An interesting look at how Starcraft was programmed… I officially gave up programming after trying to get a handle on Starcraft’s code and the code in Westwood’s RTS games. After seeing all that spaghetti and thinking that this is the ‘professional way’, I sighed and said: “I don’t think this is for me.” Hahahaha.
What is great about his blog entries is that he is turning inside out long-standing assumptions we’ve had about gaming. For example, why are Blizzard games like Warcraft all cute and bright? “It is because of Blizzard’s art style, and how they want the game to be shown.” And we also wondered why games, today, are all ‘dark and gritty’. “It is because gaming is now mature, Malstrom,” a snotty reader says. “Before, console gaming was only for kids, and the graphics had to be bright and colorful.” The actual answer is that games had to be designed to appear clearly on televisions of that time period. This meant a bright and colorful display. Blizzard’s Warcraft is bright and colorful because the art teams were used to doing console games. Today’s games are ‘dark and gritty’ precisely because of how much ‘better’ the television sets have become.
One longstanding assumption with Blizzard is that their PC games aim for ‘low to medium hardware requirements’ because they can sell more. This was always strange to me since companies like Origin always put out games that required you to get a new computer (and we did! And computers were MUCH more expensive than they are today). The real reason is that putting out games on high hardware requirements raises the costs for technical support. Customer support is a very expensive component. Lower hardware requirements means less customer support.
His remarks about Origin’s long saving and loading processes brought back memories. At least in Ultima 7, they had this really cool red moongate swirly effect on the monitor while it was processing.