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Here's more useless trivia, my brain is cluttered with superfluous memories, I can't remember every algorithm but I remember the minutiae. I remember our produc

Here's more useless trivia, my brain is cluttered with superfluous memories, I can't remember every algorithm but I remember the minutiae. I remember our producer Matt Householder telling me the bad experiences they had outsourcing the development of Diablo 1 expansion and ports meant they really wanted to make the Diablo 2 expansion in house. So at one point early in production on Diablo 2, our lead programmer, Rick Seis, had the .csv importing functionality as his primary task which seemed kind of mundane even at the time and now probably standard in most language libraries, and we transformed the Diablo 2 hard coded tables ( we were mostly following Dave Brevik's examples in Diablo 1!) into Excel spreadsheets. Then afterwards Peter Hu was on an optimization crusade towards the end, he made a .csv binary compacter/reader to save runtime.

corysama 3y ago
If you are ever in the mood to do an unstructured brain dump of superfluous memories, https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ would love to read it :)
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Thanks, I did a quick search and found alot from whom should be considered the uber sources of information about Diablo development, David Brevik and Erich Shaeffer. I was just in the trenches for Diablo 2. One thing I remember about the crunch per David's piece on crunch, he neglected to mention that when he gave a speech announcing we would crunch until we finished, and if we finished in time for holiday release that year the entire studio would get a free trip to Las Vegas, or we would get fired. Kelly Johnson, a character artist was standing near me during the meeting and mumbled something under his breath but I don't think anyone thought we would generate the content required for that deadline, but I believe he had to give a speech about it I'm guessing for appearances' sake.

corysama 3y ago

If you are ever in the mood to do an unstructured brain dump of superfluous memories, https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ would love to read it :)

stevenwoo 3y ago
Thanks, I did a quick search and found alot from whom should be considered the uber sources of information about Diablo development, David Brevik and Erich Shaeffer. I was just in the trenches for Diablo 2. One thing I remember about the crunch per David's piece on crunch, he neglected to mention that when he gave a speech announcing we would crunch until we finished, and if we finished in time for holiday release that year the entire studio would get a free trip to Las Vegas, or we would get fired. Kelly Johnson, a character artist was standing near me during the meeting and mumbled something under his breath but I don't think anyone thought we would generate the content required for that deadline, but I believe he had to give a speech about it I'm guessing for appearances' sake.