Blizzard Issues Update For 16-Year-Old Diablo II 54
Blizzard this week issued an update for the popular Diablo II game. The update, dubbed v1.14a, comes roughly five years after Diablo II was last updated, and four years since the release of Diablo III. Blizzard says the update aims to resolve glitches introduced by modern operating systems. While Blizzard's commitment towards its 16-year old game is unquestionably commendable, it appears the new update is causing issues for some.
Full fresh install is recommended.. (Score:2, Informative)
It seems that updating an existing install (with all the patches and workarounds required to keep it going on a Intel-based Mac) is problematic.
Backup your game-characters and delete the game. Then download and re-install from scratch. That works fine.
The download doesn't show for some reason in the normal clients-download under "My Account" on Battle.net (only the Windows version).
If you go to the generic downloads section https://battle.net/account/clients it is there.
Please note: For LoD you need to down
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Just got LoD going on a iMac 5K. Pixels are really big :-) because the 800x600 display gets stretched (thankfully with correct with aspect-ratio) to full-screen. Leaves a big black border on left and rights sides, but that doesn't really bother me.
16x10 is the One True Ratio (mostly if you like older games). Too bod there's only the one 5K monitor - anyone know of any others with better than 1920x1200?
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Well, there's all the 30" 2560x1600 monitors. Though if you like older games, I wouldn't bother because who wants pixels the size of your thumb? If I was to put together a classic gaming PC, I'd probably use the 19" Sony Trinitron in the closet.
Re:They could just release the code. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not always so easy.
For one they may be using third party libraries that have no source for and agreements not to distribute those libraries as part of a source code.
Secondly they have interest in the Intellectual property of the game where they may port it to other devices. This update shows that it isn't abandoned.
Just releasing the source can cause a bunch of support problems. With unauthorized patches.
Finally knowing how blizzard codes may mean the ability to hack into their battle net servers
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DII uses BINK video codec. RAD would never allow the codec to go foss.
Proprietary game tools are totally a thing. DII is not fully home grown like the DOOM engine was.
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Also, the battle.net protocol used for DII is already broken, and fully emulatable. (In Europe. Illegal in the US.)
Grew out of a now defunct project called BnetD. Now called PvPGN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
DII installs do not know the difference between a PvPGN server and the real Battle.net server farm.
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The topic of this post asked if it was easier top open source it. Not if it was possible. A rewrite doesn't constitute easy.
Source code isn't the end all be all. A good product can be made on crappy code. Often crappy code is needed to tweak for performance, or to meet deadlines. I still go back at some of my old code and marvel at the ingenuity that I took with some code without the benefits of a modern technology and I also cringe at many of the stupid things I did at the time. Because every day I can'
They are still selling it (Score:2)
Up until last year, the Diablo 1/2 battle chest was still selling in my local Target and other places for $20. 15 years after release. I asked a clerk once when the last one was sold and he looked it up and said a month before. Pretty amazing for a 15 year old game.
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I kept putting off buying Warcraft (the original, not "World of") because the battlechests were always in stores, and always $30 or maybe $20. I've been saying to myself that surely it'd end up in a $5 or $10 discount bin at some point, but fifteen years later I'm finally concluding that I may have been mistaken about that one.
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Blizzard will NEVER release any source code -- remember these are the people who sued the opensource bnetd project even though they used ZERO Blizzard code and got an idiot judge to agree with them.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Blizzard will NEVER release any source code -- remember these are the people who sued the opensource bnetd project even though they used ZERO Blizzard code and got an idiot judge to agree with them.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Idiot judge? I might not like the law, but Bnetd was a circumvention tool -- circumventing the checks that Blizzard's servers run. Whether we think such a law is moral or not, the DMCA makes pretty clear the legality of distributing tools to circumvent in the US.
Yesterday to today (Score:5, Funny)
Yesterday I was trying to install D2 and LOD from my account into a Windows 7 install and it just would not work.
So, I put in the good old Blizzard support ticket highlighting all the issues I had.
Today it's been fixed and works perfectly.
Not saying that I caused this, but you are all welcome anyway ;-p
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Good ol' Diablo 2. The only game to have given me real RSI issues.
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Seriously though, I hope this has something to do with an eventual Graphical refresh patch or something of the sort, where the resolution is bumped up to HD for modern machines to use on classic Blizzard titles. If they do some kind of re-release, I hope it goes out free to those with currently working copies of the game.
Diablo HyType II (Score:4, Funny)
16yo? (Score:2)
Wow... I really feel old.
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That moment when you realize today's kids don't even know what a BBS, or have a memorized Hayes command set, and don't know that Kermit was both a puppet and a transfer protocol.
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When I studied CompSci we had some real fun when a professor once tried to demonstrate a modem connection. He had loads of arcane option screens that all had to be set in the same settings as the guy on the other end had. The guy in the building next door, I might add. After 30 minutes he gave up :)
Things certainly have improved a lot.
Also fun to watch: Teens react to Windows 95 [youtu.be].
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The first thought that comes to my mind with Win95 are "winmodems" and man were they a fucking mess.
Warcraft 3 as well (Score:3)
Blizzard is planning to update Warcraft 3 this week as well, bringing player communication improvements as well as some surprises with the new 1.27 update.
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I have seen the Diablo II Battle Chest for $19.99 at WalMart as recently as less than a year ago.
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We're talking the year 2000 here, buddy :) That was some good hard cash going over the counter.
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By 'previously hidden bugs' you mean code that worked perfectly when run on the old Operating System? Why would developers only be allowed to write code that strictly follows Microsoft's API? Even Microsoft's Office developers aren't that slavish.
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As an example, SimCity had a bug where it continued using memory after freeing it. It worked, if only accidentally, in Windows 3.1, but the Windows 95 team had to add a special shim for SimCity to put the memory allocator in a special mode where it waited a short while before *really* freeing memory. This shows at once a) the folly of your position and b) that Microsoft is going through a lot of trouble for backward compatibility and that if your application breaks the rules and therefore breaks itself in t
but no Linux? (Score:1)
Re:but no Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft is taking Linux seriously as a server platform, in which it has a significant presence and market share. Game developers target client machines, in which Linux has a very tiny market share (under 1% according to Steam). It's the same reason fewer developers bother making apps for Windows Phone, yet Microsoft itself is targeting iOS and Android with its own apps. Developers go where the market is.
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Up until Overwatch, as of which they have abandoned the Macintosh, Blizzard was a cross-platform developer supporting Mac and PC as far back as I can remember. But I'm not sure they ever supported Linux. Since they already have the existing and supported code base, the extra effort to include the Mac in this patch was probably trivial for them. But the development work to do a new client for a third platform is probably more than the Diablo 2 team has allocated to them. Hell, I'm more than a bit surpri
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Up until Overwatch, as of which they have abandoned the Macintosh, Blizzard was a cross-platform developer supporting Mac and PC as far back as I can remember. But I'm not sure they ever supported Linux.
They supported Linux, but only behind the scenes.
A few blue posters have mentioned they filed bug reports against wine.
Blizzard worked with Transgaming (cedega) when Blizzard's Warden incorrectly flagged wine users as being cheaters.
No Linux clients, but they've sometimes seen Wine as reducing the pressure to need a Linux version.
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Linux users whine that the games aren't being built for their platform, but refuse to make it a platform that the average person wants to use. You can't say "adopt Linux" while simultaneously saying "don't dumb it down, just learn to use a command line like the rest of us".
Microsoft literally laughs at the Linux desktop effort. It has so many people pulling in so many different directions that it will never get its shit together unless someone takes direct control of enough components to put it all togeth
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1.14? Meh. (Score:1)
I've been Modding Diablo2:LoD for several years, and while it's neat to see an official update, most Modders I'm aware of use a base version of 1.10. Blizzard removed some really useful bug-features with v1.11 that make the later versions less open to modification.
I'm using Windows 8.1 and running Diablo2 v1.10 without trouble, but I can appreciate where Apple's chip changes in the last decade could be problematic.
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Do any of those mods allow you to ever complete an item set? I'm pretty sure that I never once successfully completed one in all my runs through the game. Years later I read a bit suggesting wonky math made several of them nearly impossible, and it left me feeling like I should just set the game box on fire. Pretty sure that's the last time I bothered trying to play, too.
This just in (Score:1)
Slashdot here with another story that's over a week old! News at 11.
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That's one of things that really amazed me the most about Diablo II and Battle.net is that spammers/bot/cheaters/hackers could pretty do whatever they wanted on there and it seemed Blizzard really didn't give a shit. While totally eliminating it would be impossible, it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to identify bots like that as they make themselves extremely obvious, and ban their CD keys.
Then again, I guess Battle.net is free and still supports 16 year old games so they do have that going for the