??
That text is not readable in VR; it need to be bigger and closer to the center of the screen.
Unless it’s either:
There’s VR mode and cinematic mode, and presumably the store page is taking its shots from cinematic? Or there’s a greater philosophical point about religion and bowing the head or something.
Having to lower your head to read subtitles in a vr game is an incredibly good feature though
some guy found a starcraft master disc in a box of shit he bought on ebay. blizzard themselves have claimed to not have the source code to starcraft, so they freaked out and threatened/bribed this guy to get it back. this being blizzard, that code will never be released and that disc will probably be thrown in mike morhaime’s personal vault somewhere in antarctica. paging @felix to lament what may have been
honestly the original source would probably be less valuable at this point than what they did with the most recent patch. Still a shame but they’ve made some decent moves lately
how could that ever be true. sure, the free release and the remaster are nice, I’m glad blizzard got around to it, but look at what source code did for doom, quake, thief, freespace, panzer general, duke, and who knows what else I’m unaware of. a game as enduring as starcraft would surely get a lot of mileage out of that.
That would rely on Blizzard deciding to release the source code officially to the public and under a usefully-permissive license. If you had the source code to Starcraft you could probably port it to SDL and run it on everything, but unless they GPL’d it or something, you’d get your ass taken to the legal step in a nanosecond.
actually, uh
yeah, the source code would be pretty worthless.
one, starcraft isn’t that complicated of a game. a dedicated programmer could remake it, given time. reverse engineering probably wouldn’t even be that big a deal.
two, anyone who looked at the source code would find themselves staring down a barrel full of lawyers making sure they never looked at code the same way ever again.
source code by itself is generally pretty worthless, you have to be able to make use of it too.
There is no way that a solitary programmer is going to match every nuance of starcraft in any reasonable amount of time. You really think that the dozens, if not hundreds, of devs who worked on the original starcraft for years were just being lazy or something?
no but they were iterating for much of that time and had to write a much more efficient engine than someone would now
but I agree that “a clone” is probably not at all a good solution, “just clone it” is the worst kind of linux dev mentality
dot dot dot
To start, I would never insinuate devs are lazy. Ever. Developing is hard.
But, the point I was trying to make is, creating an engine for an existing asset chain with a known specification for how everything works is a drastically different process than designing a game from the ground up. Do I believe someone with the full specifications for Doom could remake the engine runtime in his spare time? Sure do! Do I believe he could have made it from scratch? Probably not!
When a team of that size develops something that is ‘a game,’ they are not limited to the executable runtime that powers all the game logic and physics. They have the entire tool chain and content production and serious design work to manage, which is honestly at least 95+% of what you are paying for in modern dev time.
edit: honestly, I would go and say that the real work is in the tool chain anymore. Runtimes are ‘dumb’ on purpose, so that they can be as efficient as possible. The vast majority of the work in large scale game dev is in making everything lined up in such a way that the runtime does as little work as possible.
bear in mind that a lot of real developers cut their teeth on stuff like that though, too
it’s about the joy of figuring out how you make something like that more than it is about the clone itself, i feel
people who want to create new/original things tend to stick to existing engines rather than rolling their own too
no I agree it’s a very useful exercise I’m just totally fed up with the “LOOK IT’S JUST AS GOOD SEE” approach to say, tux kart
The Penguin Clone Games honestly do a lot to prove my point that asset production and management thereof is the vast majority of serious game dev, not the runtime itself
because they’re so bad at it
there are honest to god things in starcraft that the actual coders who made the game have no idea why they work the way they work.
Sure you could make an RTS game, and maybe it could even load real Starcraft assets, but would it be Starcraft? The netcode, the input processing, the pathfinding - all of these things are core parts of Starcraft, and all of them are likely to be very quirky. Could you seat a pro player in front of your clone and fool them? I really think that would be extraordinarily hard.
Yeah, Starcraft players truly care about every last obscure mechanical and UI nuance of the game. Implementing another game with the same assets wouldn’t be of as much interest as a port or “enhanced edition”.
But still, I agree it wouldn’t have been of much value to release it because the illegality would drive serious developers away from it, and secondarily because it doesn’t have Brood War. (What good came out of the hacked HL2 alpha source code? Not much that I’ve noticed.) On the other hand, I think the common countervailing concern that cheaters would have a field day with the source code isn’t really present, either (exploits for the original game have been picked clean, and the netcode for the remaster is probably different).
I think it would be valuable if Blizzard officially released it, though, for sure. They apparently had entirely lost the source code before (seems like the remaster was probably based on disassembly?), so this would empower them to make an official release if they choose to (not that I expect it, it would be out of character).
I’m still genuinely impressed that they ported the backend to OpenGL for the EOL patch, I wonder if they shared any contractors with the infinity engine OSX/Linux releases as that can’t have been completely trivial. those were all originally directdraw afaik (as was worms armageddon, whose later patches kept the ddraw backend but added wine-specific toggles in its config menu)
My guess is they wrote a fake DirectDraw implementation that projects to OpenGL. It’s easier to perfectly emulate the DirectDraw spec than to dig into crazy StarCraft implementation details. It’s common for post facto porting efforts to use high-level-emulator style approaches, since then you only need to reason about sane well-documented APIs rather than some ancient gamedev’s pile of hacks.
That kind of approach is also how DSFix author wrote a resolution uprezzing mod for PC Dark Souls before the game even was released.
