In my previous article about Warcraft I talked about the beginnings of a series that would come to define Blizzard Entertainment and lead it to being one of the best-known and most-loved game companies in the world. But how did Warcraft go from an … [Continue reading]
Debugging running server applications
August 2, 2012 by 6 Comments
So you've written an awesome online game that works perfectly in the test environment, but when real users are playing the game server doesn't work properly. Now what?!? I was reading an article by Mike Perham called Debugging with Thread Dumps and … [Continue reading]
Marketing yourself as a programmer
July 27, 2012 by 15 Comments
A number of readers asked questions about programming careers, both about getting into game-development as well as staying employed in software engineering. I started writing a comment to JM about age-discrimination but it turned into this blog post … [Continue reading]
The making of Warcraft part 1
July 25, 2012 by 103 Comments
Back before the dawn of time, which is to say when PC games were written for the DOS operating system, I got to work on a game called Warcraft. I get to lead a project! While I had developed several PC games, a couple of Mac games, and seven … [Continue reading]
Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency
July 24, 2012 by 17 Comments
TL;DR: Server-side game recording is awesome for performing scalability testing, as well as reproducing game bugs and enabling players to replay their game experiences. How to load-test game servers In anticipation of the launch of Guild Wars 2 in … [Continue reading]
