Twenty Years of Guild Wars
Twenty years after Guild Wars launched, the memories are still sharp. This is the anniversary look back fans kept asking for.
Credit where credit is due
A lot of people got the Battle.net origin story wrong. This sets the record straight with names, dates, and receipts.
HandmadeCon 2015 interview transcript
A rare long-form game-dev conversation with Casey Muratori, Jonathan Blow, Mike Acton, Ron Gilbert, and more, all in one place.
Stay Awhile and Listen
Fans of Blizzard's early years may want to check this out: a newly released book on the making of Diablo.
Uh-oh: was the company site hacked?
For a moment it looked like the company site might have been hacked. Here's what actually caused the scare.
The StarCraft path-finding hack
StarCraft pathfinding looked impossible to fix until one ugly hack changed everything. Here's the trick that shipped.
Whose bug is this anyway?!?
Some bugs look so impossible you start blaming the OS, the tools, or the compiler. This post digs into three of them.
The making of Warcraft part 3
Warcraft's first multiplayer match was somehow a win, a loss, and a tie. The story behind that mess is even better.
StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists
Linked lists look harmless until they start detonating your game at runtime. This is the bug pattern far too many programmers miss.
Tough times on the road to Starcraft
The road to StarCraft was a brutal sequence of bad breaks, hard pivots, and near-disasters. This is the part most people never heard.
The making of Warcraft part 2
Warcraft almost didn't become Warcraft. Part 2 gets into the hard calls, surprises, and turning points that shaped the hit.
Debugging running server applications
It worked in test, then collapsed under real players. This is how to debug a live server without flying blind.
Marketing yourself as a programmer
Being a great programmer is not enough if nobody notices. Here's how to stand out before your next job search forces the issue.
The making of Warcraft part 1
Before Warcraft became a legend, it was a risky DOS-era experiment. This is how it actually began.
Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency
The Guild Wars scaling trick most developers never think to use: record everything, replay it, and break your servers on purpose.
Detect client disconnects using named pipes in C#
Detecting named-pipe disconnects in C# sounds easy until nothing works. Here's the fix.
Error handling using forever-loop
Most error-handling code is messier than it needs to be. This odd pattern cleans it up.
Reducing perceived latency
People hate waiting, even when an app is technically fast. These perception hacks make software feel dramatically quicker.