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> I was a programmer on Diablo 2 and used the Diablo 1 source code Don't leave us hanging, is there a hidden cow level in the Diablo 1 source?!

stevenwoo 9y ago
Ha - that would require some time travel plot twist, IIRC the cow level got added late in the D2 development as homage to the fans - I wrote the code for the Horadric Cube UI and the triggers to call the level/item changes (other programmers wrote the level stuff and item stuff separately). The gem that did nothing in the Battle.net chat was added just to spur rumors.
- rshar 9y ago
  It's quite a serendipitous surprise to be able to meet the creators of one of the most played video games of all time (or at least me) on a random thread here. What are you working on these days? Are you still in the games industry?
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Programming, not games right now. Switched to mobile/server stuff so it might be difficult to change back.
- gcatalfamo 9y ago
  Just so you know: my childhood and I love you.
- gillette 9y ago
  Nooooooo! Why spoil the mystery of the chat gem!? But also thanks for your work, still playing D2 :)
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    There's hope for a mystery, I only worked on D2 until 1.10 so they could have added a feature to the gem in a later version.
    - gillette 9y ago
      You tease :P
sshine 9y ago
>> I was a programmer on Diablo 2 and used the Diablo 1 source code > Don't leave us hanging, Yes, don't leave us hanging! Did you ever work on the problems of item duping on Closed Battle.Net? I never understood why some games were "bugged": Certain characters would leave a game and find that their inventory would not save. This meant they could go back in the game, drop all their items, leave the game, and repeat this while the characters that did save could pick it up, creating copies of good items. The mule character could even join another game where it would save, stock up on good items and drop those. I also never understood what would trigger a bugged game. We used IRC for announcing whenever a "run" turned out to be buggy for a single player. And I wrote an IRC bot for keeping track of item trades for some dudes who gave me several accounts full of characters full of really good items. I gave it to my brother who eventually made thousands selling those items. > is there a hidden cow level in the Diablo 1 source?! Diablo I has a ton of lost treasure hidden in diabdat.mpq. I recall that they shipped the game prematurely and simply dropped a large chunk of the storyline; full characters, dialogues, items, plot triggers. Some of that storyline ended up in Diablo II. I can't find a good archaeological overview online - perhaps this isn't as well-documented as I assumed. If anyone feels nostalgic, there's a really good Diablo I mod called The Hell out there. I believe mods are written by disassembling the original game, extending this with your own, custom assembler code, and reassembling it. What a beautiful consequence of the simplicity of writing games in C.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  OK, one of the item duping bugs was my fault. It took a while for one of the battle.net moderators to tease how to do it from one of the Chinese players using it to make a killing in real world cash. At some point we made the single player game that worked into a multiplayer game without changing anything else or reviewing the code for exploits - I did all the code for the interactive objects in the game and there was a trigger on objects that we should have made authoritative on the server ( and that million dollar lesson that I always learned to do nowadays in client server projects...) but wasn't for opening chests so people with modded clients we're able to open chests an infinite amount of times. I don't know about the bug you are describing - was it peer to peer or b.net multiplayer? Though it sounds like it would depend upon some server/client synchronization timing that was not working in all situations correctly, I didn't work on the network/server team, but we must have missed something like the other bug, where it made sense in single player but should have been thoroughly rethought. A lot of the features we added to D2 were things the original creators wanted to do in D1 or even the D1 expansion, the D1 expansion was outsourced and they were really unhappy about the quality of the add-on and were determined to make things right with D2 and do the expansion in house as well. I finished my work early so I added the keyboard customization feature for fun. There's a making of book about Diablo 2 that interviews the guys who also started Blizzard North/made Diablo 1 so a lot of information about the process is in there.

stevenwoo 9y ago

Ha - that would require some time travel plot twist, IIRC the cow level got added late in the D2 development as homage to the fans - I wrote the code for the Horadric Cube UI and the triggers to call the level/item changes (other programmers wrote the level stuff and item stuff separately). The gem that did nothing in the Battle.net chat was added just to spur rumors.

rshar 9y ago
It's quite a serendipitous surprise to be able to meet the creators of one of the most played video games of all time (or at least me) on a random thread here. What are you working on these days? Are you still in the games industry?
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Programming, not games right now. Switched to mobile/server stuff so it might be difficult to change back.
gcatalfamo 9y ago
Just so you know: my childhood and I love you.
gillette 9y ago
Nooooooo! Why spoil the mystery of the chat gem!? But also thanks for your work, still playing D2 :)
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  There's hope for a mystery, I only worked on D2 until 1.10 so they could have added a feature to the gem in a later version.
  - gillette 9y ago
    You tease :P

sshine 9y ago

>> I was a programmer on Diablo 2 and used the Diablo 1 source code > Don't leave us hanging, Yes, don't leave us hanging! Did you ever work on the problems of item duping on Closed Battle.Net? I never understood why some games were "bugged": Certain characters would leave a game and find that their inventory would not save. This meant they could go back in the game, drop all their items, leave the game, and repeat this while the characters that did save could pick it up, creating copies of good items. The mule character could even join another game where it would save, stock up on good items and drop those. I also never understood what would trigger a bugged game. We used IRC for announcing whenever a "run" turned out to be buggy for a single player. And I wrote an IRC bot for keeping track of item trades for some dudes who gave me several accounts full of characters full of really good items. I gave it to my brother who eventually made thousands selling those items. > is there a hidden cow level in the Diablo 1 source?! Diablo I has a ton of lost treasure hidden in diabdat.mpq. I recall that they shipped the game prematurely and simply dropped a large chunk of the storyline; full characters, dialogues, items, plot triggers. Some of that storyline ended up in Diablo II. I can't find a good archaeological overview online - perhaps this isn't as well-documented as I assumed. If anyone feels nostalgic, there's a really good Diablo I mod called The Hell out there. I believe mods are written by disassembling the original game, extending this with your own, custom assembler code, and reassembling it. What a beautiful consequence of the simplicity of writing games in C.

stevenwoo 9y ago
OK, one of the item duping bugs was my fault. It took a while for one of the battle.net moderators to tease how to do it from one of the Chinese players using it to make a killing in real world cash. At some point we made the single player game that worked into a multiplayer game without changing anything else or reviewing the code for exploits - I did all the code for the interactive objects in the game and there was a trigger on objects that we should have made authoritative on the server ( and that million dollar lesson that I always learned to do nowadays in client server projects...) but wasn't for opening chests so people with modded clients we're able to open chests an infinite amount of times. I don't know about the bug you are describing - was it peer to peer or b.net multiplayer? Though it sounds like it would depend upon some server/client synchronization timing that was not working in all situations correctly, I didn't work on the network/server team, but we must have missed something like the other bug, where it made sense in single player but should have been thoroughly rethought. A lot of the features we added to D2 were things the original creators wanted to do in D1 or even the D1 expansion, the D1 expansion was outsourced and they were really unhappy about the quality of the add-on and were determined to make things right with D2 and do the expansion in house as well. I finished my work early so I added the keyboard customization feature for fun. There's a making of book about Diablo 2 that interviews the guys who also started Blizzard North/made Diablo 1 so a lot of information about the process is in there.