Units rotate, and as they do, they change their shape and their spatial relationship with the squares that they are trying to fit into. The marine is tiny, while zerglings double in length as they run, their stride stretches them as their legs first expand outward and then contract back inward. So while a Dragoon is a square that expands and contracts as the legs move, the Vulture is a tight rectangle that doesn’t change in size or shape. Each unit in Broodwar has a different size, a different shape, and a different orientation. This is the where a large majority of a unit glitches come from in Broodwar, but it is also where the micro potential comes from as well. Now look at this image.Īnd notice how the Dragoon is double the size of the zealot? The dragoon wants to be as centered on a square as the zealot is: but when you’re a unit that big, which of the 4-8 squares that you’re standing in do you decide to walk into? Notice how the zealots fit neatly into the 8x8 boxes. When people talk about fighting the unit AI what they are talking about is fighting the desire of a unit to neatly fit into a single square on the game grid the problem being that not all units take up the same amount of space. What this post is about, first and foremost, is a discussion on why we play the game the way that we play it. The how and why of the coding process is irrelevant to the physical act of actually playing the game itself. If you read Wyatt’s blog, he will talk about the many tricks and coding practices he implemented into the game, the many stories of how those codes came about, etc… But that’s not what I want to talk about. To handle all the tricky edge-cases, the pathing code exploded into a gigantic state-machine which encoded all sorts of specialized “get me out of here” hacks. + Show Spoiler +īecause the project was always two months from launch it was inconceivable that there was enough time to re-engineer the terrain engine to make path-finding easier, so the path-finding code just had to be made to work. This might have been the intent-I don’t believe it is, but I’m willing to accept the possibility that Day9 is more biased towards Broodwar. Overall, it simply paints a picture that Broodwar is obviously more dynamic and that SC2 is obviously more rigid. However, the metaphor doesn’t actually reveal *what* it is about Broodwar units that feel like a Frisbee and *what* it is about SC2 unit’s that feel like a baseball. In short, Day9 attempts to reveal the dynamic nature of Broodwar’s units by likening them to a Frisbee while also showing the difficulty and yet all-innish nature of Starcraft 2’s units by likening them to a baseball. Baseballs, on the other hand, requires near perfect precision and strength-because unless you throw a baseball hard enough, it won’t gain enough momentum to go any distance worth-while. Because Frisbees fly in curves, being good with a Frisbee requires finesse and accuracy which is why you see Frisbee players being able to toss a Frisbee across a field with just a flick of the wrist, or be able to get a Frisbee to curve from the perimeter of a park back to your intended target.īy and large, it is harder to hit targets with a Frisbee than with a baseball because Frisbees are delicate and glitch out with the slightest gust of wind. Since baseballs fly straight, being good with a baseball is about speed and power which is why baseball players wow each other with how fast they can throw a ball and how well they can slow it down, speed it up, as well as creating illusions of how far it can go and causing it to create slight curves in its trajectory.
Baseballs, for the most part, fly straight (they don’t really, but that’s nitpicking) while Frisbees fly in curves (sort of, but close enough). Specifically, I would like to clarify *what* exactly Day9 was talking about, in order for people who have never played Broodwar to understand what we miss about the game.ĭay9 brought up the idea of baseballs and Frisbees. I would like to break that illusion with this blog post. Ever since Day9 talked about Frisbees and Baseballs, people have been humming and hollering about Broodwar’s superiority to SC2’s pathing system: mostly talking about how spread out the armies were and how each unit have this “micro potential” inherent within it.