces into a server instance. 

Let's back up a bit and see this in context.  I said:

If NCSoft wanted us to go away, the absolute best, most obvious way to do that would have been for NCSoft to tell the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the server software and source code as part of the shutdown.  Period, end of story, go away now.  That's what I would have recommended, if it was my job to make the CoH playerbase go away.  And I would have done it right from the start.

And Tony replied:

They can't do that precisely for the same reason they're not letting go of the IP: Because on some accounting sheet somewhere, it's listed as a line item as an asset that has some particular value that, in theory, makes the company worth more.

That's explicitly false, for the reason I specified:

Keep in mind the Intellectual Property of the game hypothetically has value.  The source code might have value - they could license it to someone.  But the actual server instances had and have no material accounting value.  NCSoft could easily have claimed they have source code repositories, but no actual working server instances and lacked the tools to create them from the source code.

That part is just accounting fact.  But I did add:

In fact, from what I know of server instances, its trivially easy to hand someone all the source code in its entirety and still leave them functionally incapable of standing up servers in any reasonable amount of time.

Note: in any reasonable amount of time were the words I used, not "impossible."

Now, as to this question:

I don't know how to say this tactfully, and I don't intend this in the spirit in which it will probably be taken, but have you ever actually done development?  Because what you're describing simply isn't true.

What you are calling *parts* is akin to what I would call individual source code files.  If all NCsoft had were a bunch of *.c and *.h files, I might agree with you.  But in any modern development system, those files are bound together in a project file; in the case of City of Heroes, those would be Visual Studio project and solution files.  Those files are most definitely akin to blueprints; they contain all of the references and relationships of how the files fit together to build a project.  Now granted, they are probably old VS project/solution files, like 2008 or 2010, but the software really isn't that hard to come by to put it all back together again.

That's in reply to this:

Most people see source code as comparable to blueprints.  But in actual fact, source code is more like *parts*.  When you open that box of IKEA furniture, the individual pieces of wood and screws?  That's actually the source code.  The instruction booklet itself would in software terms be the make files and the compile instructions and the configuration file templates to make the software work, not all of which are always stored within the source repositories.  Those things are critical.  Without them, all you have is a pile of wood.

If a City of Heroes server was a program then this objection would be valid.  But its not: its actually a constellation of programs, and any credible software developer would presume such.  As a result, even if you had the entire source tree including the make tree (in this case, Visual C++ project files) what that would buy you is the actual executables.  You would still have to determine how they worked with each other, and that would be yet another time consuming step.  Again, not impossible, but not trivial.

And all of this is under the context of how difficult it would be for NCSoft to do, not the acquisition team, because the stated premise of my original statement was that NCSoft might not want to disclose or sell the source code itself.  How many developers does NCSoft corporate have that can do this and isn't doing something more important now?  How many of those developers are even familiar with City of Heroes itself: a developer with no idea how City of Heroes worked in the first place would have a completely separate hurdle to overcome when trying to reverse engineer the operational state of the servers.

It would take longer just to make a list of all the things you'd need to stand up servers without a server instance image than its likely NCSoft would want to dedicate development staff to actually do.  So if they wanted us to go away they could have simply lied about having backups of the server images, said they didn't want to invest the time to recreate them, and that would be that.  You couldn't argue that it was so simple to recreate that NCSoft was lying about that, because the time required is substantial for a property they no longer care about.  Its so high, that, as I said, even if the entire source tree was handed to the acquisition team and they *were* willing to invest the time, the time consumption would be, without outside assistance, extremely high. And that would be a motivated, dedicated group.  Compare to the time it would take if NCSoft, an unmotivated non-dedicated group elected to undertake that, given there was no real upside worth the expense to them.

To answer the question directly, yes I've done professional development.  I built a financial tracking system for a hospital, a secure healthcare messaging system, a security event correlation system, and an email system provisioning and auditing system.  I've also done professional reverse engineering: everything from literal paper tape systems (HP2400) to much larger systems.  When I say something is easy or difficult, trivial or time consuming, its within the context of the level of effort I know those things to take.  If someone wants to debate those judgments on a technical basis, I have no problem with that.  But in this case, I'm stating what I believe a reasonable colloquial estimate would be for a non-technical reader. 

Here's a technical point: if I didn't actually state for the record that *one* of the backend databases for a City of Heroes server shard was a SQLserver, would you even know to search the source code for SQL in the first place?.  All prior statements made by Cryptic about the game engine stated that they had made a custom database engine for the game servers that wasn't sql-based.  If you're starting literally from zero, how much time would you estimate it might take for someone to determine just what the major components of a server shard were, from nothing but the source trees (which would include not just server source alone)?  Days?  Weeks?  Months?  (I'm guessing weeks myself)

[Ironwolf]

Actually the hardware is more secondary to the OS being similar. If it ran on a Windows 2000 server for example then installing and mapping the drives correctly isn't that difficult.

It is all the bolt on parts that can be a mess, global chat, accounting, market place and so on - things that weren't by default on the map server. Once you boot up the map server and it crashes because it can't find all the other boxes its looking for and you now have to perhaps even write the new databases and build the box it points to - then you have all the fun of figuring out why they built this code to point there and not over here and so on.

Edit - see Arcana's post above she puts it more exactly. I stated it generally.

I would also add to Arcana's post that all of this is being done with possibly no NCSoft help other than a file clerk handing you over disk images and manuals. They probably aren't turning a server expert or programmer over to the group to work stuff out.

[Sinistar]

Actually the hardware is more secondary to the OS being similar. If it ran on a Windows 2000 server for example then installing and mapping the drives correctly isn't that difficult.

It is all the bolt on parts that can be a mess, global chat, accounting, market place and so on - things that weren't by default on the map server. Once you boot up the map server and it crashes because it can't find all the other boxes its looking for and you now have to perhaps even write the new databases and build the box it points to - then you have all the fun of figuring out why they built this code to point there and not over here and so on.

Edit - see Arcana's post above she puts it more exactly. I stated it generally.

I would also add to Arcana's post that all of this is being done with possibly no NCSoft help other than a file clerk handing you over disk images and manuals. They probably aren't turning a server expert or programmer over to the group to work stuff out.

This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.

1. The Market
2. Email
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else.
4. Supergroups
5. The Arena
6. The AE

and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.

[JanessaVR]

This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.

1. The Market
2. Email
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else.
4. Supergroups
5. The Arena
6. The AE

and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.

I could not live without the market, unless the Cash Shop is willing to sell us salvage and recipes.

[Arcana]

It's not a video tape, you won't get bits not quite right, or glitches. It will either work as before, or not work at all.  The problem then will be figuring out WHY it's not working, and fixing that.  However, any disc image made of the server is likely to be a precise snapshot of the entire server HD. Restoring that to a new server would require almost identical hardware otherwise it will not boot when restored, so work will have to be done on it after restoration to repair the Windows installation.

Hypothetically speaking, disc rot could flip a bit here and there and damage the software.  But the only serious problem with that would be if the only copies of the software were compressed archives: damaged archives could be rendered impossible to decompress correctly.

[FloatingFatMan]

Hypothetically speaking, disc rot could flip a bit here and there and damage the software.  But the only serious problem with that would be if the only copies of the software were compressed archives: damaged archives could be rendered impossible to decompress correctly.

More likely it's not even on a disc; it'll be on several backup tapes.

If there IS anything on a disc, odds are it's hiding in the desk drawer of a former dev somewhere, and therefore "doesn't exist". :p

[Arcana]

More likely it's not even on a disc; it'll be on several backup tapes.

If there IS anything on a disc, odds are it's hiding in the desk drawer of a former dev somewhere, and therefore "doesn't exist". :p

Its possible.  Disk to disk backup is the way to go these days (or even those days) particularly for systems like this, but disks also get reprovisioned.  If tape backups were being made, they would be the most likely storage that someone could find still lying around.

However, its also possible that the software necessary and sufficient to create operational servers existed on the workstations physically at Paragon's offices.  If those PCs are in a warehouse somewhere, its possible an operational server shard could be reconstructed from the disk content of those systems.

[Sinistar]

I could not live without the market, unless the Cash Shop is willing to sell us salvage and recipes.

as long as the game still awards recipe and salvage drops in a fight, we could likely go for awhile without the market until it was brought back online. 

Now the Arena and PVP in general we could do without for awhile.  Granted there are PVP/Arena badges to obtain, but given how PVP and Arena popularity wasn't that high long before shutdown.....

[MaxEternal]

This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.

1. The Market - Wouldn't be the same without the market
2. Email - Don't care
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else. Yes, must have
4. Supergroups - I like them but could live without
5. The Arena - Don't care
6. The AE - Wouldn't bother me much

and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.

[Sinistar]

I agree that the market had its uses but the game could go for awhile without it. After all the game did fine from issue 1 to 8 with just SO's, then came ish 9 with the IO's.

[Noyjitat]

I think it would be a mistake to not include parts of the game that only some enjoyed. Didn't care much for how pvp was in CoX myself but some actually did like it. I did however have fun dueling friends in the arena from time to time.