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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

#241

Post by phaedrus »

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 believe the PC version used palette switching for a lava effect, but not for scrolling (it used Direct X). Never got to see the Mac version of the game.

I wrote a bot for Diablo 1 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/projectsolo/). Due to the way the game uses older Windows modes for the palette, the colors never come out right in screen captures and also get messed up if you alt-tab. IIRC I had to use an API call dating back to Win16 to get the raw bytes, and I used artificial color for the visualizations rather than figure out how to obtain the actual palette.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#242

Post by Z1515M8147 »

mihaifm wrote: post #204
Z1515M8147 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2009 I put several hundred hours into the diablo 2 mod called Median, which turned into Median XL. Should you ever want a successor to Diablo 2 this was it. The craft that went into this by its original author BrotherLaz was exceptional, who was outstanding at creating content within the games restrictive modding mechanisms. The balance of all the content was just so finely tuned; BrotherLaz really had an ins…

Just browsed their website...this looks massive. Might be tempted to go back to D2 just to try this. Looks like it's still in development all these years later.

From what I can tell of the latest release trailers it looks to me like the bulk of Laz's work is still in there despite it having 10 years more dev since I played it, a majority being after Laz handed it over to the community, so I would be cautiously optimistic that it's still the transformative mod it once was!

I'm also tempted to reinstall it!

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#243

Post by sakarisson »

superkuh wrote: post #78
sumeno wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because someone says what they are doing is legal doesn't mean it is. IANAL so I don't know but the source files have Blizzard's copyright warning in them

And now that MS owns github there's reason to believe they're going to be more active/compliant about bullshit DMCA take down requests.

It wouldn't be a bullshit takedown request. The source code even had a copyright notice before the repo owner "removed the fear factor".

https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8...

In fact, when you wrote your comment, those notices were still there, so you have no excuse for writing such an ill-informed comment.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#244

Post by galaxyhaxz »

sakarisson wrote: post #243
superkuh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now that MS owns github there's reason to believe they're going to be more active/compliant about bullshit DMCA take down requests.

It wouldn't be a bullshit takedown request. The source code even had a copyright notice before the repo owner "removed the fear factor". https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8... In fact, when you wrote your comment, those notices were still there, so you have no excuse for writing such an ill-informed comment.

The copyright notice was fake, I was the one who typed it up originally and removed it so people don't think this actually came from blizzard.

It will be interesting to see what happens on Blizzard's end. I won't be surprised if the repo gets DMCA'd. It's not a big deal to me either way, I did this for the learning experience.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#245

Post by headsoup »

terandle wrote: post #191
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…

The descent guys recently did a kickstarter for a new game: Overload. It just came out on Steam. I haven’t checked it out yet to see if it’s any good.

It's Descent through and through. It's great.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#246

Post by headsoup »

loeg wrote: post #203
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.

They just published a remake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overload_(video_game)

This is not a remake, it's a 'spiritual successor' due to the devs not owning the IP rights.

It feels just like descent...

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#247

Post by pjmlp »

paulie_a wrote: post #224
scarface74 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, in Portugal there was just one official importer Interlog with shops in Lisbon and Porto, with prices that would send anyone to by an Atari ST or Amiga instead.

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#248

Post by crocal »

munificent wrote: post #183
crocal wrote: post #143

What I like about this code is how much direct it is. No fancy abstraction. Brutally to the point with switch() and if() and that’s it!

This code was automatically decompiled, though, wasn't it? The original is likely quite different.

I don’t think it is vastly different in terms of program structure. They lost variable names and maybe some optimized intermediary calculations, but functional calls and branches are usually preserved through decomp (unless some compiler optims have been activated)

Re: Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

#249

Post by darkmighty »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #188
jakebasile wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isometric ARPGs are niche now, but there's still games being made. Off the top of my head: - Titan Quest (just got an update and a new expansion!) - Grim Dawn - The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing - Victor Vran - Path of Exile - Warhammer 40000 Inquisitor - Martyr - Torchlight 1 & 2 (I wish Runic games hadn't imploded...) It is unfortunate that most of these don't have the same level of randomness than Diablo ha…

Blade : Edge of Darknes (aka Severance: Blade of Darkness ), could count as some kind successor on 3d and the grand father of Dark Souls.

If you're interested have a look at FromSoftware's actual Dark Souls (spiritual) predecessors. In particular King's Field. The setting is very similar; although the gameplay is very primitive, it has the same feeling of exploration and similar difficulty. Also it's 1st person (quite innovative for the time).
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