How Diablo Was Reverse-Engineered Without Source Code [video]

Re:How Diablo Was Reverse-Engineered Without Source Code [vi... by kevingadd on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @01:51AM (#20341942)

Debug assertions in game binaries for blizzard and blizzard-branched studios are more common than you might expect. At least at ArenaNet, it was studio philosophy to ship with most debug assertions enabled so we could gather crash reports in the field to fix bugs. We only exempted assertions where the checks would cause performance issues (i.e. in a renderer or audio mixer). Most of our engineering culture was inherited from Blizzard and I think that particular rule was too.

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Re:How Diablo Was Reverse-Engineered Without Source Code [vi... by jchw on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @02:07AM (#20342008)

Cool insight to hear. Apparently for the original Diablo, the usual release builds actually didn't contain debug assertions. I guess it must've become a part of their culture sometime after the release of the original Diablo?

I definitely believe you, though. I am pretty much positive that I've seen Warcraft III's engine crashing on debug assertions before when playing with the scenario editing tools.

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Re:How Diablo Was Reverse-Engineered Without Source Code [vi... by kevingadd on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @08:29PM (#20350439)

I wouldn't be surprised if Diablo development is why the policy was in place. One of ANet's founders did a lot of work trying to help ship Diablo and it sounded like it had some serious engineering and quality culture issues (iirc Diablo was originally being developed by another studio that Blizzard acquired, but I might be misremembering)

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Re:How Diablo Was Reverse-Engineered Without Source Code [vi... by DCoder on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @05:09AM (#20342790)

I also remember Diablo II throwing up assertions when I was playing with the parameters in the txt files. Fun times.

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