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2Pacalypse-

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One less talked about thing when discussing StarCraft, that might be more pertinent to HN audience, is that this game was almost endlessly hackable. And I mean that in the truest sense of that word. Many a careers were launched by playing around with OllyDbg and learning to reverse engineer code all so you could create an awesome plugin [0] for the community.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that the community aspect of StarCraft is a huge part of why it remained popular for so long. As previously mentioned, there were hackers and programmers developing awesome tools that helped the scene, but also there were map makers which were essential in keeping the game balanced. One little known fact about StarCraft is that the last balance patch released by Blizzard was in 2001, at the early beginnings of the pro scene. After that, the game was kept fresh and balanced by community map makers.

Combine that with people who created websites where you could follow news about Korean pro scene (TeamLiquid has its roots here), talk with other people about StarCraft, and other people who organized tournaments and did everything else; and you get a formula which almost ensures the longetivity of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if there are people playing and following this game in 20 years time. I know I'll be one of them.

[0] https://github.com/TheEngineeringBay/Awesome-Broodwar-Resour...

You might be interested in: https://github.com/ShieldBattery/ShieldBattery

It's a project that few of us started almost a decade ago to ensure the longevity of this game. We don't try to emulate Battle.net at all, but instead we take only the gameplay itself and reimplement everything else ourselves.

It's a work in progress, so please let us know what you'd like to see in there that's currently missing if you do check it out.

Any codebase that I had complete control over.

No, but more seriously, I've found that familiarity with the codebase is more important than having it be perfectly engineered. Once you're really familiar with the codebase, you know where dragons be, and you can make changes more easily. And God (PM) forbid, if you ever find yourself with some extra free time you might even reduce the size of dragons over time.

This brings me to my final point. Any codebase that I really enjoyed working with was the one that was constantly evolving. I don't mean rewriting everything from scratch every few months, but as long as I have permission (and time) to refactor the things that have been bothering me for months as patterns emerge, I'm a happy bee.

Isn't this only true if there is no physical infinity? I know it's-turtles-all-the-way-down is impossible for our brains to comprehend, but causality breaks down when infinities are involved. Another thing is that if space-and-time itself was born at some point (as they say), then talking about "before" and causality doesn't make any sense either.

But yeah, to your point, thinking that there was never "nothing", and that there always was "something" is equally mindblowing.

That is closer, but it's also not exactly correct. Now that I think about it, I don't think the English language has any sound where the letter "c" is used as it's pronounced in Croatian language. For example, the word "points" has the "ts" sound which is phonetically closest to the letter "c", but the the letter "c" is much sharper and shorter.

Edit: just as I wrote that, a word popped into my head which has almost the same "c" sound: Pizza. The "zz" sound, if you can call it that, is closer to the "c" letter phonetically than "ts". So Rimac would be pronounced something like Reemazz.

1 Reason Why Current Music Doesn't Suck:

- I like it

More seriously, I've been listening a lot to the mainstream pop songs on the radio during my car commute, and I don't know which carefully crafted formulas and laboratories those songs come from, but they're in sync with what my brain perceives as "good music" quite incredibly.

I genuinely enjoy listening to them.

Based on the fact that this language shares the same name as me, I think it's one of the most beautiful languages that has ever existed.

Jokes aside, this does look pretty neat.

Gail.com FAQ 4 years ago

Not only they can sue you, but they can make your life a living hell if you choose to fight them back. See one of the most famous examples: http://nissan.com/

While not that unexpected, I'm curious to see if this will start a trend that other game publishers might follow. I'm mainly curious about when Blizzard will deem the cost-benefit analysis to swing in favor of shutting down their old battle.net service which hosts games like StarCraft 1, Diablo 2, and WarCraft 3.

For StarCraft 1 specifically (and its Remastered version), a few us have been building a custom server/launcher[0] which should at least ensure that the game/community doesn't completely die out. However, we still rely on Blizzard's online services to verify the in-game purchases, like HD graphics (the game will automatically stop rendering the HD graphics if you didn't log into Blizzard's services in the last 30 days).

It remains to be seen how this will be handled by Blizzard if (when?) the time comes.

[0] https://github.com/ShieldBattery/ShieldBattery

From my perspective as a software engineer there have been none.

At this point, doing everyone on GitHub itself is a very viable strategy to me, but I know that will never fly with people who obsess over story points and time estimates.

Fun fact: this is Chris Hadfield's son, who even makes a cameo in the video!

But Evan definitely stands on his own as a great video maker, definitely do check out some of his other videos.

What a delightful article. Just enough humour interspersed to make it enjoyable to read without going on long tangents to make it annoying. And as someone who has very limited knowledge of this stuff, I feel like I've actually learned something!

The video[0] at the end of the article was also very beautiful and concise. I wish more scientific writing was done in this way.

[0] https://youtu.be/U_xWDWKq1CM

Well, as far as my understanding of hooks go, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, hooks are not just about giving functional component an option to use state and lifecycle methods. They are also a much more powerful and flexible replacement of mixins and offer an (arguably better) alternative to use certain design patterns, like render props.

I did assume that hooks were not supported in classes because it would be too complex to support that use-case, but the linked article specifically has an "Absorb the Complexity" principle, so it seemed a bit weird to me. Also, I understand the decision to try to motivate the community to use function components more, but is this the trend that we can expect to continue seeing in React? Certain APIs being phased out until they finally become deprecated. I know it has happened a few times already in React, but not on the level of something like a class API.

I'd be interested to hear a practical example of these principles applied. For example, how do these principles lead to the creation of hooks API? I'm not trying to say they don't, just genuinely curious.

As someone who has been using React for five years and especially liked it for its simple class API to write components, I was a bit taken aback by the introduction of a new powerful API that is incompatible with the simple class API.

Would love to hear your thoughts as well on this! Especially with regards to remembering scroll position between route navigations in an infinite scroll component that fetches its content asynchronously.

Dave Churchill, who is heavily involved in the StarCraft AI scene, posted this in the StarCraft AI Facebook group:

"Hey everyone, I just wanted to make a quick statement about this article that was posted in WIRED. If Tom had told me that his intention for this article was to focus on the loss of ANY bot, Facebook or not, I would not have given him the information that I did to write this article. I am normally a huge fan of Tom's AI articles, but I think that this is a shameful clickbait title that focuses on the wrong side of the story.

It turns out that there may actually be a bug with how Facebook's serialization library interacted with our tournament environment, causing their strategy selection to not work properly, causing a huge drop in performance for their bot. We will be investigating this over the next few days to see if it was my mistake in setting things up that caused this, or if maybe something as simple as a windows firewall setting to be at fault. Unfortunately with competitions like this, competitors do not have access to our tournament environment / machines to fully 100% test all of their code on, and sometimes issues like this can arise. I appreciate Facebook's effort in this competition and applaud them for actually having the balls to submit an open source bot, knowing the scrutiny they would face if it wasn't already superhuman. It's a real shame that this is what media chooses to focus on. Tom also asked me what time the results would officially be made public so that the article could be released at the same time, but instead the article ended up being published 7am the next morning so everyone could wake up to the headline :( Also the word "quietly" implies some sort of sneaking around on the part of Facebook, when their registration has been publicly visible for months.

Note: There is nothing factually incorrect in this article, I just believe its focus is in poor taste, and hurts the SCAI community as a whole, and unfairly singles out a single competitor."

I've been playing a single video game for more than half of my life (I'm 30 now). I've dabbled with other games, but this game and the community around it contributed a lot in making me the person I am today. I don't plan on stopping any time soon. In fact, for the past few years I've shifted most of my free time from playing that game to helping a friend develop cool shit[0] for it, so we can hopefully prolong its lifetime. Programming and gaming go so well together that I'm pretty sure I'll continue hacking on some old games when I'm 60.

[0] https://shieldbattery.net

For all you know, that higher dimensional beings' real life could be a video game played by an even higher dimensional beings. It's turtles all they way down.