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Comment by egfx | Hacker News Reader

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 very frustrating but we fixed it! The solution was hand crafted per model every time. There were ~800 bugs in graphics.

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I suppose the QA teams always have a very acute awareness of the flaws compared to the users. From the perspective of someone who played the game, I thought it was amazing.

Props on the game - it is one of my all time favourites.

Yep. Very true. I have a hard time enjoying WarCraft3 and WoW. Those were work projects. But I shared this feeling playing WarCraft2.

I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the multiplayer mode.

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.

Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD. The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.

Well, there was 3dfx Voodoo before that.

I disagree.. There were quite a few gaming-focused graphics cards released during the development of Warcraft 3. - 1996 : 3DFX Voodoo(1) - 1997 : Nvidia Riva 128, ATI Rage Pro, 3DFX Voodoo Rush - 1998 : Nvidia Riva TNT, 3DFX Voodoo2, Banshee, S3 Savage 3D,Matrox G100/200/300, Intel i740, ATI Rage 128, Rage 128 Pro, Rage Fury Maxx - 1999 : Nvidia Riva TNT2/Pro/Ultra, S3 Savage 4/Pro/2000, Power VR, 3DFX Voodoo 3, Nvidia Geforce 256, Matrox G400 - 2000 : 3DFX Voodoo4, Voodoo4, Matrox G450, Nvidia GeForce2/MX/GTS/Ultra, ATI Radeon, etc

Believe me I know, I also loved my monster voodoo card but Nvidia changed the game with GeForce 1 and the record breaking scores in 3Dmark. Nothing really was able to deliver spectacular graphics a̶p̶p̶r̶e̶c̶i̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶f̶o̶r̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ particularly the frustratingly popular rage and embedded intel cards.

That's such a pity people mean spectacular 3D graphics under "appreciable gaming performance". IMHO that's very far from the most important part of a game.

This is a highly subjective opinion.

I played a considerable amount of 3D games on the cards listed prior to the Geforce256's release.

Hardware Transform and Lighting was nice but it wasn't as if the industry didn't exist prior to it's release.

I owned a Riva 128 and I can hardly name it a gaming-focused graphics card. I could play no game in hardware 3D mode with it. The only real 3D cards during the days were 3DFX Voodoo 1-2. And this was many years before WarCraft 3.

Not sure when development started, but when the game was released the geforce was out for 3 years and the geforce 4 series was already launched.

Modern 3D with modern graphics cards already existed in 1998 with games like Unreal and Half-Life, imho, on the Riva TNT (not the Voodoo with its 16-bit color ;)).

Of course indeed there still was a larger variety of types of graphics cards and drivers then so indeed more work.

It was very important for us to deliver the “WarCraft” experience no matter what computer or language you played. It’s true that it was not the most groundbreaking 3D game in term of what was technically possible i guess.

Was going to say something similar - but thinking about it, games from that time just didn't have many glitches. I don't know if games are just so much more complex now, or there was extra love and attention back then?

Gaming graphics indeed is by orders of magnitude more complex today. Insane numbers of polygons, huge textures, lots of effects impossible to render on a CPU. Back in the days I played everything with software (CPU, also very weak as compared to those of today) rendering (as I've never had a Voodoo) and was ok. I wish today games had graphics this simple.

>games from that time just didn't have many glitches

What do you mean? It was pretty standard for a game to work on select few(3dfx, nvidia and maybe ATI if you were lucky) graphic chips and glitch/crash on the rest. You often waited 6-12 months for fixed drivers. Original Unreal just crashed on stock Nvidia TNT2 drivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqqsYoT4hk

What can I say, my experience was different, or it could just be nostalgia :shrug:

Pre-3D graphics cards I really don't remember having issues like modern games seem to.

Once 3D graphics cards first became a things, maybe I just got lucky with my choices (Voodoo, then Voodoo 2,IIRC).

I'm not saying I had no issues, and downloading large patches over dialup wasn't exactly fun, but I recall bugs being far less frequent.

pre 3d compatibility nightmares: https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Any other stories from that time? I think a lot of people here would love to hear them.

Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.

Wow, Descent, man that one just took me way back. I remember one thing: PC struggled as much as I did to go through the game, haha. I can't believe that engine eventually made it to WC3, such a small (and wonderful) world. Thank you so much for the memories, and for sharing!

Yeah, that one took me way back, too. Descent was the first time I'd ever done multiplayer gaming on a computer. I was maybe 12 or 13 and a guy in my neighborhood was some kind of software developer who would take me and my friend to his office on the weekends sometimes to play it on their networked computers.

Good times!

I used to play it with my brother - one of us would aim and the other would move and shoot. Somehow that was easier than playing solo for us.

Years later I revisited the game and discovered it had music! Our old sound card had not been compatible.

if you ever decide to write a collection of these memories.... like a little blurb for reach story, and the things like 40 pages of 40 small stories or something. please put them on gumroad or some easy site where we can buy them . Id' gladly drop a 5$ bill to read a bunch of these on my way to work.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll strongly consider it and let you know what I can come up with.

Same! I'd be happy to pay for these small nuggets of blizzard history

What was the office like?

It was one medium sized building in an Irvine office park next to the UCI campus. Basically you had an auditorium that opened to QA with 3 awesome coin-ops in free play. I’m still having a hard time finding exact replicas of these games in any arcade. Then you had a small upstairs section with a few offices.

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 scurried to find him the nearest chair I could. But there was no such thing as a working chair on the QA floor. And as he sat down the entire chair collapsed and he fell back first on the floor. The QA manager gasped like I dropped the most expensive decorated egg in the world. But it was the most hilarious thing we've ever witnessed down there. After the incident he even stayed and played a round of X-Men vs StreetFighter so it was cool.

> There was one notoriously very high payed engineer behind Battle.net. (I think they payed him $500k per year)

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.

Industries, not times. Gamedev works in a different pay scale.

I’ve always been curious - what would you say was the driver internally behind the legendary “Blizzard polish” back then? What made that happen?

I recommend the World of Warcraft diary. It's 300 pages, has some awesome stories and pictures, and just as a good job of telling how blizzard made WoW have in 2001-2004.

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.

A tireless focus on delivery.

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.

I tried to break the war3 engine as a youth, pushing it to weird limits in the map editor. Can confirm war3 doesn't break. Will forever be a staple game in my library.

I've always been quietly impressed how well war3's JASS and map editor works as an introduction to programming and how games work. The sc2 editor is too complex for teenage fun IMO.

i still play tft on battlnet. its small now, not many games hosted, but you can still find cool stuff. i was always impressed when the game was big how smooth the game played when custom maps added custom abilities and spells. dota (2005/2006) would add new heros with each release and the game performed well. it still has great animations

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