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Comment by tgb | Hacker News Reader

My first question is what will they change with regards to UI and pathfinding? The original SC is very finicky by today's standards which means it'll be tough to get anyone interested for reasons other than nostalgia. But the particulars of strategy and tactics are strongly influenced by things like the maximum army size selection, the frankly bizarre path finding, etc. So making any change will alienate long term fans.

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The article suggests they aim to make this version pretty much bug-for-bug-compatible, to retain the original feel of the game (and original strategies, which often took game's idiosyncrasies into account).

Whoops, I actually didn't read most of the article, you're right! I went straight to starcraft.com, which has much less information (but pretty visuals).

The press release says "gameplay and balance have been precisely preserved". If that doesn't include the pathfinding algorithms, complete with bugs, I don't know what would.

It would be nice to have a post or two from Blizzard employees to see what went into this effort. I would assume most of Starcraft was written in C++, and that performing this kind of an upgrade without impacting other aspects could be non-trivial.

Why wouldn't they be able to pretty much just reuse all of the old engine code, if this is just a graphical update? Changing the graphics without changing the rest of the game should be fairly straightforward as long as it was written reasonably.

I don't know. There are empirical reasons to suspect that StarCraft uses code like this.

    void DragoonAI()
    {
        // Decide next move by reading main video buffer for random bits
        MoveDirection = Video->buf[1000];
        ...
    }

You are assuming the game was written reasonably though :) Starcraft, like many other games, was written in a huge rush.

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-s...

what you call a bug others call a feature. BW players invested a lot of time learning to manage their units to take advantage of those bugs/features. Starcraft solves most of those issues.

This, totally. Starcraft 2 has a level of finish, particularly in those regards that makes the whole experience much more satisfying.

Just take SC2 for a spin and look at how your army compresses to pass a bottleneck, then expands again once it is past. A thing of beauty.

hopefully nothing changes. lots of players based their technique around those bugs. having it behave "correctly" would make it a pretty different game.

Right from the short article:

> ... the gameplay and balance have been precisely preserved, for an experience that will feel identical to veteran players.

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