51–60 of 154 posts
Oh I’d be thrilled to play WC3 Tower Defence again. Those were loads of fun.
Amazing how WC3 maps were responsible for both MOBAs and Tower Defence, two of the most popular genres of all time, both moreso than conventional RTSs at this point
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…
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.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 scurr…
How times have changed. When I hear about an experienced engineer at Google, Facebook, or Microsoft pulling down $500k today, I barely bat an eye.
On the one hand, one of the greatest games of all time gets remade. And I feel humbled that we're able to make giants over decades — Star Trek, Cobol, Warcraft have my respect.
But on the other hand, it also speaks of a dire lack of creativity as we speak, or boldness, maybe both. The general trend of remakes is also about fixing problems we too often created for ourselves in the first place..
— cough DRM — cough solo/LAN requiring online servers cough —
Ahh, why can't it simply be WC4, all new and shiny and yet with better mechanics and player/customer freedom than any previous installment? I'm a simple man, I just ask for evolution.
Still confused whether I should be thrilled or disheartened or just 'meh'.