starcraft

In my previous entry, I linked to a new post on Timothy Farrar’s blog where links to a few SIGGRAPH ‘08 papers. One of them was written by Dominic Filion and Rob McNaughton of Blizzard Entertainment about certain details of the StarCraft II engine.

This paper is interesting beyond the technical content because Blizzard has not been a frequent source of papers in the computer graphics industry, despite their dominant position. With their involvement in the OpenGL Working Group, is this a sign Blizzard intends to be more active in industry groups and academia? Certainly something to keep track of.

http://ati.amd.com/developer/SIGGRAPH08/Chapter05-Filion-StarCraftII.pdf

MPQDraft 1.1 is now available. This release basically adds proper support for Mach-O PowerPC and Intel programs. The download link is available from the sidebar, or you can update via Sparkle.

MPQDraft 1.0 is now available, after a ridiculous 6 years of development. This is my second oldest project, second only to MPQKit (and its predecessor, MPQ2K Mac Edition). The highlights are as follows:

• Support for patching PowerPC CFM programs on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Mach-O and Intel support are forthcoming.
• MPQ Loader 0.5 only supports Starcraft. Warcraft III support will be added only if there is demand.

The download is available from the sidebar and on the MPQDraft project page.

MPQDraft has an interesting history which I will be revisiting in an upcoming post. This will bring us all the way back to the days of Classic Mac OS.

In addition, I am planning on releasing in partnership with Campaign Creations updated versions for their classic campaigns using this new version of MPQDraft. Hopefully, people will check out the richness of the Starcraft modding community before stepping into the next chapter that Starcraft 2 will begin.