Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whenitsready/the-world-...

The author did an actual diary and interviewed people back while the game was being produced and immediately after it shipped. He wrote most of his book back in 2006 but didn't publish it until this year.

The QA manager came out of his office one day with a critical announcement. He was angry that we started taking a more quantitative approach to QA, producing lateral results and accomplishing little to nothing. Remember guys you’re number one task is to have fun. This was quite the eye opener for me. So wait I’m supposed to work at Blizzard and have fun? That just didn’t seem right so I just focused on the graphics.

People would come into QA with an ambition to join another budding internal team like cinematic’s and sound and did their best in QA to showcase their work ethic and ambition.

Team members were often treated to company goodies and publicly acknowledged for hard work.

In short we felt important.

> Unfortunately, we did not have private or public symbols for StarCraft 1.16.1.

And then there are all kinds of complications that make the naive approach insufficient. Ok, you have a static memory map. But that's not really enough when the buffer overflows are being used to poke at dynamically allocated data structures (e.g. linked lists and GUI elements).

So you need to basically emulate the full original game and constantly sync the state (in both directions) between the emulation and the real game.

If you find a recording, I'd love to see it too.

Starcraft 2 is still quite good, though, IMO, and they still pay a lot of attention to keeping it as balanced as possible. I still find the high-level tournaments very entertaining to watch.

As for the desync checker, I've been down that rabbit hole - I removed every async method from the codebase and still had desync issues. I am starting to suspect its an issue with some new native that I am not thinking of, but it's a very slow process to track it down, since I need to get ~5 random players in my game every time to test it, and even if no desync happens it doesn't really mean its solved.

This summer with a group of friends we wanted to play Battlefied 2 (2005), official support for that game ended years ago, and even with the unofficial patches, we couldn't play in a fully offline LAN, the game needs to ping a specific server to enable, even local, multiplayer.

At my last LAN party, we were six people in a room without internet connection [1]. I brought a bunch of open-source games and ZIP archives of classic games with No-CD patches and put them on a plain HTTP server for distribution. We mostly played WC3 (with the original Dota map) and Widelands (a Settlers 2 clone), but everyone's favorite was Empty Epsilon (the OSS clone of Star Trek Bridge Simulator).

[1] #Neuland :)

https://www.epicwar.com/maps/159097/

It's a bit like Tetris, in that the game proceeds in levels. Each level, a wave of enemies would run from their spawn point to the centre of the map. All you can do is build defense towers to kill them off as they run through your build area.

Most waves are ground units, and you can arrange your towers in such a way that those units must spend more time walking through your area, which means each of your towers can fire more times. Every so often there would be an air unit round, and this maze approach doesn't work. Some towers have special attributes, like slowing an enemy unit with cold damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeJ7IrE7aFA

Proto-MOBAs and tower defense games were basically singlehandedly popularized by WC3, of course. Some of the WC3 TDs, like Wintermaul Wars, were way more complex than the mobile games you see today, though -- they involved strategies like building truly gigantic mazes to expose enemies to more tower fire and precisely angled walls that took advantage of quirks in the pathing AI to confuse enemies and keep them in the kill zone juuust long enough. Some of them were really unique, too. Battle Ships combined MOBA mechanics with the auto-firing of a tower defense game. Skibi's Castle TD had a ton of unique Mario-Party-style minigames that you'd play against the other players between waves.

There was also a whole genre of reverse tower defense games, where you would buy and upgrade tons of units that would automatically march into the middle to battle enemy units, until one pushed far enough to take out the enemy's bases. Or until there were so many units on the map that the game crashed. But what a spectacle it was.

There were games that were sort of a mashup of RTSes and Betrayl/Secret Hitler, in that every player built villages but one was secretly a "werewolf" whose goal was to convert all the other players.

There was a game called Darwin's Island and other similar ones in an "evolution" genre, which were basically prototypes of Spore.

There were games similar to Civ/Risk played on a map of the world.

RPGs based on popular books and movies were super common, and some were as as good as or better than missions in the WC3 standard RPG campaign. Some the multiplayer ones incorporated a system where you could serialize your stats as a code that you could copy and paste into the next game you played to start were you left off.

There was a CTF-style game called Tree Tag where one player was an infernal who had to tag the other players (treants), who could build defenses and countermeasures as they hid. Then if they got tagged, they'd be sent to jail, where other players could rescue them.

Board games like chess and checkers were common too.

There were platformers like Run Kitty Run.

Even micro-MMOs like Life in the City where you basically just hung out, got a "job", and played some resource gathering minigame. Some of them were crazy complicated, several-megabyte maps with some players playing as institutions and others as citizens. Of course there were fantasy and sci fi themed ones as well.

The best part was that there was zero quality control, because anyone could edit anyone's map, so you constantly encountered variations and remixes of popular maps. Apart from a handful of very popular main maps, you often had no idea what you were going to get.