You can see this when the workers run out of minerals and boom they expand all over the place. Awesome read and makes me feel great about some of my own git-r-dun hacks :-)
The StarCraft path-finding hack
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#12It's pretty cool to see the source of this. Back when I used to play Starcraft I primarily played UMS maps (custom game modes) and several of them were based on using "bugs" in the game engine to surmount situations that appeared impossible.
Moving a harvester unit past an invincible wall of enemies was one of these, which was accomplished by right clicking on a further mineral field. It's interesting to see that this was an intentional design decision.
Other tricks in those maps were definitely bugs, like the ability to infinitely cloak burrowing units by using an arbiter and other ones I can't remember. I think they fixed that bug though (although it would be unlikely to occur in real play).
Now that I think about it, there was one other trick in those maps that likely was a similar hack to fix a bug. You could destroy a siege tank if you tried to siege a tank in the location a terran building was landing in. It seems like it was a quick fix to two immovable units taking up the same position.
Reading these blog posts is always a treat.
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#13The Protoss Carrier regularly lagged behind other units because it had its own way of doing … everything. The Carrier should have been scrapped entirely and replaced with a different air unit. Even to the latest upgrades of Starcraft I, the AI simply couldn't deal with the carrier effectively--they would always attack the interceptors first. This made using the carrier a cheap game-breaking trick against the computer…
...and made it one of the most interesting units in multiplayer. In programmer-land, where all abstractions should be pure and elegant, the carrier (as implemented in SC1) may be abhorrent, but this is irrelevant because the customers (i.e. the players) loved it . Some of the quirky behavior of the SC1 carrier was even re-implemented into the upcoming SC2 expansion at the behest of fans. Why? Because it made the unit…
Really? That's interesting.
I've noticed that units never seem to have the good sense to target Brood Lords rather than Broodlings when they have a choice. It seemed odd, given that the AI had improved so much in other areas -- pathfinding, running from unwinnable fights, varying its opening strategies. It never occurred to me that things might be that way because it's fun!
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#14What no one has mentioned is how many "essential" skills have arisen as a result of this hack.
For instance, an everpresent threat in Starcraft is the Zerg Rush, in which a player skips building an economy to build zerglings---cheap, light, raider units--- to attack the opponent early before he has any defenses (as he, presumably, has not skipped building an economy). The zerglings are melee attackers, so holding a small choke point is an effective way of only allowing one or two zerglings to attack at a time, even if there are more (usually 6-8).
Of course, this poses a problem---if the tight spaces allow only two zerglings to attack, that's great, but the tight spaces also only allow two of your workers to fight back. Actual fighting units will slaughter worker units, so you've merely slowed your death, not prevented it.
Except! By ordering all your workers to harvest the same mineral patch, you can activate this collisionless behavior described in the article, and then fit your "super-group" of ten or so workers into small spaces---to fight the two zerglings at a time. The workers can definitely win now!
This has become a giant wall of text, but this is actually basic, easy, essential knowledge for the competitive starcraft 2 player, so it's fun to see its origins in this article.
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#15The Protoss Carrier regularly lagged behind other units because it had its own way of doing … everything. The Carrier should have been scrapped entirely and replaced with a different air unit. Even to the latest upgrades of Starcraft I, the AI simply couldn't deal with the carrier effectively--they would always attack the interceptors first. This made using the carrier a cheap game-breaking trick against the computer…
I don't know that that has anything to do with carriers specifically, though. The old AI just wasn't very smart -- there were lots of cheap game-breaking tricks you could use. Lurkers in the base entrance, for example, generally resulted in a computer going crazy until it starved itself. It's like it refused to do any teching until it could get a dozen infantry standing in the base entrance like it WANTED.
The new one's better, but definitely not exploit-free. A dozen speedlings in its mineral line will result in it recalling ALL its forces, rather than just what it needs to deal with the problem.
I sometimes think of the AI as an example of how hard it is to simulate human intelligence.
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#16The Protoss Carrier regularly lagged behind other units because it had its own way of doing … everything. The Carrier should have been scrapped entirely and replaced with a different air unit. Even to the latest upgrades of Starcraft I, the AI simply couldn't deal with the carrier effectively--they would always attack the interceptors first. This made using the carrier a cheap game-breaking trick against the computer…
...and made it one of the most interesting units in multiplayer. In programmer-land, where all abstractions should be pure and elegant, the carrier (as implemented in SC1) may be abhorrent, but this is irrelevant because the customers (i.e. the players) loved it . Some of the quirky behavior of the SC1 carrier was even re-implemented into the upcoming SC2 expansion at the behest of fans. Why? Because it made the unit…
A fun unit in multiplayer isn't really a good excuse for a gamebreaking behavior in single player.
An examination of what it was that made the Carrier fun might have revealed ways to get similar effects (long range, able to fire while retreating, requires paying minerals for continued use . . .) in a unit that wasn't such a weird gamebreaker. Most people just liked Carriers because it cast a field of enemy unit and Ai stupidity around it. Once players get attached to a unit, you may be stuck keeping it in the game even if it's not really good for overall playability.
Just because it worked with this one unit doesn't mean the overall game experience couldn't have been better with something different in there. But once something is introduced, status quo bias takes hold in a major way.
Edit: I'll concede that you want the AI to be stupid in some ways so that it can be exploited. The Carrier just always seemed to me too extreme.
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and made it one of the most interesting units in multiplayer. In programmer-land, where all abstractions should be pure and elegant, the carrier (as implemented in SC1) may be abhorrent, but this is irrelevant because the customers (i.e. the players) loved it . Some of the quirky behavior of the SC1 carrier was even re-implemented into the upcoming SC2 expansion at the behest of fans. Why? Because it made the unit…
Really? That's interesting. I've noticed that units never seem to have the good sense to target Brood Lords rather than Broodlings when they have a choice. It seemed odd, given that the AI had improved so much in other areas -- pathfinding, running from unwinnable fights, varying its opening strategies. It never occurred to me that things might be that way because it's fun !
Since you're interested, here's the video (recorded by a SC1 pro) that catalyzed the SC1 behavior being recreated in the SC2 expansion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rqx8s2qKXM
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and made it one of the most interesting units in multiplayer. In programmer-land, where all abstractions should be pure and elegant, the carrier (as implemented in SC1) may be abhorrent, but this is irrelevant because the customers (i.e. the players) loved it . Some of the quirky behavior of the SC1 carrier was even re-implemented into the upcoming SC2 expansion at the behest of fans. Why? Because it made the unit…
Really? That's interesting. I've noticed that units never seem to have the good sense to target Brood Lords rather than Broodlings when they have a choice. It seemed odd, given that the AI had improved so much in other areas -- pathfinding, running from unwinnable fights, varying its opening strategies. It never occurred to me that things might be that way because it's fun !
These units are basically specifically designed to require micro-ing from the player. Both brood lords and carriers are pretty weak if attacked head on (slow/low-hitpoints)-- their entire strength is in the fact that other units will auto-attack broodlings/interceptors first (which makes some "conceptual" sense since that's what actually attacking them).
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#19I always thought that the fact that workers don't jam was one of the coolest little details of the game that made it so awesome! I never would have thought that it was basically an ugly, last-resort bugfix :)
It's become such an important part of the gameplay that it's funny to think it was just a fix.
see also quake rocketjumping, strafe jumping, bunnyhopping, etc. when carmack wanted to fix all those issues in q3arena, the players protested, because the game was dull.
Re: The StarCraft path-finding hack
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's become such an important part of the gameplay that it's funny to think it was just a fix.
see also quake rocketjumping, strafe jumping, bunnyhopping, etc. when carmack wanted to fix all those issues in q3arena, the players protested, because the game was dull.
And skiing in Starseige: Tribes, a bug with the jumping code. They had to reimplement it for all the following games.