It's possible
StarCraft II will have a workaround to allow play on a
Local Area Network following the uproar over
previous indications
that Blizzard's RTS sequel will not include LAN support.
Kotaku brought this up with Rob Pardo, and he seemed amused at the idea that
people will still consider this an issue when the game is released, indicating
that in cases where no 'net connection is available, there may still be ways to
play: "There's a few legitimate cases that we're going to try and address over
time. Location-based tournaments, or let's say I'm in a dorm with a firewall or
something like that, hopefully there's a way to determine that and maybe start a
peer-to-peer game." Likewise,
Shacknews raised the
possibility in a conversation with Battle.net developer Greg Canessa work on a
solution to support low latency/high bandwidth situations where they asked
if such a solution could provide "pseudo-LAN" support with Battle.Net
authentication for local games: "Something like that," he told them.
"Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or
periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to
facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things
that we're working on." They also confirm with Jay Wilson that
Diablo III
will deal with LANs the same way StarCraft II does, so it should support any
such programming created for StarCraft II.
About
a month ago we saw comments from John Carmack indicating
that Linux versions of
RAGE and the new DOOM game were up in the air, as
the id technical director said: "There are no firm plans for linux ports of the
idTech 5 titles, but it certainly isn’t off the table." Now a later email
exchange with Mr. Carmack posted to the
Ubuntu Forums
(thanks
Ant and
LinuxGames)
indicates that the chances they will port their Tech5 titles to Linux are
nearing ever-closer to the edge of that table, with a later exchange repeating
his thinking that it "probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the
nvidia binary drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably
anywhere else would be small." Here's his overview of the situation:
The
PC and Mac versions are still OpenGL 2.x.
We are not currently scheduling native linux ports. It isn't out of the
question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work. If there are
hundreds of thousands of linux users playing Quake Live when we are done with
Rage, that would certainly influence our decision...
The
Kali Website has shown unexpected
signs of life after a couple of years of dormancy, with a couple of posts from
about a month ago announcing that a new Kali tracker is online, and offering the
Kali software for $10.00 "for a limited time" (thanks
Ant). Old school online
gamers will recall Kali from when it first appeared almost 15 years ago as a way
of playing IPX games over TCP/IP networks, which allowed DOOM to be played on
the internet. Over they years the program grew into a more full-fledged server
browser for other games, but the last update prior to June 22, 2009 was in late
2007 announcing a server going down. The resumption of activity in Kali-land
goes unexplained, and the software they now offer is the version
released in 2004 that added
DOOM 3 support.
There's a
Frank Pearce Interview where the
World of Warcraft executive producer
fields questions from some journalists about the Cataclysm expansion, StarCraft
II, the new Battle.Net, and more, among other things indicating
WoW Mods will probably not be distributed through the BattleNet Marketplace.
Finally, the
J. Allen Brack Interview on IncGamers TV talks with the World of Warcraft
production director about WoW. They discuss race changes in the Cataclysm
expansion and more topics of interest, but in failing to follow advice we
offered in a rant about trade show video interviews a few years ago, they rely
on the camcorder's microphone, which picks up background conversations better
than the interview itself, at times making the conversation difficult, if not
impossible to follow.
The
Diablo III Open Q&A Full Transcript on Diii.net offers the chance to read
through answers at a BlizzCon Q&A session for Blizzard's action/RPG sequel. Ever
party with a player that grabbed all the good loot every time a monster dies?
Well apologies, sometimes I can't help myself. But this won't be a problem in
Diablo III: "All items are dropped on a per player basis so every monster
that dies has a chance to drop loot for every player in the game. I say ‘chance’
because some creatures don’t drop items but a boss would drop loot for every
player. You will see your loot, your friend will see their and the scrub would
see their look but you can’t see each others." There's also a
BlizzCon 09 Diablo III
Q&A on IGNspy talking with Jay Wilson about the game.
Last night we celebrated the birthday of a close friend who is a few years older
than I am. I asked him to explain whatever mistake he made to get so old, but he
wouldn't share, so now I'm concerned I'll end up repeating it, darn it all. Oh
well, not learning that secret aside, it was a fun celebration.
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