Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps • Hacker News Board

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#41

Post by shawnz » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #33

dangrossman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games they released over 20 years ago.

Question - is it really that hard to achieve this? Seems like something you could throw in a VM and call it a day. Especially with the way things are scaling vs 20 year old games. Presumably you can run the entire world's worth of 20 year games off a crappy VM

It's additional attack surface which they have to maintain. Consider that those servers probably need access to customer's personal information for licensing and authentication reasons.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#42

Post by egfx » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

eljimmy wrote: post #36

egfx wrote: post #17

I was the QA Lead for Grapics on WarCraft3. This was Blizzards first 3D game and the early engine was very error prone but with the meticulous attention to detail and the sheer amount of time we spent polishing. This game turned out flawless for its time. Early on there were many models that would glitch and there was a massive artifact issue that would happen in multiplayer games. I’m sure the developers found it ve…

I suppose the QA teams always have a very acute awareness of the flaws compared to the users. From the perspective of someone who played the game, I thought it was amazing. Props on the game - it is one of my all time favourites.

Yep. Very true. I have a hard time enjoying WarCraft3 and WoW. Those were work projects. But I shared this feeling playing WarCraft2.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#43

Post by egfx » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #37

egfx wrote: post #17

I was the QA Lead for Grapics on WarCraft3. This was Blizzards first 3D game and the early engine was very error prone but with the meticulous attention to detail and the sheer amount of time we spent polishing. This game turned out flawless for its time. Early on there were many models that would glitch and there was a massive artifact issue that would happen in multiplayer games. I’m sure the developers found it ve…

Any other stories from that time? I think a lot of people here would love to hear them.

Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#44

Post by grawprog » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

I Still have all my original copies of all my blizzard games with CD keys from the original Warcraft and diablo up to Warcraft 3. I enjoyed Warcraft 3 but I always liked 2 and its exapansions better. I wasn't a big fan of the the expanded RPG elements and to be honest i never really liked the way the story went. I also never got into WoW so I was kind of sad to see the franchise change so drastically after and still hope, fruitlessly I feel, there'll be a Warcraft 4 with a return to the solid RTS roots of the first 2 games.

Warcraft was the first RTS I ever played and the first game I remember going to a computer store to buy. I remember seeing the box and that was the game I wanted. I read through the manual, eagerly awaited the never released Warcraft adventures and played Warcraft over and over. When the second one came out it blew my mind. It made everything about the first one better and expanded the story pretty well. It introduced other races, increased unit speed drastically, added aerial and naval combat, got rid of the ridiculous road system and just felt like such an awesome improvement. It was the first game I played over lan. I remember playing with my cousins and my brother when we got a newer computer and had the old one hooked up still. It was amazing to me.

I never felt the same way about Warcraft 3. The 3d graphics were cool, though I didn't really like how cartoonish it all became, I enjoyed the additional races, but it didn't really feel the same. It felt like they took those really annoying maps from the first Warcraft where you had a hero and had to go through those dungeon cave things and made an entire game around it. I played through it all and the expansions, but I don't remember it as fondly. It may have just been that point in my life where I was becoming more disenchanted with video games overall, but the series is still one of those special ones to me. Even if I probably spent far more time with StarCraft and diablo 2. I was addicted to diablo 2 for a while, I can't play games like that any more.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#45

Post by trollied » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #8

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…

Wow, really enjoyed reading that. Thank you!

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#46

Post by vince14 » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

mashlol wrote: post #14

I recently pre-ordered and got access to the original wc3 which they've since patched with updates. I started working on a new custom map, which now has support for Lua and all kinds of new natives like UI natives that allow you to completely customize the UI. Unfortunately, the debugging tools are abysmal. There is currently a player desync happening in multiplayer in my map (somehow different players disagree with…

The first thing I do is to wrap the entire Lua script in a pcall in order to intercept and display occurring exceptions.

As for desyncs there is https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/desync-checker-for-jass...

The archive contains text files which are very helpful in understanding which functions are responsible for desyncs.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#47

Post by VonGuard » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:09 PM UTC

One thing I don't see mentioned here is how important for history it is to be compatible with those old mad. WC3 was where the tower defense game was invented, where DOTA was invented, and where a dozen other smaller sub-genres of games were invented. Being able to play those again will be incredibly important for future generations.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#48

Post by K0SM0S » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

egfx wrote: post #43

ajkjk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any other stories from that time? I think a lot of people here would love to hear them.

Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.

Wow, Descent, man that one just took me way back. I remember one thing: PC struggled as much as I did to go through the game, haha. I can't believe that engine eventually made it to WC3, such a small (and wonderful) world. Thank you so much for the memories, and for sharing!

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#49

Post by cm2012 » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

This is incredible news. So many genres of games came from these.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#50

Post by egfx » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 8:17 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #37

egfx wrote: post #17

I was the QA Lead for Grapics on WarCraft3. This was Blizzards first 3D game and the early engine was very error prone but with the meticulous attention to detail and the sheer amount of time we spent polishing. This game turned out flawless for its time. Early on there were many models that would glitch and there was a massive artifact issue that would happen in multiplayer games. I’m sure the developers found it ve…

Any other stories from that time? I think a lot of people here would love to hear them.

Ok, one story you'll only hear on HN. There was one notoriously very high payed engineer behind Battle.net. (I think they payed him $500k per year) Anyways, he loathed coming down to QA and intermingling with us minions. But one day he needed to come down and check out a bug in person. He pointed his arms like he needed to take a seat and look at the computer screen. He then pointed at me and without thinking I scurried to find him the nearest chair I could. But there was no such thing as a working chair on the QA floor. And as he sat down the entire chair collapsed and he fell back first on the floor. The QA manager gasped like I dropped the most expensive decorated egg in the world. But it was the most hilarious thing we've ever witnessed down there. After the incident he even stayed and played a round of X-Men vs StreetFighter so it was cool.