141–150 of 154 posts
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Never tried it. Link?
They came in many flavours, but Cube Defense is fairly representative. It's a bit like Tetris, in that the game proceeds in levels. Each level, a wave of enemies would run from their spawn point to the centre of the map. All you can do is build defense towers to kill them off as they run through your build area. Most waves are ground units, and you can arrange your towers in such a way that those units must spend mor…
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I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the multiplayer mode. Cool thing was it played nicely on my Pentium-II with a Matrox G550 video card which is famous for being great at 2D an very bad at 3D graphics.
Was going to say something similar - but thinking about it, games from that time just didn't have many glitches. I don't know if games are just so much more complex now, or there was extra love and attention back then?
What do you mean? It was pretty standard for a game to work on select few(3dfx, nvidia and maybe ATI if you were lucky) graphic chips and glitch/crash on the rest. You often waited 6-12 months for fixed drivers. Original Unreal just crashed on stock Nvidia TNT2 drivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqqsYoT4hk
The story of making the Starcraft 1 custom maps work on the remaster is pretty amazing: http://0xeb.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emu... Basically a lot of the maps were using a buffer overflow in the scripting to read and write all kinds of internal data structures in the game engine. If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to…
> If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to this extent? Well you have the original source so you can derive the memory map and then just create an artificial "buffer overflow area" where the maps can write to that you then copy into the actual game data.
> Unfortunately, we did not have private or public symbols for StarCraft 1.16.1.
And then there are all kinds of complications that make the naive approach insufficient. Ok, you have a static memory map. But that's not really enough when the buffer overflows are being used to poke at dynamically allocated data structures (e.g. linked lists and GUI elements).
So you need to basically emulate the full original game and constantly sync the state (in both directions) between the emulation and the real game.
The story of making the Starcraft 1 custom maps work on the remaster is pretty amazing: http://0xeb.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emu... Basically a lot of the maps were using a buffer overflow in the scripting to read and write all kinds of internal data structures in the game engine. If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to…
Do know where these slides were presented? I'd like to find a recording if possible.
If you find a recording, I'd love to see it too.
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Was going to say something similar - but thinking about it, games from that time just didn't have many glitches. I don't know if games are just so much more complex now, or there was extra love and attention back then?
>games from that time just didn't have many glitches What do you mean? It was pretty standard for a game to work on select few(3dfx, nvidia and maybe ATI if you were lucky) graphic chips and glitch/crash on the rest. You often waited 6-12 months for fixed drivers. Original Unreal just crashed on stock Nvidia TNT2 drivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqqsYoT4hk
Pre-3D graphics cards I really don't remember having issues like modern games seem to.
Once 3D graphics cards first became a things, maybe I just got lucky with my choices (Voodoo, then Voodoo 2,IIRC).
I'm not saying I had no issues, and downloading large patches over dialup wasn't exactly fun, but I recall bugs being far less frequent.
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I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the multiplayer mode. Cool thing was it played nicely on my Pentium-II with a Matrox G550 video card which is famous for being great at 2D an very bad at 3D graphics.
Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD. The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.
Modern 3D with modern graphics cards already existed in 1998 with games like Unreal and Half-Life, imho, on the Riva TNT (not the Voodoo with its 16-bit color ;)).
Of course indeed there still was a larger variety of types of graphics cards and drivers then so indeed more work.
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Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD. The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.
Not sure when development started , but when the game was released the geforce was out for 3 years and the geforce 4 series was already launched. Modern 3D with modern graphics cards already existed in 1998 with games like Unreal and Half-Life, imho, on the Riva TNT (not the Voodoo with its 16-bit color ;)). Of course indeed there still was a larger variety of types of graphics cards and drivers then so indeed more w…
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>games from that time just didn't have many glitches What do you mean? It was pretty standard for a game to work on select few(3dfx, nvidia and maybe ATI if you were lucky) graphic chips and glitch/crash on the rest. You often waited 6-12 months for fixed drivers. Original Unreal just crashed on stock Nvidia TNT2 drivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqqsYoT4hk
What can I say, my experience was different, or it could just be nostalgia :shrug: Pre-3D graphics cards I really don't remember having issues like modern games seem to. Once 3D graphics cards first became a things, maybe I just got lucky with my choices (Voodoo, then Voodoo 2,IIRC). I'm not saying I had no issues, and downloading large patches over dialup wasn't exactly fun, but I recall bugs being far less frequent…
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Replying here because you mentioned WarCraft 2. For whatever reason, while I love watching others play 3D MMORPG, I personally prefer to play 2D or 2.5D (Diablo 2, Dungeon Keeper, old school FF Tactics).
FFT is one of the greatest games of all time. It has a little community of people making custom mechanics / storylines / etc.: http://ffhacktics.com/
I love the UI, mechanics of Polytopia on iOS. I'm eagerly awaiting a Final Fantasy Tactics with a similar touch-centric UI.