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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

#221

Post by filesystemdude »

cabaalis wrote: post #192
Exuma wrote: post #9

I remember going on vacation with my parents and all I had was the Diablo game manual, because I got the game 1 hour before we left. I read the manual about 100 times in the car... good memories

That manual and the warcraft/starcraft manuals are responsible for a large part of the person I am. I was 10 at the time, and the universes that Blizzard created got me into gaming, from there into social gaming (m:tg) and then into computers and programming so that I could make my own games.

Ditto. I tried to write a .pud editor in QBasic in about the summer of '98 or '99, and built a WarCraft fan site for my Kali/Engage gaming clan with entirely hand-coded HTML and some random and probably terribly-insecure cgi-bin Perl scripts for guestbooks and whatnot. I probably learned more from that than any single other time period in my tech career.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#222

Post by gattr »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #197
kevstev wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire genre of flight and space-sims has almost entirely gone away and to me its such a tremendous shame- with today's multi-monitor setups and wide screens they would be such a better experience. X-wing, descent, flight simulator, were all so much fun. I still have my MS sidewinder collecting dust in a closet- which may be part of the problem- these games really needed a decent flight stick to enjoy, and that's…

To this day I have to ‘invert’ my y-axis when I play for any sort of 1st person perspective game.

Same here! IIRC for me it's due to Duke Nukem 3D's default settings. (Annoying when games "forget" to respect this option, e.g. Crysis 3 in the VTOL flying segment.)

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#223

Post by doitLP »

kevstev wrote: post #168
gwicks56 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had totally forgotten about Descent, thank you for the reminder. That game seriously scared me as a 13 yo boy at the time. I loved it.

The entire genre of flight and space-sims has almost entirely gone away and to me its such a tremendous shame- with today's multi-monitor setups and wide screens they would be such a better experience. X-wing, descent, flight simulator, were all so much fun. I still have my MS sidewinder collecting dust in a closet- which may be part of the problem- these games really needed a decent flight stick to enjoy, and that's…

Don't forget about Freespace!

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#224

Post by paulie_a »

scarface74 wrote: post #179
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…

What was sad was that the same games ran better on my DX2/66 Dos Compatibility card with 32MB of on board RAM on my 6100/60 (with 16MB of RAM) than they did natively on the Mac.

That's because developers didn't care about Macs, they were and remain to have a tiny market share.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#225

Post by rifung »

kevstev wrote: post #168
gwicks56 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had totally forgotten about Descent, thank you for the reminder. That game seriously scared me as a 13 yo boy at the time. I loved it.

The entire genre of flight and space-sims has almost entirely gone away and to me its such a tremendous shame- with today's multi-monitor setups and wide screens they would be such a better experience. X-wing, descent, flight simulator, were all so much fun. I still have my MS sidewinder collecting dust in a closet- which may be part of the problem- these games really needed a decent flight stick to enjoy, and that's…

Well perhaps they will come back in VR form?

Also, I know it's not exactly the same but at least there are awesome driving games.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#226

Post by IntelMiner »

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…

I emailed him a few times about the reverse-engineering effort for the old Battle.Net games (PVPGN)

He's a really nice, approachable guy as well. He was quite impressed at how well the program worked, even with how old the games were

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#227

Post by tgtweak »

doitLP wrote: post #223
kevstev wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire genre of flight and space-sims has almost entirely gone away and to me its such a tremendous shame- with today's multi-monitor setups and wide screens they would be such a better experience. X-wing, descent, flight simulator, were all so much fun. I still have my MS sidewinder collecting dust in a closet- which may be part of the problem- these games really needed a decent flight stick to enjoy, and that's…

Don't forget about Freespace!

Still fun to play!

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#228

Post by sidusknight »

Splines wrote: post #212
lfowles wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't risk it anymore. One time I received an ever so slightly cracked DVD from Netflix. Desperate to watch the show without waiting for a better copy to be mailed, I stuck it in the computer anyways. Ended up shattering and taking my DVD drive with it!

I don't know about OG diablo but you might be able to register your cd key on Blizzard's site and play the game through their on-line launcher. I know this works (or worked) with Warcraft 3.

OG Diablo didn't even have a cd-key, unfortunately.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#229

Post by bananaboy »

sumeno wrote: post #75
oh_sigh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The guy on Github is distributing the source files which have a Blizzard copyright notice on them saying not to distribute them.

Looks like he pushed a change to remove the copyright notice: https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8...
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