Neither the HN submission or GitHub repository says it's first or novel though? Just that it's (another) port of it?
The actually important work (of making the original code release portable and then create Linux and macOS ports) had already been done in https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX. There is really not much to see here.
It's so crazy to remember sitting in front of W3Schools after school trying to learn PHP to create a website, and hear people today saying it isn't very impressive a fucking machine can automatically translate/port code from one platform to another, even a machine doing that with PHP3 > PHP4 code back then would have been cool but nope, "not at all impressive" just because things improved so much, so quickly, everyone got quickly used to the status quo.
I agree with you in general though, the title does make it sound like more was done than what was done in actuality, as it was just a iOS port. Still, I'd wager it seems interesting enough, given it's on the front page right now.
It's a good example of AI psychosis I guess, people reading things into a headline which they want to be true, no matter what reality says ;)
When you look at the commit history, the actual changes come down to a few dozen lines of code, all of them absolutely trivial, and most of those code changes seem to be cherry-picked bugfixes from the original project.
More like "wisdom of the crowds" (for better or worse) unless you're trying to argue that everyone who upvotes/downvotes on HN suffers from AI psychosis ;)
You can’t downvote articles, so a relatively small amount of enthusiastic people slamming upvote will do it.
Have you ported a desktop title to mobile? It is NOT trivial. This is the next step in a continuing chain of work that builds upon the next and next person's work, but this is not a trivial step. If it was so trivial, why hadn't it already been done?
The jump to Apple Silicon is net-new work, and they aren't trying to pretend they did more than they did.
> This fork — the iOS/iPadOS port (arm64-ios cross-build, DXVK-on-iOS, touch controls, app lifecycle, packaging) and engine fixes, offered upstream
They are even asking you to support the original creators on Steam, so they are getting a cut. No one is stealing assets. I would love to see more of this sort of work being done out in the wild, not discouraging it. Were previous steps harder? Absolutely. Doesn't that invalidate this step? No.