welcome datacomp

Since only like three people read this blog, I’m going to talk about whatever I want!

The other day, I wanted to see the textures in ICO, a really cool game by SCEI about moé and light bloom. So, I started disassembling it.

Soon I noticed:

• it had text strings that appeared in libarc, a small decompression library
• the decompression code was exactly the same as libarc’s
• it uses the exact same file format (deflate with headers missing) as libarc

Technical details here:
http://astrange.ithinksw.net/ico/

Now, unlike all the other versions of deflate, libarc is GPLed.
ICO, of course, doesn’t mention this or credit the author anywhere. And, like every other console game in the history of ever, there’s no offer to give out the source.

I don’t think they intentionally set out to violate its license; it’s more likely they just used it because its site was in Japanese. I’m really just surprised they’d use it over something more tested; zlib itself has a much friendlier license and is way more tested, and if you need something fast LZO has commercial licenses.

I’ve tried to contact the author, but his only working email address goes unanswered; apparently, other people have the same problem. If someone’s in Japan and up to it, maybe they could reach his company?

(It’s weird that his profile page hasn’t been updated since 2001, but I really don’t think he was hired by Sony! Otherwise he’d be in the credits somewhere, you know?)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 12:25 pm by astrange and is filed under JAPAN, software, the internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.