[bluedino]

> In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so.

Reminds me of the story where some company was making a new VGA card, and it was rumored a rival company had implemented a buffer of some sort in their card. When both cards came out the rival had either not actually implemented it or implemented a far simpler solution

[alanfalcon]

An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled their game.

Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion’s E3 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play, not live gameplay.

[stevenwoo]

I got a look at an early version of StarCraft source code as a reference for the sound library for Diablo 2 and curiosity made me do a quick analysis of the other stuff - they used a very naive approach to C++ and object inheritance to which first time C++ programmers often fall victim. It might have been their first C++ project so they probably needed to start over again anyways. We had an edict on Diablo 2 to make the C++ look like recognizable C for Dave Brevik's benefit which turned out pretty well I think (it was a year late but we shipped).

[genewitch]

Diablo II is in my top 3 games of all time, i still play it all the time. Thanks for contributing so much fun to my life!

(for ref, diablo III is also in my top 3 :)

[stevenwoo]

I was only one of many programmers at Blizzard North + others at Blizzard and our parent company at the time, but you are welcome from me.

[selimthegrim]

What exactly did they do that was naive?

[mhh__]

Similar tale with propaganda and stats with asterisks missing about the MiG-25 leading to the requirements for the F-15 being very high.

[Grosvenor]

Michael Abrash's black book of graphics programming. They heard about a "buffer", so implemented the only non-stupid thing - a write FIFO. Turns out the competition had done the most stupid thing and built a read buffer.

I teach this lesson to my mentees. Knowing that something is possible gives you significant information. Also, don't brag - It gives away significant information.

Just knowing something is possible makes it much, much easier to achieve.

https://valvedev.info/archives/abrash/abrash.pdf

[bogantech]

> Turns out the competition had done the most stupid thing and built a read buffer

This isn't really stupid though as explained in the pdf

> Paradise had stuck a read FIFO between display memory and the video output stage of the VGA, allowing the video output to read ahead, so that when the CPU wanted to access display memory, pixels could come from the FIFO while the CPU was serviced immediately. That did indeed help performance--but not as much as Tom’s write FIFO.

VRAM accesses are contended, so during the visual display period the VGA circuitry has priority. CPU accesses result in wait states - a FIFO between the VRAM and the VGA means less contention and more cycles for CPU accesses

Why improve read performance though? Games accessing VRAM I presume would be 99% write. Perhaps it was to improve performance in GUIs like Windows?