What reverse engineering and modernising an old war game tells us about the…
Some observations from my War of the Lance (1989) Code Harness assisted modernisation (WIP)
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I gave Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next a job: Reverse engineer and
I gave Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next a job: Reverse engineer and port War of the Lance (1989) to modern browsers. It took about a week, primarily because I can only run a single lane on my workstation due to VRAM constraints, but it got the job done: Faithful reproduction of rendering and game rules in a new Three.js rendering engine.
A few days ago I started modernising it
A few days ago I started modernising it into a Total War meets Heroes of Might and Magic like experience that you could actually play without getting a UX aneurysm. But doing so while keeping the original “underneath”. After a few hours, it looked like this (see also the video in the attached LinkedIn post).
In the past, one would have chosen another
In the past, one would have chosen another AAA game for a “total conversion”, but in this new transformer world, synthesising the exact features and renderer is easier and faster.
With the Fable 5.1 just released, there was
With the Fable 5.1 just released, there was an opportunity to see how the frontier improved on modelling with Blender and it's pretty good and definitely a significant step up from Opus 5, quite usable in fact for this type of game.
The workflow here is to have the model
The workflow here is to have the model write python code that leverages Blender's headless mode APIs to create web-usable GLBs. It's fast and token efficient, you can model about 80-100 models on a week's worth of Fable subscription. That's not good enough for most use cases, but let's not kid ourselves, the specialized models will get there.
Edit, just one day later: I got access
Edit, just one day later: I got access to GPT6 Astra and it clearly was trained on 3D modelling and it significantly moved the bar. Where Fable was a junior modeller, we're now into mid-career professional land.
OpenAI was smart here, they saw everyone benchmarking
OpenAI was smart here, they saw everyone benchmarking on one-shot Three.js scenes and benchmaxxed all the way into that direction, knowing the internet will use it as the sign of impending AGI. Coding performance seems ... significantly less improved. Want to add seasons, day/night and three moon phases? Well, that'd be 15 minutes and $2.28
Instant, usable 3D assets, placeholder or not, “unbounds”
Instant, usable 3D assets, placeholder or not, “unbounds” design - you can now order custom assets for anything you want as a token micro-transaction, only limited by renderer considerations.
For War of the Lance, all of this
For War of the Lance, all of this - the complex task of reverse engineering, renderer optimisation and then building something new on top of one of the most fickle platforms of all, browser based web - involved a single person with a full time job and less than 4 hours of dedicated attention to the harness over a week.
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What reverse engineering and modernising an old war game tells us about the economic impact of the transformer —…
Some observations from my War of the Lance (1989) Code Harness assisted modernisation (WIP)
@spots
Source: Hacker News