
StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames - phenylene
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-down-in-flames
======
T-R
For anyone who's wondering:

Mode 7 was the SNES graphics mode that allowed for things like rotating and
zooming a background layer - used for things like the track in Mario Kart and
F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). The
Scroll Register was used for scrolling in Mode 7.

H-Blank is the horizontal blanking period (and associated interrupt) - a time
period between the drawing of scanlines on the screen (there's also V-blank,
between frames). Changes made during H-Blank could make for some interesting
effects - it was used for things like the circle that closes around Mario at
the end of a level of Super Mario World: The rectangle draw routine is used,
but the size of the rectangle is changed between scanlines, creating a circle.
I'd imagine this was used for some of the wavy distortion effects in games
like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound as well.

~~~
psykotic
> used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in
> Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship).

Even the 3D plane effect in F-Zero and Mario Kart requires an hblank interrupt
routine that changes the scale and scroll registers for the tile map. Without
such trickery Mode 7 technically only does 2D rotozooming. That said, in
colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D
plane effect.

~~~
philiac
> in colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D
> plane effect.

That is amusing.

~~~
T-R
I believe he's right, though - I've heard that Mode 7, and specifically the
fact that it could simulate a 3D perspective with that effect, was a selling
point of the SNES over the Genesis/Megadrive to developers (that, and its
higher number of colors). I admittedly haven't played around with Mode 7 much
myself.

Apparently Wikipedia has a nice article on it -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7>

~~~
philiac
Oh, I meant I found it amusing that something as obscure as Mode 7 could be
referred to "colloquially." I'm in no position to hold an opinion on the
intricacies of SNES graphics modes.

~~~
GFischer
It was mentioned on every SNES review back in the day, so at the time it was
common knowledge among gamers and enthusiasts.

~~~
padobson
+1, "Kicking it into mode 7" was one hell of way to spend a Saturday night.

There's no youth like nerd youth.

------
SoftwareMaven
I've worked at two game studios over the years and came away with one
takeaway: there won't be a third unless it's my own. There are few more
dysfunctional engineering environments on the planet, leading to continual
burnout.

There is a long line of coders who grew up playing games that want to do that
into adulthood, leading to a perverse supply/demand ratio that allows studios
to treat their employees like crap under the auspices of "that's how the
industry works". I wouldn't buy into it.

~~~
motoford
This is not limited to game studios, or even software in general.
Unfortunately it's everywhere.

~~~
pjmlp
Not really.

In most European countries, unions tend to be strong enough to prevent this
type of situations in regular IT shops, if you complain about it.

Just in the game industry, people tend to avoid to complain, because it is so
hard to get into.

~~~
enjo
You clearly have never experienced Symbian or Nokia development efforts. Both
places where complete blood-baths, at least from my perspective as an outsider
working pretty closely with teams inside of both companies.

~~~
pjmlp
Actually I used to work for that Finnish company.

But here in Germany we have good unions that are able to say _stop_.

So those blood-baths had limited extent here.

------
wtallis
_"As bad as Ion Storm was internally, there was a dark secret that eventually
unraveled. It wasn’t until years later, well after the 1996 E3 demo of
Dominion Storm, and after StarCraft launched, that we discovered that the
Dominion Storm demo was a fake."_

How many times in the history of computing has a team seen a faked demo,
believed it, and cloned it, unwittingly becoming the first ones to do it for
real? The fact that there are several such stories is really quite amazing.

~~~
3minus1
What are some other examples?

~~~
mlinsey
One famous example is the Apple team getting a demo of the Graphical User
Interface at Xerox PARC. The Apple engineers mistakenly believed that the
Xerox interface had a bunch of things it did not, in particular being able to
drag overlapping windows on top of each other. The Xerox engineers were
supposedly amazed when they saw the results. This isn't quite the same thing -
Xerox wasn't staging a fake demo, the Apple guys just mis-remembered or mis-
understood what they were looking at. But they still put an insane amount of
effort into getting this working, much to everybody's surprise, because they
thought that someone else had already done it, so it must have been possible.

Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. You can probably find this
story somewhere on the folklore website.

~~~
nessus42
_> in particular being able to drag overlapping windows on top of each other_

That's not true. The Xerox Alto had overlapping windows, and it was released
in 1973!

<http://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/alto/index.html>

Also, MIT Lisp Machines had overlapping windows by the late '70s, and MIT had
borrowed this idea from the Alto.

~~~
icebraining
It's not overlapping windows, but a similar concept. From folklore.org
(awesome site, by the way; it made me a fan of _that_ Apple):

    
    
      Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get
      them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows.
      Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw
      and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and
      repaint portions of windows brought to the front.
    

On Xerox, Apple and Progress:
[http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_P...](http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt)

~~~
nemo1618
Ah, I love folklore.org. I devoured every article on the site in about a week.
Really makes you wonder what Apple would be like today if Burrell and Andy had
had more power to override Jobs (see the "Diagnostic Port" story).

------
STRML
Blizzard is often revered as one of those few studios, like Valve, that
operate on "when it's done" time - game releases happen when they're ready,
not when some publishing house requires it. As a result they have been
monumentally successful.

It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have
gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up,
studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like
they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard
a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the
greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.

~~~
MMXII
It's an incredible marketing message that may or may not be in line with what
actually goes on internally.

Is it believable that they have more freedom to scrap, or extend projects?
Certainly. But are there are also external forces to development that include
things such as deadlines, and other timings? I would imagine so.

It's easy for us to think of companies as an unchanging abstraction, but in
reality a company changes very much based on who is behind it. Blizzard in its
heyday is not the Blizzard today. I feel like the company has lost some of its
magic, and it's not even quite sure why.

The talent is very different since the industry has matured. Their projects
are run by people from industry that have been able to deliver before
(C&C:SC2, DoW:D3). I can understand the desire for a certain predictability
when you are spending 100M+ on a title. But at the same time, the reality is
that these people spent many years delivering mediocre titles. Contrast this
approach with Valve, which routinely picks up brilliant, but risky, talent and
IP. Today, they have picked up DOTA, possibly one of the biggest games of this
decade, which has slipped either by ignorance or incompetence through
Blizzard's fingers.

Blizzard has every right to rehash their older games. But in 15 years, we see
sidegrades instead of evolution. Perhaps they are using 1997 as a reference
point. When you release a product with the barebones featureset of BNET2, it
would have been passable in 1997, but 2012 is different. The landscape has
completely changed. Blizzard is no longer one of the few providers of a
functional multiplayer experience - you can get any game you can think of in
your browser, desktop, or console. They are no longer a big fish in a small
pond, but just one fish in a large ocean. By their actions, I'm not sure they
truly understand how dangerous their position is. It's understandable to miss
the change in the environment, after all it has been slow, and masked by
tremendous successes with WoW.

But the times have changed, and on their current path, they will miss the boat
the next time someone eats their lunch.

~~~
crazypyro
To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to
say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to
secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot
games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few
years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the
studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able
to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.

~~~
MMXII
That's exactly what I mean by slip through their fingers. It would be like
Valve not picking CS. With Blizzard's considerable resources and, as they
claim, freedom, they should have gone after hiring Icefrog and getting DOTA.
If it's not in their DNA to make such a play work, well I think that factors
into the larger point of them living in another age.

I want to also clarify that a lot of this rant is in the context of them
trying to build out stuff like the UMS maps store for SC2 (or even putting in
development time on their version of DOTA). To me, these are a fool's errand;
pursuing them demonstrates that Blizzard doesn't understand _why_ UMS was so
successful on their platform 15 years ago, and how the landscape has changed
such that it no longer makes sense.

~~~
FreakLegion
UMS was still successful 9 years ago, when the original DotA (not Allstars)
first appeared. And it wasn't until 2005-6 that Allstars really took off, so
that's only 6-7 years ago that there was still a vibrant UMS scene for WC3.

SC2 could've had a successful modding scene as well; Blizzard just doesn't
understand what modders want or how to build tools for them. SC2's editor and
the Galaxy scripting language were both underwhelming in their own right and
significantly less powerful than the community-developed tools available for
WC3. As a result, the competent WC3 modders abandoned Blizzard en masse.

Blizzard Allstars is also a fantastic idea and exactly the right move from a
strategic standpoint. Unfortunately, Blizzard has absolutely bungled the
execution. They should have had it ready to release with SC2, long before LoL
had really caught on or DotA 2 was a thing. Instead it's been more than two
years, and there's still no release date for it or HotS.

~~~
crazypyro
Lots of people agree that SC2's editor was good enough to do a lot of neat
things. Someone made a 3rd person, mmo/arena type game. There was some issues
with the fact that sc2 netcode is no good for mmo/shooters, but I think the
true killer was the fact that it was impossible to get your map to become
popular if you weren't already popular. The popular maps stayed popular
because they were always on the front page.

This is completely different from wc3's system where whatever games were
hosted by people showed up, so you would have to wait to find a game you
wanted, but it also provided new maps much more exposure.

~~~
FreakLegion
It doesn't matter that you can do neat things when the workflows are hideously
overwrought, though[1]. As if Blizzard's insistence on GUI-ifying everything
weren't bad enough, they then proceeded to add a ridiculous Data Editor that
only partially exposes objects to code and doesn't allow you to do much
programmatically. As a result, you end up having to cobble effects together
through a combination of kludgy GUI editing and hackish[2] scripts. Examples:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hGV1eJEGx0>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bgxel9g-ms>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu7E7Ds2V6g>

The middle one is a particularly good example because you can't dynamically
set the miss chance. Or rather you can, but that change will affect all units,
so in practical terms you can't do it that way. Instead you have a single 1%
miss buff and layer it on until you hit your target value. The problem there,
of course, is that each 1% suffers from diminishing returns, so you end up
having to use a logarithmic approximation instead. By contrast, completely
dynamic evasion in WC3 was a breeze.

Anyway, even when Andromeda[3] was actively being worked on SC2 modding was
barely tolerable. But you're also right about the mechanisms for advertising
maps to players: They suck.

\--

1\. People were making third- and first-person mods in the WC3 days too, by
the way.

2\. Hackish because, by design, there are many things you simply cannot do
with scripting.

3\.
[http://www.sc2mod.com/board/index.php?page=Thread&thread...](http://www.sc2mod.com/board/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=13)

------
comlag
The link to the story of ION Storm and the game Daikatana he mentions was a
really interesting read as well. Talk about a complete mess of a company.
[http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-
weather...](http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather/)

~~~
achompas
Ion Storm rivals Looking Glass Entertainment as one of the bigger
disappointments of the 1990s PC gaming scene. Both companies produced an
incredible roster of games -- _Thief, Deus Ex,_ and the amazing _System Shock_
series (which managed to frighten so much with so little) -- then vanished
after figuratively lighting money on fire.

Can anyone point to companies producing games like this today? Games that are
sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character? I'd really like to find
a few before I give up and buy _Halo 4._

~~~
evan_
> Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character?

I'm sure you're familiar with them but all of Valve's first person shooters
fit this mold (maybe not minimal...). The Left 4 Dead series especially has
the atmosphere _down_.

~~~
achompas
I'll have to give the L4D games a shot--I hear they're excellent. Does Xbox v.
PC matter at all?

~~~
shawabawa3
At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I don't think there's an FPS in
existence where console vs PC doesn't matter. You need a mouse.

------
danso
Ah, the press event, the time-suck that had to be tolerated in every realm of
human undertaking: video games, sports, business, politics, etc

> _As every game developer knows, release dates are slippery, but the dates of
> trade shows are set in stone. If a game studio has spent hundreds of
> thousands of dollars to prepare booth space, purchase long-lead print
> advertising and arrange press appointments, the development team is going to
> have to demo something or heads will roll._

It's crazy to think about how much money and resources were wasted, not to
mention destructive pressure created, by these contrived schedules of
publicity dates. Getting publicity today is not as simple as making a webpage
and twitter account, but at least it's not how it was in the OP's day

------
xentronium
Speaking of change of plans. Does anybody remember blizzard warcraft 3 pre-
release version? See screenshots [1][2]

That was entirely different gameplay, with more RPG and less strategy. I
remember how I read about it in some magazine and was greatly excited. When it
came out, I liked it even more than I expected, that was one kick-ass game.

And then I found World Editor. Needless to say, I was stunned, I spent all my
free time playing with JASS (wc3 scripting language), and that was very
probably a deciding factor in me becoming a programmer. Hell, even now, I
think I could make a decent map if paired with a good landscape
designer/storymaker. I haven't finished many maps and projects in my time but
the process of creation/programming was so incredibly enjoyable, that end
result didn't even matter.

I wonder if there are any other world editors on HN.

[1]
[http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=...](http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=39&pos=0)

[2]
[http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/...](http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/albums/war3_prerelease/003.jpg)
also click arrows on the page, there is more.

~~~
doppel
I am just sad that they scrapped the RPG / adventure game they were making
with Thrall as the main characer. It seems a lot of his storyline took place
behind the scenes somewhere between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. But
again, an adventure might have failed spectacularly with no prior experience
and the genre in general losing popularity.

~~~
xentronium
There have been videos of leaked Warcraft Adventures game walkthrough
published relatively recently, if you are talking about it. I reckon that the
guy who published this refused to give/sell his copy of the leaked beta.

<http://www.youtube.com/user/0manbiker0>

Humor, gameplay and main character reminded me of another great adventure,
full throttle.

------
error54
IGN review of the game that made Starcraft what is today.

[http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-
over-g...](http://www.ign.com/articles/1998/08/01/dominion-storm-over-gift-3)

------
melicerte
Patrick Wyatt's CV at the end of the post is impressive and its story well
worth the read !

------
lectrick
Pretty awesome story!

