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Possible to decompile a AAA title (UE3) and import to UE4 for research/learning purposes?

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#1

Alright, I tried posting this earlier, but it didn’t show up. I’m not sure if I screwed something up, or if it was automatically removed for breaking some rule I’m not aware of.

Aaaaanyway, I’m still very new to game development, but I want to make a third person shooter. Pretty much a HD remake of one of my all-time favourite childhood games.
I own a copy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (built on UE3), which is similar in style to what I want to do.

Now I’m wondering if it’s possible to completely decompile and import RSV2 into UE4 so that I can learn what makes it tick?
I still want to be able to change variables of the original game, and edit stuff and things. Like, make new maps and whatnot so that it loosely resembles the game I want to make.
Kinda like the game dev equivalent of copying an existing website’s HTML and doing some edits here and there to see roughly what you want in action, learning from it, then scrapping everything and starting from scratch when you feel competent.

So… is this possible? How would I go about doing it?

#2

hi,

I have moved this to off topic because I don’t think decompiling a game qualifies as content creation.

you didn’t screw up, the first few posts of new members are moderated and have to be approved by one of the moderators.

first I should say its often illegal to decompile games so it might not be a good idea to try, that being said anything can be decompiled but you would only be able to open it in the version of UE3 it was made in, you would not be able to open it in UE4 as both engines use different file formats that aren’t compatible with each other, also neither engine is backwards compatible.

my advice would be to download the free “shooter game” example from the learn tab of the launcher and then take it apart learn how it was put together and then modify to be more like rainbow six and just build from there.

taking the other free sample/example projects apart would also help you learn how to do stuff with UE4.

hope that helps:)

#3

It’s not illegal to reverse engineer products you own for learning purposes.

You cannot however open any part of a UE3 game in UE4, that’s simply not how things work.

#4

You wouldn’t be able to open it in UE3/UDK either because most likely there’s enough changes that they would have made that it wouldn’t work. Even then, things like gameplay aren’t usually able to be studied, just the assets like models and textures.

#5

Fair enough. I wasn’t sure if I was posting it in the right section. CC seemed to be the most relevant to what I was doing.

I noticed the little box that says posts need approval AFTER posting this one, then proceeded to feel really, really stupid.

I probably should have looked into those a long time ago, actually.
I remember getting some TPS example from somewhere a while back, but it didn’t really provide anything useful. But I’ll certainly take a look in the learning tab.

#6

while you actually CAN decompile ue3 games(not very well, but UDK games can all be decompiled fine), it doesnt mean you SHOULD. The legality of the action depends on wich country you are. Anyway, there is absolutely nothing worth seeing there, UE4 demos like shooter game and UT4 show actual working code, you cant import anything done in ue3 into ue4