alt Hacker NewsI found a used copy of Warcraft 3 at the store about ten years after it came out, proudly brought it home, fired it up and didn’t recall the graphics being quite that awful, but the first time I tried to scroll the map sideways it shot to the far end because they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation and I shut it down, disappointed.
Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means.
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There are various hacks and tools for games (especially DOS games, but for W3 there may exist the same) which delayloop various calls to slow things down enough "to work".
The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane.
This is pretty much the experience of trying to play any game from the '90s on modern hardware. It always requires a bit of tinkering and usually a patch from the modding community. Funniest one I've found is Fallout Tactics. The random encounter frequency is somehow tied to clock speed so you'll basically get hit with random encounters during map travel about once every half second.
I think it means gcc -O0
The original Wing Commander was like that. Playable on 286s/386s, then Pentiums and beyond showed up and it was unplayable. The game started in the "simulator" to show you the controls, and you'd get blown out of space in about 0.5 seconds.
> they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation
Wow.
1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed!
I guess some lessons don't get passed on?
Yeah, Reforged was received very poorly so they basically end of life'd the franchise.
There is a thriving community with a couple different choices for servers to play on. So I'm sure there's a fix for your mouse speed issue.
Check Twitch for people streaming it: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/warcraft-iii
Grubby, one of the early esports stars, still streams it regularly and hosts his own for fun tournaments with other streamers.