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Shenmue (1999) reverse engineering reveals possible sun position oversight

So far, we’ve only really touched on some of the fundamentals of reverse engineering with one game example, but this time we’re looking at something a bit different. Shenmue (1999) is widely known for its pursuit of realism and has remained an influential series to this day, with its third game releasing in 2019. This […]

As stated before, the game is heavily based around daily life and as such, I discovered that this code was responsible for calculating the suns position and direction, for the purposes of lighting the scene. Now we’ve gained a little bit of a clearer picture as to what is happening here, part of the expression from the last line of code is calculating how far along the game currently is into the year: Ultimately, it is impossible to tell without clarification from the developer in this instance, but the intent here is to show how reverse engineering code is an iterative process and your understanding of the original logic is always changing the more you look into the details.

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