Comment by hinkley

Comment by hinkley 18 hours ago

15 replies

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I found a used copy of Warcraft 3 at the store about ten years after it came out, proudly brought it home, fired it up and didn’t recall the graphics being quite that awful, but the first time I tried to scroll the map sideways it shot to the far end because they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation and I shut it down, disappointed.

Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means.

jasonwatkinspdx 18 hours ago

Yeah, Reforged was received very poorly so they basically end of life'd the franchise.

There is a thriving community with a couple different choices for servers to play on. So I'm sure there's a fix for your mouse speed issue.

Check Twitch for people streaming it: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/warcraft-iii

Grubby, one of the early esports stars, still streams it regularly and hosts his own for fun tournaments with other streamers.

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  • SOLAR_FIELDS 16 hours ago

    Reforged was received poorly because it was a lazy half assed job that was a blatant cash grab. Not because culturally we have moved on and the game has aged beyond being fun

    You probably knew this, but wanted to make sure others knew that the reason they ended the franchise is not because there was no market, but instead it was pure unadulterated greed that led to that situation. In an alternate reality they would have actually done the remake justice and there would be a lively competitive scene

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    • pixelpoet 16 hours ago

      Sorry for the aside but,

      > SOLAR_FIELDS

      Panoramic Greetings!

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bombcar 18 hours ago

There are various hacks and tools for games (especially DOS games, but for W3 there may exist the same) which delayloop various calls to slow things down enough "to work".

The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane.

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  • the_af 15 hours ago

    Also, some DOS games were coded so that they ran correctly no matter the speed of the hardware, like Alley Cat :)

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droptablemain 17 hours ago

This is pretty much the experience of trying to play any game from the '90s on modern hardware. It always requires a bit of tinkering and usually a patch from the modding community. Funniest one I've found is Fallout Tactics. The random encounter frequency is somehow tied to clock speed so you'll basically get hit with random encounters during map travel about once every half second.

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  • usefulcat 16 hours ago

    I've been enjoying Total Annihilation since 1997. Still works fine on fairly modern hardware with Windows 11. No modifications other than some additional maps that I downloaded decades ago.

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    • droptablemain 15 hours ago

      Interesting. Assuming it did not use DirectDraw -- that's often a major pain point.

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cwillu 9 hours ago

There's an SC2 custom campaign that reimplements the wc3 campaign that is worth a look.

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barbs 10 hours ago

Sorry if this is a dumb question but did you patch it to the latest version? I don't know if the in-game updater still works but from memory you could download some sort of patch exe file and update it that way.

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psunavy03 17 hours ago

The original Wing Commander was like that. Playable on 286s/386s, then Pentiums and beyond showed up and it was unplayable. The game started in the "simulator" to show you the controls, and you'd get blown out of space in about 0.5 seconds.

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  • Terr_ 16 hours ago

    Oh man, I remember that: on a newer computer, I'd tap the left arrow to turn and the Hornet would do a 360.

    I suppose, technically, that's one way to make the Scimitar feel more responsive...

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  • the_af 15 hours ago

    The original Wing Commander brings back memories! I remember being amazed by the graphics and the story.

    These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game.

    I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this.

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the_af 15 hours ago

> they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation

Wow.

1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed!

I guess some lessons don't get passed on?

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