EA a while back released the source code to (most) of the old Command & Conquer games [2] though interestingly left out Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2, StarCraft's closest competitors at the time.
Would've been nice for historical preservation to be able to peek behind the curtain and see StarCraft's code in a similar fashion
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/68xzxt/star...
The StarCraft source code is something that must be kept behind closed walls, under tight control by Blizzard, even though the original people working on the game at Blizzard have already left and there is nothing to protect here other than eternal shame.
Oh, you wouldn't want to, believe me. You'd be scarred by code like this:
class CUnit ... {
#include "header_1.h"
#include "header_2.h"
#include "header_3.h"
#include "header_4.h"
};
PS: Still waiting to hear about the "Westwood's reaction" blog post! :p
I never developed standalone demos -- I was already working so many hours at work there wasn't much left over for, y'know, regular things like having a life.
On a related note, I worked on Battle Chess, porting it from DOS/Amiga to Windows 3.1, and later to Windows 95 ("MPC Battle Chess"). Every few years a new producer from Interplay would call me and ask for a copy of the source code so they could rebuild it, because they lost their own copies. One of those times it was because they discovered their weekly backup tapes were all blank.
Weren't almost all console games up to that era written in assembly? What high level languages were used? I recall hearing many Atari 7800 (?) games were written in Forth? May be mistaken.
Each map block was 2x2 cells, and each cell, 8x8 pixels. Made rendering background cells and fog-of-war overlays very straightforward assembly language.
All of Warcraft/etc. had only a few thousand lines of assembly language to render maps/sprites/fonts/fog-of-war into the offscreen buffer, and to blit from the offscreen buffer to the screen.
The rest of the code didn't need to be in assembly, which is too time-consuming to write for code where the performance doesn't matter. Everything else was written in portable assembler, by which I mean C.
Edit:
By way of comparison, Blackthorne for Super Nintendo was all 85816 assembly. The Genesis version (Motorola 68000) and DOS version (Intel 80386) were manually transcribed into their respective assembly languages.
The PC version of Blackthorne also had a lot of custom assembler macros to generate 100K of rendering code to do pixel-scrollable chunky-planar VGA mode X (written by Bryan Waters - https://www.mobygames.com/person/5641/bryan-waters/).
At Blizzard we learned from working on those console app ports that writing assembly code takes too much programmer time.
Edit 2:
I recall that Comanche: Maximum Overkill (1992, a voxel-based helicopter simulator) was written in all assembly in DOS real mode. A huge technical feat, but so much work to port to protected mode that I think they switched to polygon-rendering for later versions.