I remember going on vacation with my parents and all I had was the Diablo game manual, because I got the game 1 hour before we left. I read the manual about 100 times in the car... good memories
I was so frustrated I removed the cdrom from the drive and threw it on the wall; the cd broke and that was the last time I played Diablo...
The game's public multiplayer was notoriously full of griefing like that. There were also ways to get firewalls to go on the spawn point and pvp was easy to force.
It was a mess. Going into a public game was basically just asking to get screwed over.
edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars
good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars
Heck, they did a better job than most games do to this day. Often when a game has the ability to start before completing the download, it just means you get to look at the main menu.
He's a really nice, approachable guy as well. He was quite impressed at how well the program worked, even with how old the games were
I have no love for optical media anymore.
I know this works (or worked) with Warcraft 3.
1) Latency hiding. The results of actions are determined ahead of time. The hit chance and damage value for melee swings and missile shots (arrows, spell effects) are calculated when you start a weapon swing or bow fire or spellcasting action. The duration of the action hides the network lag; by the time your sword finishes swinging, the packet describing the results has arrived.
2) Low bandwidth. The client does a lot of autonomous prediction and extrapolation. The server typically sends updates of monster positions at intervals of several seconds, rather than every frame. This can create situations where your attacks seem to automatically miss because the monster you think you're attacking isn't where your client thinks it is. But better to have that "lag haze" than to not be playable at all for lack of bandwidth.
This was all implemented for Diablo II after learning from the first Diablo.
As a kid evil is the worst thing ever. No 'bad guy' quite compared...
Until Diablo
I played that demo to oblivion, I can still pretty much remember all the street layouts
I loved that game so much I finally, last week, made it to Orkney to see the actual Skaea Brae. Little bit of artistic licence taken, but Orkney is an amazing place to visit regardless.
Game manuals are a lost art :(
I hope I still have my Warcraft, Lords of the Realm 2, Close Combat 2 and Civilization 2 manuals somewhere.