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Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game
- lordleft 8y agoWhat is the legality of something like this? Really cool project!
- thefreeman 8y agoI think as long as they don't include DIABDAT.MPQ or any of the content / texture files from the original game it should be ok.
- degenerate 8y agoIt is. And it's mentioned at the bottom of the github page, too: "This work is being released to the Public Domain. No assets of Diablo are being provided. You must own a copy of Diablo and have access to the assets beforehand in order to use this software."
- davidcbc 8y agoThis seems legally questionable given that all of the source files have a copyright notice from Blizzard indicating distribution without written permission is prohibited.
- oh_sigh 8y agoNo one is distributing them. If you have the content files, you can point the open source engine to read them.
- davidcbc 8y agoThe guy on Github is distributing the source files which have a Blizzard copyright notice on them saying not to distribute them.
- joecarpenter 8y agoWhich is really weird. Because the code is reverse-engineered and I'm 99% sure the author used Hex-Rays Decompiler (due to variable names, etc).
- bananaboy 8y agoLooks like he pushed a change to remove the copyright notice: https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8d6525785f7f41a2ceca18c06c86c https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8...
- darkstar999 8y agoWhat do you mean? https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/blob/master/Source/automap.cpp#L6 https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/blob/master/Source/... This seems like distribution to me.
- oh_sigh 8y agoOh, sorry, I thought the comment I was responding to was nested under the 'freeablo.net' discussion, and not the main thread. You're right that this person is distributing stuff they shouldn't be. I'm guessing it will be removed from github shortly.
- poizan42 8y agoThere is no way this is not a derivative work of the engine of Diablo, assets or not it is blatant copyright infringement. That said I don't think Blizzard is going to make any attempts at enforcing it considering similar projects for other old Blizzard games.
- bitwize 8y agoIt's super illegal. Irrespective of whether you need a commercial release of the game in order to actually play Diablo with this engine, the fact is that they're distributing a derivative work of software copyrighted and proprietary to Blizzard, which is illegal under copyright law without authorization. And that's not even getting into due diligence w.r.t. other IP concerns; there could be third-party code or trade secrets in there.
- aw3c2 8y agoThere is a slowly but steadily progressing engine being developed at https://freeablo.org/ https://freeablo.org/
- have_faith 8y agoIt's such a shame there's no modern spiritual successor to Diablo / Diablo 2. The aesthetic and gameplay was great.
- yoz-y 8y agoTorchlight? Although it is a few years old.
- phoe-krk 8y ago...and Torchlight 2.
- bloodorange 8y agoI've played both but they lack the replay value of Diablo II (with/without expansion). There are a number of improvements to mechanical things when compared to the Diablo series but I felt that the Torchlight games were quite repetitive after a while. Though diablo 2 had a lot of grinding, I did not feel that way about it at the time. I've spent countless hours in Diablo 2 and Diablo 2: LOD but I could only play both Torchlight games put together for ~ 2 weeks or so.
- Merthurian 8y agoPath of Exile
- gabes 8y agoThis game is incredibly good. It's everything Diablo 3 should have been.
- Exuma 8y agoI remember going on vacation with my parents and all I had was the Diablo game manual, because I got the game 1 hour before we left. I read the manual about 100 times in the car... good memories
- learc83 8y agoSame thing happened to me with Diablo 2. It came out while my family was visiting my aunt on the other side of the country. My parents bought it for me, but my aunt and uncle didn't have a computer that could play it, so I spent the week looking through the manual.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoI had the inverse with carmageddon. I used to study abroad so I waited till I was on vacation to get the uncensored edition, then carried the box all the way home. The manual wasn’t as tick nor as useful as caesar iii’s tho.
- Exuma 8y agoHoly crap I forgot about that game
- paulmd 8y agoBut wait, it gets better: it's on GOG now.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoAnd there’s a not great but decemt enough remake on steam
- wingerlang 8y agoAnd the original is in iOS (and Android I guess) as well.
- jannes 8y agoWe should clone this repository before Github gets sent a DMCA takedown notice.
- EpicEng 8y ago>"This work is being released to the Public Domain. No assets of Diablo are being provided. You must own a copy of Diablo and have access to the assets beforehand in order to use this software."
- davidcbc 8y agoJust because someone says what they are doing is legal doesn't mean it is. IANAL so I don't know but the source files have Blizzard's copyright warning in them
- superkuh 8y agoAnd now that MS owns github there's reason to believe they're going to be more active/compliant about bullshit DMCA take down requests.
- SXX 8y agoGitHub was always super compilant in regard of DMCA. MS will change nothing.
- sakarisson 8y agoIt wouldn't be a bullshit takedown request. The source code even had a copyright notice before the repo owner "removed the fear factor". https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8d6525785f7f41a2ceca18c06c86c https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8... In fact, when you wrote your comment, those notices were still there, so you have no excuse for writing such an ill-informed comment.
- galaxyhaxz 8y ago
- brailsafe 8y agoThe repository is ~1mb. Far less than most websites.
- cthuluforprez 8y agoHaving never played Diablo, is there any way I can still play it on a modern computer?
- ryanmcbride 8y agoYes! I actually played it through last year. https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/wiki/index#wiki_diablo_i_game_guide https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/wiki/index#wiki_diablo_i_gam... I've also used this HD mod that adds some characters from Diablo II, better multiplayer, and increases the difficulty: https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/download https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/download
- cthuluforprez 8y agoThanks! I'll try it out. Did you liked the game?
- cdolan 8y agoPlay balzebub it’s awesome. I grew up on D1 and it’s my favorite
- ryanmcbride 8y agoOf course! It wasn't my first time playing it had just been years since my last playthrough.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amatecha 8y agoAlright, let's take a look at these remaining bugs that never got fixed... puts on Godly Plate of the Whale ;)
- SamLevin88 8y agomy dude edit: this guy quests
- brailsafe 8y agoJust leavin dis here https://archive.org/details/Diablo_1996_Blizzard https://archive.org/details/Diablo_1996_Blizzard
- theandrewbailey 8y agoYup. I used that 2-3 years ago to play it on my old Windows 98 system.
- rocky1138 8y ago> According to Jurannok, a Blizzard representative on their Support Forums, the game has been discontinued and Blizzard has no current plans to update it or start selling it again. > Sources: > https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/13595100072#post-2 https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/13595100072#post-... > https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/14611181553#post-2 https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/14611181553#post-... > As far as I am concerned, that makes Diablo 1 abandonware, so feel free to download this iso, legally. That's quite a jump of logic! Just because they don't publish it now doesn't mean they don't reserve the right to publish it in the future.
- hyperman1 8y agoI think abandonware is always illegal, it's just that nobody cares enough to enforce the copyright. Betting on this when you have blizzard with their trigger happy lawyers seems risky, IMHO.
- rocky1138 8y agoAssumed abandonware, anyway. Some companies have legit given the rights over to the public domain for stuff. Hasbro releasing the encryption keys and rights to Atari Jaguar comes to mind. http://www.atarihq.com/news/1999/990514.html http://www.atarihq.com/news/1999/990514.html
- hyperman1 8y ago
- slezakattack 8y agoThere is no cow level.. https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/69604/what-does-it-mean-there-is-no-cow-level https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/69604/what-does-i...
- radiorental 8y agoThese are not the cows you are looking for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlGQpvl_IA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlGQpvl_IA
- zackmorris 8y agoI'm old enough to remember that when Diablo came out, it seemed to be running too fast. This was before 3D video cards were mainstream (which happened with the Voodoo and Quake in 1997 maybe?). I was working a lot with blitters at that point and running into speed issues on the Mac because Apple liked to release machines with half-width busses, which cut memory throughput by almost half. I'd be lucky to get 60 fps on a fullscreen 640x480 blit in 256 colors on a 68k Mac, but PCs seemed to do it trivially, and also do more with masking and color mapping at nearly the same speed. Even PowerPC Macs ran between 2-10 times slower than their Pentium counterparts on tons of games. For example, Descent ran at 10 fps or whatever and was barely playable on a PPC 601, but ran great on a 100 MHz Pentium. Even Duke Nukem 3D ran full speed on a 100 MHz 486dx4. That could not have all simply been due to a lack of optimization on the Mac side. This is all from memory so take it with a grain of salt. But I'm mildly curious what kind of approaches went into their blitting, and if they used things like palette animation (which wasn't available on the Mac because Apple put a blocking call on the palette change, which synced it to the refresh rate, although I never tried it from another thread because I don't think it was thread-safe).
- fusiongyro 8y agoI remember trying very hard to play Descent on a 33 MHz 486 DX. It did not go well for me!
- amatecha 8y agoDid you ever play that pre-alpha source port of Quake on Mac that was just roughly compiled from the DOS source? Got like 12 fps at best on 320x200 on a PowerPC 603e 120mhz... When you fired a rocket the framerate would slow down by like 50% :'D
- reiichiroh 8y agoIt's amazing that Chris Metzen's terrible kiddy drawings from the Diablo and Starcraft manuals got him promoted eventually to creative lead.
- abiox 8y agometzen created the diablo universe (with roper) and the starcraft universe (with phinney). he had a bit more involvement than some drawings in manuals.
- reiichiroh 8y agoStill, the pencil drawings in the manuals looked like EGM envelope rejects.
- Mtntk 8y agocould be there any effort to conversion to opengl support, or it would be too complex to handle ?
- brailsafe 8y agoNothing is too complex to handle, it just depends on how many resources you have at your disposal and perhaps how much interest there is. Edit: I suppose in this case it would depend on exactly what capability one would have over the original game data which acts as a dependency for this.
- Zelizz 8y agoIt would probably be better to port to SDL2, which can then use whichever rendering backend is best for your platform.
- frugalmail 8y agoSo many fun hours spent playing with friends and talking about it! Thanks for the work and trying to breathe new life into it. Look forward to new generations enjoying it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Reedx 8y agoFor anyone interested in the history of Diablo, the GDC post mortem is well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc Quite a bit of detail regarding the origin of the game, going turn-based to real-time, the studio becoming Blizzard North, etc. Also here's the original design doc: https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf
- crocal 8y agoWhat I like about this code is how much direct it is. No fancy abstraction. Brutally to the point with switch() and if() and that’s it!
- ddtaylor 8y agoThese archive.org people are really awesome.
- munificent 8y agoThis code was automatically decompiled, though, wasn't it? The original is likely quite different.
- crocal 8y agoI don’t think it is vastly different in terms of program structure. They lost variable names and maybe some optimized intermediary calculations, but functional calls and branches are usually preserved through decomp (unless some compiler optims have been activated)
- what-the-grump 8y agoI might still have the disks to all except d3.
- mihaifm 8y agoHaven’t played Diablo 1, I grew up with Diablo 2 (I’m a bit younger lol), but for me D2 represents the most memorable athmosphere in gaming. Man...that music in Act 1... Years later I bought 2 copies of D2 to replay it. Needed 2 because no shared stash to transfer items between characters.
- jmts 8y agoI played stupid amounts of both. In early highschool I was sick for a few weeks, and spent all of it playing D1. One afternoon I decided I needed a drink, so I got up and as I turned around I saw a Hidden melting away into the aether. I decided I should probably break for half an hour or so. In late highschool I remember walking home from school and seeing a newspaper on our front lawn, and in my head I tried to press the 'tab' key to activate the popup telling me what it was. As far as the music goes, I honestly can't recall any D2 music nearly as easily as the D1 music comes to mind. The town music is obviously the most iconic, but the caves and hell soundtracks give me goosebumps every time. Combined with the sounds of magma demons, and vipers, and balrogs, and mages. Oh man, those were the days.
- egfx 8y agoQA tester on Diablo 2 Expansion here. There was sort of an infamous bug I found on the old D2 Expansion discs that let you bypass securom as well as play as expansion characters in non-expansion games using non-expansion discs. In fact, once you put in the D2 Expansion disc, all the configs got copied and if you switched to the regular non-expansion disc you were able to retain all the expansion features for as long as you had your PC on ;)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- n0tme 8y agoSo many gotos..