31–40 of 87 posts
Really enjoyed this part of the article. When you have an infinitely long two-month period, you still can't complete a task that requires three months.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Forget about Tribes: Vengeance & Tribes Ascend, neither captured that same feel.
The 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…
Earlier 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…
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 A…
I wonder what part of their path finding algo created a glitch like the drone float[1] [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MN0wjoqmzU
A number of similar bugs with queued commands existed. I get the sense that this feature wasn't adequately tested. :)
It'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 thi…
Funny fact: if you landed a building on your opponent's tank, you could actually get a label "Kills: 1" on the building :D.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember thinking to myself, at a talk given by an Activision employee on some Mechwarrior pathing issues, that these guys were re-inventing printed circuit board layout. They had the same sorts of constraints, go from here to there, don't cross certain types of 'terrain' (traces in the layout case). Game units don't get to make vias though :-)
Circuit routing is an entirely different beast. A previously routed "shortest" trace from one node to another can obstruct a much shorter trace between two unrelated nodes. In this way it's similar to the traveling salesman problem, where early "greedy" choices made by the salesman can force him to make much less efficient choices later.
I remember circuit routing was an example in Skeina's Algorithm Design Manual [1], and believe he proved that it was indeed NP-complete, not polynomial like the general pathfinding problem.
1. http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena/...
Earlier 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…
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 A…
One of the reasons Starcraft is interesting as an e-sport is because bugs like this have kept the game in racial balance for over a decade. For example, the game was not designed to give mutalisks the ability to stack on top of each other. However, at some point in the early 2000s, it was discovered that when 11 mutalisks were grouped with 1 overlord, the mutas tended to stack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfqQYJzq…
Is changing the behavior of a group of units because it happens to be grouped with a distant unit really a good thing for the game? It makes for a good story, and it's great fun for the person who discovers it. Players like it, because it lets them beat new players even more easily. But players don't always know what's best for them. This is why Starcraft 2 multiplayer is structured to force players to play on compli…
Both SC2 and BW have two sets of maps, UMS maps with custom settings used for fun games and competitive maps made to be racially balanced and produce "good" games. In SC2 UMS maps are part of the arcade where as ladder games are played on tournament maps. The same is true for BW but blizzard didn't have an official ladder so 99% of the games on battle.net were UMS maps, but ICCUP ladder had the same competitive maps you see in SC2.
As far as the glitches are concerned, they were undoubtedly beneficial to BW, as the last balance patch was in 2001 when the game was in its infancy as far as strategy goes. For example TvZ could not be played in its current form without muta stacking and terran's still have more success despite it. 99% of players would never use these tricks of have them used against them, but it allowed for the game to advance strategically and added an additional element of skill.