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Comment by mathw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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