StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames - Page 5

Zera

Lithuania716 Posts

October 01 2012 21:40 GMT

#81

Reading comments, that's what we can expect in the future:

1) reaction of the development team about the formation of a professional starcraft scene in Korea and how various glitches in the game contributed to balance it;

2) When did you decide that races should be totally unique? Another interesting point is that there are screenshots from an alpha version where the dropship seems to land and the goliaths shoot lasers. This version looks better (at least on screenshots) than the version you shipped. What made you change this engine?

mikedebo

Canada4341 Posts

October 02 2012 00:05 GMT

#82

The article is really good (as usual), but even more interesting to me was the link to the Daikatana article from 1999 that was contained therein. Read that, if you haven't already! It's like every greek hubris/tragedy storyline rolled into one.

Cheerio

Ukraine3178 Posts

October 03 2012 15:05 GMT

#83

That is amazing read, so entertaining. Great guy he is.

Kazeyonoma

United States2912 Posts

October 03 2012 17:01 GMT

#84

On October 01 2012 20:43 kar1181 wrote:
Patrick's recent blogs on StarCraft's development are amazing (and you must go read his linked article regarding the turmoil that went on over at Ion Storm). His most recent one reminded me of something Michael Abrash (of Quake and more recently Valve software fame - one of the smartest software guys in the world imo) wrote back in the 90s and it's still up on Bluesnews. http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/chap64.shtml

Basically he talks about a friend of his, Tom Wilson, who had heard that a rival video card manufacturer had used a technique (FIFO buffers specifically) to boost their chipset's performance. Wilson, wracked his brain and pushed himself and his thinking to the extreme to try and figure out what his competitor was doing. In the end he came up with an idea that while not perfect, seemed good enough.

Turns out his competitor hadn't really done anything particularly brilliant and his solution was actually far more effective and dramatically increased the performance of the chipset he was working on.

It's amazing how during this era of computing, individuals could still make a massive difference. It's also remarkable how we see time and time again, when faced with competition how brilliant people can be.

It's funny that despite it's sheer level of dysfunction, we have Ion Storm to thank for our favourite game being as good as it ended up being.

Reminds me of that movie that had two spies being hired by two chemical companies to steal each others ideas, only to realize that the 'huge announcement' that one was making, was all just a ploy to push their opponents to try to catch up, only to get it stolen in the end. or something...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicity_(film)

And why smh towards blizzard, sure some of the original people aren't there anymore, but the games they put out are still great games, people just have unrealistic expectations.

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