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Two of the earlier entries to the Grand Theft Auto series have been fully reverse-engineered by a team of modders. Re3 and ReVC are the respective reversed source code for GTA III and GTA Vice City that have been made available to download. Those releases bring new features to those games such as widescreen support, debug menu and improved rendering. They also open doors to future modding and tinkering for those titles and the project has also been ported to the Nintendo Switch, Playstation Vita and Nintendo Wii U.

A few screenshots of those mods in action have also been made available:

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The team still has a "to-do" list with features that could be implemented later but you can find the current improvements in the list below:

• Fixed a lot of smaller and bigger bugs
• User files (saves and settings) stored in GTA root directory
• Settings stored in re3.ini file instead of gta3.set
• Debug menu to do and change various things (Ctrl-M to open)
• Debug camera (Ctrl-B to toggle)
• Rotatable camera
• XInput controller support (Windows)
• No loading screens between islands ("map memory usage" in menu)
• Skinned ped support (models from Xbox or Mobile)
• Rendering
  • Widescreen support (properly scaled HUD, Menu and FOV)
  • PS2 MatFX (vehicle reflections)
  • PS2 alpha test (better rendering of transparency)
  • PS2 particles
  • Xbox vehicle rendering
  • Xbox world lightmap rendering (needs Xbox map)
  • Xbox ped rim light
  • Xbox screen rain droplets
  • More customizable colourfilter
• Menu
  • Map
  • More options
  • Controller configuration menu
• Can load DFFs and TXDs from other platforms, possibly with a performance penalty

An installation guide is available in the GitHub repository linked below but you will need to provide your own copy of each game to proceed as the mods require PC game assets to work.

Re3 and ReVC GitHub Repository

 

[naddel81]

because other companies aren't dumb enough to try to take down something that's likely covered by fair use
unless it's on youtube

There goes that great project. They directly follow nintendo's attitude unfortunately.

 

[FAST6191]

because other companies aren't dumb enough to try to take down something that's likely covered by fair use
unless it's on youtube

How on earth does decompilation in this manner fall under fair use?

 

[Deleted User]

How on earth does decompilation in this manner fall under fair use?

reverse engineering counts as fair use, if it wasn't then there would be a lot of shit that would have gotten taken down YEARS ago, like openMW, openRCT2, even nintendo haven't even bothered to take down the mario 64 decompilation project (as far as i know)

 

[FAST6191]

reverse engineering counts as fair use, if it wasn't then there would be a lot of shit that would have gotten taken down YEARS ago, like openMW, openRCT2, even nintendo haven't even bothered to take down the mario 64 decompilation project (as far as i know)

Certain types of reverse engineering and uses for it count as that.

Typically clean room reverse engineering. That is to say you play the game, interpret the mechanics and then go from there, possibly even handing it off to a secondary team in the big boy cases just so you can plausibly say nobody that wrote this touched the original code. Nightmarishly tedious and thus usually limited to protocols (various network and whatnot, or Windows API for things like WINE and reactos) and simple formats, or highly desirable formats (say Microsoft office formats) where less than 100% might still be more than good enough (figure out bold, center, font, italic, underline and maybe a table and you have probably 95% of Word documents going).

Playing with a disassembler and decompiler to recreate the source code, whether you have a nice boost from some developer leftovers giving you all the function names or go from scratch, or determining nature of formats is anything but that. This is what they would have done for this. Do something like this to your competitor's software in industry and you will get all kinds of fired and sued.

Ignoring forensics reasons ("did they steal my code?") then there are other accepted reasons/defences like dodging dead activation or dead multiplayer servers, maybe cross platform compatibility (this would be about the only in and stretching the reasoning for that beyond what I imagine any court would accept, or any kind of case law I have seen. It is however one of the "substantial non infringing uses" given for emulation being acceptable along with development, homebrew and accessibility).