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Questions And Answers
OpenCloud is an open source re-implementation of the Dark Cloud games for PS2. To put this simply, OpenCloud is an effort to reverse engineer Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2 and port it to PC (and other platforms). In many ways you can think of it as a port or remaster.
OpenCloud is created by reverse engineering the original PS2 games and creating functionally similar code. This is done with the help of Ghidra.
No.
The goal for OpenCloud is not to produce the same machine code as the original game. Instead, OpenCloud focuses on getting the original games to function on other platforms. The original game engines are extremely specific to the PS2 platform and therefor any exact re-implementation would only function on PS2 which would be antithetical to OpenCloud's goals. We focus on having a modern base for which the original game logic can run on top of and therefor produce a version of the game that functions on multiple platforms.
Our goal with OpenCloud isn't just to directly port the game as it was on the PS2 but also to improve on the original game in terms of performance, fidelity and quality of life. Those improvements require more modern features than were available on PCs of the time or the PS2. Additionally, the PS2 hardware was rather specialized for a certain development paradigm. There is more than one way to accomplish a goal, be it rendering polygons or AI. The PS2's way of accomplishing these goals are not analogous to PCs of the time (or most other consoles of the time, for that matter). The technical details are a bit esoteric but the best way to describe what OpenCloud is attempting to accomplish is something between what is traditionally thought of as a remaster and a direct port.