EPTSince Brood War's very early days, the community has banded together to ensure a great competitive experience. When the tools and services that came with the game fell short, new ones sprung up to replace them; with ladders and servers that gave people a place to interact and compete; with launchers and plugins that refined the experience with features like lower latency and in-game displays. But today, even these community efforts have started to become inadequate to support the aging core of Brood War. As the sheer number of support threads and posts on TeamLiquid indicates, simply starting a game of Brood War is very difficult these days. With Battle.net servers being hacked and failing, new Windows versions introducing countless new hurdles, and network conditions continually making it tougher to host and join games, how can we hope to attract new blood to the game we love, or even retain the players we do have?
About three-and-a-half years ago, I was considering these issues and I came upon a realization: the core aspect of the Brood War experience that we love and care about is the gameplay; the rest—all of those interfaces and menus and the experience of joining a server, hosting a game, or watching a replay—none of that really matters so long as we keep the same gameplay that we hold dear. Through this, I suddenly understood that we could step back from the legacy of all the previous community efforts and, instead of simply following in their footsteps, build a completely new, modernized experience suitable for this amazing game.
I'm happy to announce ShieldBattery, a brand new server that can finally give Brood War a smooth, seamless multiplayer experience replete with all the features you'd expect from any modern game. Free from the shackles of its 90s interfaces and options, we can finally see what Brood War is like if things just work, if the system is designed around how people actually want to chat and play.
This has been a long time coming, but I, along with the many others who have devoted their time and energy to the project, am excited to see the influx of players, ideas, and contributions this announcement will bring. This is not some pie-in-the-sky idea; our platform is under active development, but a large parts of it are already done and ready to use. Starting today, we're opening closed beta signups, and will be sending out invites periodically over the coming weeks while we continue developing and improving the server.
As a wise (and f33red) Korean zerg once said, "life of lively to live to life of full life thx to shield battery". We hope ShieldBattery revitalizes and restores Brood War to its former glory, and lets it thrive well into its twenties and thirties.
Since the release of Windows Vista, Brood War players have struggled with a myriad of compatibility problems that have only gotten worse with each new Windows version. Struggle no longer—ShieldBattery offers full support for all Windows versions Vista and above: no batch files, registry tweaks, or command line arguments required.
Brood War's forced 640x480, full screen graphics mode might have made sense in 1998, but who wants to play like that today? ShieldBattery offers a completely new graphics backend supporting both DirectX and OpenGL, borderless and bordered windows, and fast, smooth scaling to tons of different resolutions. Smart mouse sensitivity is included, too, so you can get things just right for your muta micro. Should you want to broadcast your matches to all of your adoring fans, ShieldBattery's windowed mode also works great with streaming programs out of the box.
Tired of doing battle with your router before you can play with your friends online? We were too, which is why ShieldBattery includes a brand new network stack that removes the need for port forwarding completely, and brings LAN latency settings by default, no plugin needed. Support for forthcoming network technologies like IPv6 is included too, so Brood War is ready for the next decade of internet changes.
No modern multiplayer experience would be complete without a streamlined ladder system that doesn't require you to spam a chat channel to find opponents. ShieldBattery provides a fast, easy laddering experience and can automatically match you to similarly skilled opponents on a fresh, rotating map pool. Searching for matches is just a click away, and continues in the background so you can focus on more important things, like learning that awesome 10/15 build from Liquipedia.
Chat channels? You wanted those, right? ShieldBattery has 'em, front and center. Join tons of channels simultaneously, chat with your friends and enemies, all from our simple web interface that you can connect to from anywhere. And when you're ready for a game, you can do that there, too, all without leaving chat.
About three-and-a-half years ago, I was considering these issues and I came upon a realization: the core aspect of the Brood War experience that we love and care about is the gameplay; the rest—all of those interfaces and menus and the experience of joining a server, hosting a game, or watching a replay—none of that really matters so long as we keep the same gameplay that we hold dear. Through this, I suddenly understood that we could step back from the legacy of all the previous community efforts and, instead of simply following in their footsteps, build a completely new, modernized experience suitable for this amazing game.
I'm happy to announce ShieldBattery, a brand new server that can finally give Brood War a smooth, seamless multiplayer experience replete with all the features you'd expect from any modern game. Free from the shackles of its 90s interfaces and options, we can finally see what Brood War is like if things just work, if the system is designed around how people actually want to chat and play.
This has been a long time coming, but I, along with the many others who have devoted their time and energy to the project, am excited to see the influx of players, ideas, and contributions this announcement will bring. This is not some pie-in-the-sky idea; our platform is under active development, but a large parts of it are already done and ready to use. Starting today, we're opening closed beta signups, and will be sending out invites periodically over the coming weeks while we continue developing and improving the server.
As a wise (and f33red) Korean zerg once said, "life of lively to live to life of full life thx to shield battery". We hope ShieldBattery revitalizes and restores Brood War to its former glory, and lets it thrive well into its twenties and thirties.
Features
Listed below are the major features which make ShieldBattery a server unlike any other in all of the Brood War's history. Besides these major features, there are tons of minor ones, all made with an ultimate goal of making the experience of playing Brood War as seamless as possible. It's also important to note that some of these features are under active development, so even though they might not be 100% ready now, they will be soon™ enough.Modern operating system support
Since the release of Windows Vista, Brood War players have struggled with a myriad of compatibility problems that have only gotten worse with each new Windows version. Struggle no longer—ShieldBattery offers full support for all Windows versions Vista and above: no batch files, registry tweaks, or command line arguments required.Brand new windowed mode
Brood War's forced 640x480, full screen graphics mode might have made sense in 1998, but who wants to play like that today? ShieldBattery offers a completely new graphics backend supporting both DirectX and OpenGL, borderless and bordered windows, and fast, smooth scaling to tons of different resolutions. Smart mouse sensitivity is included, too, so you can get things just right for your muta micro. Should you want to broadcast your matches to all of your adoring fans, ShieldBattery's windowed mode also works great with streaming programs out of the box.Improved networking
Tired of doing battle with your router before you can play with your friends online? We were too, which is why ShieldBattery includes a brand new network stack that removes the need for port forwarding completely, and brings LAN latency settings by default, no plugin needed. Support for forthcoming network technologies like IPv6 is included too, so Brood War is ready for the next decade of internet changes.Auto-matchmaking and ladder
No modern multiplayer experience would be complete without a streamlined ladder system that doesn't require you to spam a chat channel to find opponents. ShieldBattery provides a fast, easy laddering experience and can automatically match you to similarly skilled opponents on a fresh, rotating map pool. Searching for matches is just a click away, and continues in the background so you can focus on more important things, like learning that awesome 10/15 build from Liquipedia.Completely revamped multiplayer experience
Chat channels? You wanted those, right? ShieldBattery has 'em, front and center. Join tons of channels simultaneously, chat with your friends and enemies, all from our simple web interface that you can connect to from anywhere. And when you're ready for a game, you can do that there, too, all without leaving chat.Beta Signup
As mentioned in the introduction, we're opening closed beta signups starting today, so feel free to request your invite in the link below. Invites to the closed beta will be sent periodically to various members of our community, to help us with testing of various features and finding bugs in general. We'll try to keep the closed beta period as short as possible, so we can open our server to everyone who wishes to play this beautiful game, hassle-free.
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