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Comment by magnat | Hacker News Reader

I strongly recommend reading Pat Wyatt's blog [1] for some insights about an early Starcraft development from more technical point of view.

[1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...

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It is incredible that you could run such game on a 486 and play online using a 28.8 Kbps modem. StarCraft II requires far more resources and bandwidth to play while not being necessarily more fun in a directly proportional manner.

Another similar article from that era: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/1500-archers-on-a-...

Is there any game which is proportional more fun for the computational resources it uses compared to late '90s games?

Some things were basically perfected back then.

It technically ran on a 486, but was painfully slow.

IIRC the box stated 100MHz Pentium minimum, but we found for LAN sessions that you really wanted a 200MHz MMX CPU to never suffer slowdown.

it barely ran on 486 fwiw, it would have a major ongoing pause every 2 seconds or so at beginning, getting worse as game progressed. -anecdote from a boy that badly wished for a 586.

Exactly, I remember the game for not being technically impressive upon release. 2D games were looked down upon in 1998.

I worked at another game studio at the time of release and all our titles under production were 3D.

We played the hell out of it at LAN parties but felt that technically it already was dated.

I would not say it looked dated.

The low polygon count 3D games of 1998 were still not aesthetically superior to 2D games.

Even if you had a GPU back than (better known at the time as "graphics accelerator"), the graphics were not that good.

This was my opinion at the time as well. First generation 3D games looked inferior to the previous 2D pixel art and 2.5D shooters of the time. The polygon counts were just to low. They could handle perspectives better and had more complex lighting and by the second generation they were already the way forward, but they had a crude first effort feel and required additional hardware to really shine against their predecessors graphically.

I still feel a lot of games (particularly strategy games) lose something going 3D but maybe that is just nostalgia talking. I never could quite getting to 3D RTS games.

That's not 100% true. The pathfinding is atrociously bad in SC1, which is usually attributed to how they took the WC engine and made it isometric, but I assume was partly also due to performance. Whenever I go back to play it, that's the one thing that frustrates me every time when playing the campaign.

SC1 is a game where the player makes a very significant different in the outcome.

And where the difference in skill level are huge.

This sort of "atrociousness" is also why it made the competitive scene work, because it allows skills to show through. If you select-all, attack, the pathing will cause you to lose the fight against someone micro-ing the units.

I don't disagree, but when I'm playing the campaign or custom maps, I'm not too worried about skill expression and micromanaging these brain-dead units is not all that fun.

He's in this thread

Thank you for this link.

I'm busy reading through the blog and there are some incredible programming insights in there.

Highly recommended.

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