StarCraft II

No, this is not supposed to be a game thread.

Blizzard apparently intends on leaving LAN out of StarCraft II, which is a horrible mistake. Anybody here plan on making their own Battle.net servers? Or at least do some mod for LAN play?

For a game like SC II, surely there will be many ways to do this even if you don't bother doing it yourself.
Besides, there are multiple Battle.net emulators:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PvPGN
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/free/bnetd.html

>>2
Yes, I'm aware that there are current emulators, but StarCraft II is supposedly coming out with a completely revised Battle.net. You could probably use those as a base, but you're going to need a fork, basically.

I'm more interested in seeing how many programmers want to take a swing at it; I imagine most that visit /prog/ are interested in gaming-related things.

I imagine most that visit /prog/ are interested in gaming-related things.
You mean like BBCode pong?

It doesn't seem like a horrible mistake, and when you read about it, their reasons for doing it aren't really manufactured. (Well the piracy reason is, and that does piss me off, but it's not the only reason.)

Basically they want every game of SC2 you play, in any medium, to be recorded in your Battle.net account. This way they can get a good metric of your skill level. This is to give you a good experience online, since you'll be well-matched against players your level, but it's also to protect other players from you, in case you're a dick who pretends to be bad at the game. You can't just create a new account and destroy shitty players again, since in the new Bnet the account is tied to your copy of the game.

I really don't think it will be a problem. Obviously it's only for match-making; all game traffic will be local to the network (like every fucking other game with a centralized match-making system). And there will obviously be a crack to use PvPGN or something within minutes (again like every other game), so if you want to LAN party it you'll be able to use the cracked copy.

Honestly, I don't understand what the fuss is about. What I've described above is how *EVERY* steam game works, crack and all. When we LAN party we just have a cracked version of each steam game we want to play, and everyone turns off steam and uses the cracked version whether or not they have a legit copy. SC2 will be no exception.

So stop panicking already. This is how multiplayer works in the 21st century; get used to it.

>>5
There was no panic in the opening post; it was a simple set of questions.

Why should we "get used to it" when that's not what a large subset of paying customers want? I don't get this reasoning either, why should LAN games between friends (who have done their own matchmaking and do not need any additional help or direction) be subject to Blizzard's idea of what is and isn't okay? We didn't come from having huge gatekeepers shoving what we "should" want down our throats only to get more of it.

These games aren't accurate indicators of skill. When you attach conditions like that to a permanent record, people feel pressure to perform, lest they be told they suck balls. That's not fun. People don't play things that aren't fun to them. Not everyone has a competitive spirit.

Single player games and LAN games usually have people fucking off and having fun, but that's not possible with the new system, because there's a pressure to perform even there. There's nothing reasonable about that. It's bullshit.

I'm not concerned about it because I know that I can work around the retarded decisions, but to say that it makes sense is a whole other ball game. The rhetoric is even more important, I think, than the fact that the features are being excluded.

>>6
I don't get this reasoning either, why should LAN games between friends (who have done their own matchmaking and do not need any additional help or direction) be subject to Blizzard's idea of what is and isn't okay?
What the fuck are you blabbering about?

Have you tried playing SC on Bnet lately? I have, and it's fucking awful. With players as shitty as you or I, people online don't even play the real game; they just fuck with you. Sometimes they wall you in and never attack; they enjoy waiting around and berating you, forcing you to quit. It's impossible finding someone around your skill level; putting 'noobs only' in the game name is a fucking magnet for douchebags. I had a decent online record maybe 7 years ago but those days are over. I'm the best in my LAN group and it doesn't matter, I haven't won a game online in years.

Single player games and LAN games usually have people fucking off and having fun, but that's not possible with the new system, because there's a pressure to perform even there. There's nothing reasonable about that. It's bullshit.
Blizzard have mentioned the exact problem you're talking about before. Shit dude, you honestly think they haven't thought about these things before? You think you're smarter than all of Blizzard, having thought about LAN play for five whole fucking minutes?

IIRC they talked about having an option for turning off ratings in a game, so you can fuck around and it won't be recorded. You're just using Bnet for the match-making; what exactly is the disadvantage here? Yeah there are 0.01% of people who want to LAN without an internet connection, but you're not one of them so what the fuck do you care?

Besides, how many other recent games let you do standalone LAN? Have you played Counter-Strike lately? That's an *old* game, and fucking everything is recorded when you play it. Have you played COD4? This is the worst offender of them all. You can't even turn on all weapons in a LAN game; it's all tied to your account, and you unlock weapons and earn achievements even in offline LAN play, and they ban your cd-key if you use an unlock cheat EVEN IN OFFLINE PLAY. A few LAN parties ago we did it, and we had to jump through enormous hoops just to get a goddamn local server crack than unlocked everything. That was plenty enough for me to never buy a COD game. If you bought COD4 or Modern Warfare 2, you're a giant hypocrite. Blizzard's new Bnet is quite generous in comparison to that bullshit.

>>7
A couple of years ago, when I still used to play games, I've played countless Starcraft, WC3, Quake 3, Counter Strike games, all on LAN(from small sized 2-3 player games to huge 30-40 player games, depending on what the game allows of course). I've only played on Battle.net and official servers a handful of times. About a year ago, I played on a local CS server for a few days. Almost always the LAN game was more entertaining.
Not including support for LAN games is just rude since most of the times they already have all the functionality built in, and Battle.net or whatever service is nothing more than a lobby manager/player record keeper. It's something that shouldn't even be connected to the game, it should be something optional. Not adding a LAN option just shows how greedy they are, but of course because such lobby managers are just artificial constructs, people will easily emulate them and be able to take back the LAN option.

>>7
Yes, I still regularly play on Battle.net. My problem here isn't attempting to fix up Battle.net and support that in the software, in case you were somehow confused.

I'm saying there's absolutely no compelling reason to need an Internet connection for a game which has the terms already set by people in a single room that are all aware of everyone's skills and so on; similarly, there's no compelling reason to need one for a simple single-player game. What the fuck is that?

The trolling stuff isn't very useful here, either. I like how you automatically "know" that I'm not a great player and how I'm "not one of those people that wants LAN without an Internet connection." Come off it, I know this is /prog/ and trolling is like Ed: THE STANDARD, but this could be a reasonable discussion.

I don't buy new games that force bullshit restrictions on me. I don't play them at all because if they were worth my time, they wouldn't be putting bullshit restrictions on me. I won't buy StarCraft II if there are arbitrary and utterly pointless limitations, despite how much I know the game is going to rock. Lay off the fallacies, please.

>>9
The trolling stuff isn't very useful here, either. I like how you automatically "know" that I'm not a great player and how I'm "not one of those people that wants LAN without an Internet connection." Come off it, I know this is /prog/ and trolling is like Ed: THE STANDARD, but this could be a reasonable discussion.
How is this trolling? It is a perfectly reasonable discussion point. I can honestly say with 99.999% certainty that you are not a good SC player (because no one is, aside from a handful of koreans), and that you have an internet connection (you're here aren't you?)

You people are really making a mountain out of a molehill. SC2 is one of the last games to remove standalone LAN; why do you only start caring now? Tell me, how many Steam games have you bought? Just how big of a hypocrite are you?

When you attach conditions like that to a permanent record, people feel pressure to perform, lest they be told they suck balls. That's not fun.

Yes.  SC2, like every other game, will be filled with teenagers saying "u suck nub" and acting like obnoxious assholes to anyone who doesn't practice zerg-rushing 16 hours a day.

>>10
It's a matter of principle. If an application doesn't truly need to make a connection to a server, then it shouldn't. The user should be in control of what an application connects to and where. This isn't even about games.

if you guys don't stfu already I'll report this thread to /v/ and nobody wants that, believe me

>>13
do it, i dare ya

>>10
Perfectly reasonable discussion point
Those things have nothing to do with my point of view
（　≖‿≖）

I have Half-Life on CD from way back and I bought Half-Life 2 through Steam. I don't have to be connected to use it, I only have to be connected to download it, which is fair. I don't think it supports multiplayer on its own, either.

"You people" are really making a mountain out of a molehill
You know, I think I'm done responding to you.

>>11
Obviously not what I meant. I mean that when there's a record tied to playing games, people feel like they're being watched - because they are. There's a pressure to perform and that's not fun for a large number of people. The teenagers are a non-issue comparatively; you can simply boot them from your games. You can't give this recordkeeping the boot.

>>13
kawaii desu （　♥‿♥）

>>12
HAHAHAHA. You do realise this is proprietary software right? You don't care about control, otherwise you'd reject proprietary software and accept only free software.

>>16
0/1e12

>>17
NYJMUA

>>18
TNAAIAN

>>16
I keep my proprietary software under very tight control. I don't run it until I've reverse engineered enough of it to make sure it doesn't do anything that I wouldn't want it to do, and as an extra measure of security, it tends to run on boxes which I don't grant direct access to the Internet or in VMs ran on such boxes. To someone with good enough reverse engineering skills, proprietary software isn't such a scary boogyman as people put it, but that doesn't mean I can't bitch about such principles. If the application goes against my beliefs, I either choose not to use it or bend it to my will.

>>17
On a logarithmic scale, I hope.

>>20
The thing about compiled objects is that it is practically impossible to make <i>meaningful</i> changes to software without the source. When I say "make meaningful changes", I'm not solely referring to trivial tweaks which is how people without the source study and modify machine executable software - flipping bits in various places and maybe inserting some JMP routines to bypass checks or otherwise replacing routines their own.

I'm referring to the ability to make fundamental changes to the design of the program, which is practically impossible and requires a significantly disproportional amount of effort to achieve. You may as well invest that effort into studying the higher level logic in order to write your own clone; the Wine and ReactOS teams do exactly this. How about trying to reverse Nvidia's drivers AND firmware into meaningful source code? The Nouveau team have been doing this for years now and they are far from being considered a mature project.

It's hard enough to comprehend someone else's shitty source code, and now you expect programmers to do the same for compiler generated machine code to a non-trivial system? No, it's just not practically possible.

>>22
Of course I don't mean that I would try to gain understand of every little detail. Such things, while possible would be a huge waste of time for most applications, but you also overestimate how hard it is to gain understanding about the functionality of binaries. I sometimes find it easier to just do a binary patch than recompile an application when source is available:
A few years ago, I encountered a PRNG bug in a certain GPLed multimedia container tool suite. The bug managed to cause the GUI and applications to hang as it was generating the same id for objects which were required to have different ids. (I don't recall all the details about it right now, it's been a long time, but in short, an infinite loop was entered because some object identifiers which were meant to be unique were not. ). I whipped out my disassembler and debugger and located the bug. The conclusion was that that specific routine would need to be rewritten. It took me about 20 minutes to write a replacement function in x86 asm and patch it in in one of the libraries used by the application. Mind you, source was available to this, but it was just easier to locate the bug with a debugger and patch the binary. I already had my fix, but of course it's a crappy, hacky fix, as the fix was limited to my platform(which was enough for now), and I would have to redo this for future versions unless I got the fix in the official trunk. I then proceeded to obtain the source, spent some 10 minutes guessing the location of the bug in the source code, and eventually located it. Building the application and its dependencies with MINGW took over an hour, damn SEPPLES, and getting the fix incorporated in the main code base took a couple of days submitting tickets and talking to people on IRC. Which was easier? a 20 minute quick binary fix to a GPLed binary, or a few days of bureaucracy to actually get it fixed properly and incorporated in an official build?

You also seem to claim that it's impossible to make meaningful major changes to binaries. I think that depends on how much knowledge someone has about them and how much time the person is willing to spend on the process. I've seen quite a few such projects which involved replacing 10-20% of a binary application with code loaded from an external module. Sometimes there were ways to make this easier(debug symbols), other people actually had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering work to comprehend the internals. In some cases such things may be worth it, but in others, it's better to just understand the concepts and reimplement everything yourself - it can be faster.

It's hard enough to comprehend someone else's shitty source code, and now you expect programmers to do the same for compiler generated machine code to a non-trivial system? No, it's just not practically possible.
It took me less time to locate that bug and understand the cause of it by looking at the disassembly, than it took me to understand the underlying SEPPLES code.

>>23
I'm not saying it's impossible to study and modify binary software in general, I'm saying it's impractical to do this for any non-trivial software system. It's all about control - without access to the source code (which allows a programmer to study and tinker with the software), the user is <i>practically</i> helpless to help themselves.

I responded to >>12 who complained about not having control to a proprietary program. I found it amusing because the purpose of proprietary software is to keep users helpless and to keep the control in the hands of the software master. If you want control over your computer, you must have freedom 1 (the right to study and tinker with software) and this is impractical without source code.

>>24
Source code access guarantees nothing. You can obfuscate terribly malicious code even in innocent-looking code. Some guy that worked on Unix or FreeBSD (I forget which) did a dissertation of some sort on this very concept. There's also an annual contest to see precisely how innocent you can make it and there are some very compelling entries that have come from this contest.

>>14
I was totally gonna but then it halfway turned into a programming thread. I mean someone mentioned Sepples and that beats par for /prog/ anyway.

>>23
a 20 minute quick binary fix to a GPLed binary, or a few days of bureaucracy to actually get it fixed properly and incorporated in an official build?
What a bullshit comparison. Why the fuck are you including the time submitting a patch to mainline? Isn't just fixing your own source and recompiling equivalent to patching the binary?

Your example is obviously anecdotal, an extreme special case of a failure in a pure math function, in an obviously shitty project in fucking mingw, the worst development platform imaginable.

Talk about mental masturbation. Yeah, you're fucking awesome dude, good job with your leet hax. Give yourself a high five.

>>27
I am not that guy, but I will give myself a high-five.

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32 Name: Anonymous 2011-02-03 6:13

33 Name: Anonymous 2011-02-18 13:00

dubz<

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