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Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

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Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#61

Post by gameswithgo »

stormbrew wrote: post #30
spapas82 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember trying to play Diablo multiplayer through a 55.6 kbps modem. It was nice for like 5 minutes but then the connection lagged and I couldn't control my character. When the connection quality improved, I saw my character dead with all his (high level and very diffucult to find) gear stolen by other players. I was so frustrated I removed the cdrom from the drive and threw it on the wall; the cd broke and that w…

There's a very real possibility it wasn't your connection that was the problem. Since Diablo 1 was a peer to peer game it was super easy to just flood another player to lag them out and steal their crap. The game's public multiplayer was notoriously full of griefing like that. There were also ways to get firewalls to go on the spawn point and pvp was easy to force. It was a mess. Going into a public game was basicall…

What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!]

edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars

good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1faaOrtHJ-A

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#62

Post by oh_sigh »

sumeno wrote: post #50
degenerate wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. And it's mentioned at the bottom of the github page, too: "This work is being released to the Public Domain. No assets of Diablo are being provided. You must own a copy of Diablo and have access to the assets beforehand in order to use this software."

This seems legally questionable given that all of the source files have a copyright notice from Blizzard indicating distribution without written permission is prohibited.

No one is distributing them. If you have the content files, you can point the open source engine to read them.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#63

Post by jjjensen90 »

have_faith wrote: post #4
aw3c2 wrote: post #3

There is a slowly but steadily progressing engine being developed at https://freeablo.org/

It's such a shame there's no modern spiritual successor to Diablo / Diablo 2. The aesthetic and gameplay was great.

It's not modern, but I founded/work on a revival of the 3D ARPG MMO created by the studio founded by the creators of Diablo/Diablo 2 (Flagship Studios), Hellgate: London (https://london2038.com). In almost every sense Hellgate: London was intended to be the direct successor of Diablo 2, created by the same people, but on an even more ambitious scope. Sadly the game failed to stay profitable and the servers shut down in 2008. A few of the team members from Flagship Studios went on to found Runic and create Torchlight, another spiritual successor.

Reading this reverse engineering, I can see a lot of similarities between Diablo and the Hellgate systems.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#65

Post by fusiongyro »

zackmorris wrote: post #56

I'm old enough to remember that when Diablo came out, it seemed to be running too fast. This was before 3D video cards were mainstream (which happened with the Voodoo and Quake in 1997 maybe?). I was working a lot with blitters at that point and running into speed issues on the Mac because Apple liked to release machines with half-width busses, which cut memory throughput by almost half. I'd be lucky to get 60 fps on…

I remember trying very hard to play Descent on a 33 MHz 486 DX. It did not go well for me!

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#68

Post by fusiongyro »

gameswithgo wrote: post #61
stormbrew wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very real possibility it wasn't your connection that was the problem. Since Diablo 1 was a peer to peer game it was super easy to just flood another player to lag them out and steal their crap. The game's public multiplayer was notoriously full of griefing like that. There were also ways to get firewalls to go on the spawn point and pvp was easy to force. It was a mess. Going into a public game was basicall…

What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!] edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a go…

And who and what is that?

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#70

Post by amatecha »

gameswithgo wrote: post #61
stormbrew wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very real possibility it wasn't your connection that was the problem. Since Diablo 1 was a peer to peer game it was super easy to just flood another player to lag them out and steal their crap. The game's public multiplayer was notoriously full of griefing like that. There were also ways to get firewalls to go on the spawn point and pvp was easy to force. It was a mess. Going into a public game was basicall…

What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!] edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a go…

Which programmer/game was that? Mike O'Brien on Guild Wars? (Just going through credits on mobygames ;))
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