Who's excited to watch Blizzard massacre Diablo II?

How will Blizzard manage to fuck this up?

From: Lyra at 2021-02-20 03:19:11
diablo 2 ended up fun because of the vast quantity of hacked, duped, and botted items in the economy. who the fuck has the time to farm or trade for the runes for runeword gear if everyone is subject to their actual drop rate lmao

The last time I had to do that was back when the game was new and I was a junior in high school over summer break.

since they axed the wc3 reforged team i’m sure it’ll both look and play fine, but modern anti-cheating measures will make gearing up way harder than anyone realizes it is without the help of cheaters and it probably wont be as fun

My biggest fear is that the game will be always online without the Open Battle.net and Direct TCP/IP multiplayer options so you HAVE to go through Battle.net servers to play with friends or even single player.

How likely is it that Blizzard will offer “gear packs” or some other bullshit pay to win system with this?

They really think I’m going to pre-order a digital re-release of a 21 year old game after what they did to Warcraft 3 🤣

From: janus kaisar at 2021-06-16 08:44:14

From: Sam Porter “Norman Reedus” Bridges at 2021-06-14 16:45:34
you played diablo on ps1, now try diablo 2 on ps5

i actually did try d3 on ps3

Weird that Blizzard said that my banger of a PC is too weak to host a Diablo 3 session (so the game has to be hosted online) but the console versions all can host games offline.

Really makes you think.

Currently installing Diablo II from my release day CDs to scratch that itch.

Going to mod it with https://github.com/bolrog/d2dx

It’s wonderful. I have a stock Diablo 2 installation and then a separate directory containing the following mods:

• d2dx with v-sync and motion prediction disabled - v-sync off means I can use G-sync to get lower latency without screen tearing and turned off motion prediction because it made the animations look “wrong”
  
• BaseMod - general QoL mod that adds map regeneration every session and ladder-only runewords to single player
  
• PlugY - added mainly to have unlimited (well, limited to 4 billion, technically) per-character and shared stashes. It also blocks access to Battle.net when active.
  
  

Any of these would cause a ban on Battle.net, so having them in a separate directory means the game gets patched at runtime so I can hop on Battle.net by using the stock, untouched installation without mods easily.

Might put up a PvPGN server for some ladder fun with friends.

I am not entirely sure how it works, but here’s what I gather from my observations with d2dx:

• Stock Diablo refreshes the display at the same rate as it processes updates - 24 Hz update rate -> 24 FPS
  
• d2dx interposes itself between the Glide renderer and DirectX 11 and updates the display at a rate different from the game update rate - so you can get a high refresh rate even if the display doesn’t change because the game hasn’t updated its state yet - 24Hz update -> up to display maximum FPS
  
• A feature that d2dx supports (but which I have disabled) abuses a network feature of the Diablo 2 client that uses network prediction. Diablo 2, like most online games at the time and even today, uses client side prediction of movement for online games. This code appears to be active even in single player. d2dx, hooking into DX11, processes the input faster than the stock client and then pushes the updates to the client using the network prediction, which gives a higher effective update rate Disregard this and see below
  
  

Because it appears the network prediction was built with the intent to not interfere with game logic this works. The problem is that it causes the animations to appear different, and different enough to me that it is distracting, so I disabled it. The renderer still refreshes at a higher frame rate but the game update rate is unchanged.

Update: took a quick tour through the motion prediction code - my guess was wrong. d2dx doesn’t look like it’s intercepting input and forcing changes to the game using network prediction as I had thought. What it’s doing is that the renderer, independent from the game state, is doing location prediction separate from the game state, so when the renderer renders a frame it interpolates where it thinks the units should be based on where they were during the last game update and where they were headed during the last game update. This gives a higher apparent refresh rate by interpolating locations between game ticks but doesn’t affect the underlying game logic. It can lead to units “snapping back” to their actual location of the prediction over or under predicts where they should be, similar to the snap backs you’d see for network prediction due to lag or packet loss.

It’s actually a pretty reasonable solution because you only need to interpolate about three frames between updates to get to nearly 100 FPS (1 game tick and 3 interpolated frames = 4 displayed frames 24 times a second gives you 96 FPS. A fourth interpolated frame would give you 120 FPS.)