irresponsible
Newbie
- Jan 11, 2019
- 25
- 40
- 109
I guess it boils down to how much our ideas of time-consuming and easy would differ?I'm definitely not suggesting that it's technically difficult to replicate the engine; it's not very complicated at all. But, and maybe this was a comprehension issue on my end, it sounded like you meant that replicating the game just wouldn't be all that time-consuming and that's the idea that I'm pushing back against--it's been expressed here over and over that since it's not "hard" like writing an FPS from scratch, a modern OS kernel, or a fast RDBMS, then it must be both quick and easy to knock out.
I feel that a few months (maybe 3–6?) of part-time but consistent work on the code base would produce something very closely resembling the original. Certainly not a few weeks' job, but also not a seven years' job, either. The text can be scraped out of the JAR, which cuts down on the main time-sink, and the design is already there, so you wouldn't have to really reinvent the wheel or write a lot of text.
As for the easiness, the game doesn't feel particularly sophisticated code-wise (not that it has to be); it doesn't seem like it would need much more than normal Java constructs (that is, not much beyond OOP, control flow) and a small amount of external libraries (the interface is almost certainly made with Swing, and the game has a YAML parser, and probably a serialiser for saving and restoring state). I feel that the ingenuity of this game is in the design rather than its implementation, and when you're cloning an already existing product, the design is already figured out for you.