ShieldBattery - BW Revitalized for Modern Mortals - Page 21

On May 16 2016 11:19 Falling wrote:

I was a part of Birdie's DRTL team and so when people in the bw skype groups were saying that Birdie should join forces with TL to create his server, I tried (in a rather cagey way) to recruit him for Shield Battery, linking a development video because I was failing at describing the project with words, but I don't think the project was very clear from that video. I hadn't consulted with any of the other BW staff, so it really could have blown up in my face, but fortunately Birdie is a cool dude and kept quiet about the entire thing, despite me basically leaking it. Gah. Still remember that panic feeling, when I confessed what I had done in the Shield Battery thread. I think tec or 2pac talked a little with Birdie after, but the reality is (and what I hadn't realized being little more than an observer) is at that stage there really wasn't more for another coder to do that tec and 2pac weren't already doing.

I think Birdie got too much flak for his attempt at starting a server- I don't know how much his abandoning his project was influenced by knowing there was another project more or less endorsed by TL, but he took a lot of shots from the community and never leaked the existence of Shield Battery once. So my hat is off to Birdie (Of course I already thought he was a great guy, being my team leader and all.)

On May 16 2016 12:41 blade55555 wrote:
I'm curious, will there be a ranking system at all like iccup, or is there currently no plans for ranks?

On May 16 2016 12:41 blade55555 wrote:
I'm curious, will there be a ranking system at all like iccup, or is there currently no plans for ranks?

On May 16 2016 12:41 blade55555 wrote:
I'm curious, will there be a ranking system at all like iccup, or is there currently no plans for ranks?

On May 16 2016 11:19 Falling wrote:

I was a part of Birdie's DRTL team and so when people in the bw skype groups were saying that Birdie should join forces with TL to create his server, I tried (in a rather cagey way) to recruit him for Shield Battery, linking a development video because I was failing at describing the project with words, but I don't think the project was very clear from that video. I hadn't consulted with any of the other BW staff, so it really could have blown up in my face, but fortunately Birdie is a cool dude and kept quiet about the entire thing, despite me basically leaking it. Gah. Still remember that panic feeling, when I confessed what I had done in the Shield Battery thread. I think tec or 2pac talked a little with Birdie after, but the reality is (and what I hadn't realized being little more than an observer) is at that stage there really wasn't more for another coder to do that tec and 2pac weren't already doing.

I think Birdie got too much flak for his attempt at starting a server- I don't know how much his abandoning his project was influenced by knowing there was another project more or less endorsed by TL, but he took a lot of shots from the community and never leaked the existence of Shield Battery once. So my hat is off to Birdie (Of course I already thought he was a great guy, being my team leader and all.)

On May 16 2016 03:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Few people in the world love this game more than I do, few people have had brood war be as big part of their lives as what the case is for me. Absolutely love the game, always have, I still play it with some frequency.

There was however a 3 year period where I didn't touch the game even once. And it had nothing to do with the game itself, the reason was that I couldn't fix my internet in a way that enabled me to create games. Eventually I purchased software from portforward.net and was able, and then I started playing again.

Then I had another long hiatus after I got windows 7, because I was unable to play the game without it stretching out to the sides of my screen, and I didn't want to play in windowed mode. Eventually that also got fixed, and I started playing again.

Then I got windows 10, and suddenly, whatever I did to fix the windows 7 stretching problem stopped working, so I stopped playing. Then I loved the game so much that I started playing again with windowed mode, but it has always been kinda annoying to me. Once I tried shieldbattery, and noticed that my entire glorious screen from top to bottom was entirely dedicated to brood war, without it being stretched, with perfect black bars on the sides of the monitor, I was so happy with how it looked that I did something I hadn't done for more than a decade - I played 1v7 computer because it just.. felt so good to have the full screen brood war experience again.

Now, obviously activity is not going back to where it was in 2003 or whatever. And Brood War is still an incredibly demanding game, tiresome even, and the people who used to play it religiously are now mostly too old to still do so. But look at the resurgence of cs:go. Perfect competitive gameplay is incredibly hard to design - games that nailed it 15-20 years ago have not necessarily been improved upon since that time. Brood War is still a legendary game, and I can bet you there are thousands of players who, over the past decade, have wanted to play it again, but been discouraged by having to download a launcher and anti-hack software to log on to a private server only to find that they aren't able to create games, maybe their screen got all stretched out and they weren't dedicated enough to try to fix the issue, that they had to wait 5+ minutes to find a game, that they couldn't play their old favorite ums because nobody was around to create it. If a fraction of those players come back every half year for 3 week period of times each, we'll have enough for a server with reasonable activity. I myself know many younger gamers who never really played bw who have never had the chance to really try it out because after they learned of its legendary status as a game, they would need to spend more than an hour trying to make it work properly for their system. That is far too big of a hurdle for most people who want to try a new game - it's even discouraging for people who used to play it and loved it. With this, they can be introduced to it.

On May 16 2016 18:22 Birdie wrote:
People took my thread as a promise of a server, rather than looking for interest and discussion of what was wanted. I was always very careful to never promise anything because I knew that the chances of completion were fairly low, given the kind of project and my lack of experience. I knew of tec27's project and thought it sounded very promising but had no idea whether it would ever happen, which is why we continued with StarServer.

This sounds very promising, congratulations to tec27 and team for getting this far. I look forward to playing on the new server.

On May 16 2016 21:09 Holint_Casazr wrote:
I never played BW (or any RTS for that matter, besides a bit of C&C and AoE 10 years back), but always liked watching it since around 08/09, following the scene, be it korean pros or foreigners, thinking to myself "come on, just try it" but never bothered, with all the stuff i've read about matchmaking, port-forwarding difficult to find D----- games etc.

This sounds very, very amazing and I look forward to playing my first ever game of BW/Starcraft (and losing a hundred times), if/when this goes open beta!