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I think the problem you're seeing isn't with the way the sprites are projected into 2D, but rather they couldn't change the number of frames in each action. So the animations look jerky and rough instead of smoothly flapping their wings (or whatever).

They couldn't change the animations because that would change the behavior of the code, and gamers rely on precise timings and such for micro. They probably could have made some changes, but it would have been a lot harder and the codebase isn't great. People rely on bugs as standard strategy now.

It's no longer rumor that WarCraft was originally headed in the direction of being a WHFB game. It was confirmed by Patrick Wyatt, the lead dev of WarCraft 1, in his blog when talking about the making of the game. Specifically, there's this bit - "Allen Adham hoped to obtain a license to the Warhammer universe to try to increase sales by brand recognition. Warhammer was a huge inspiration for the art-style of Warcraft, but a combination of factors, including a lack of traction on business terms and a fervent desire on the part of virtually everyone else on the development team (myself included) to control our own universe nixed any potential for a deal."

Now the question becomes "Did GW shoot them down, or did they even approach GW in the first place?" My guess is that they approached GW and were shot down, considering that the guy who wanted the license was the president and co-founder of the company.

You can read the whole blog post here. I find a lot of his stuff to be interesting reading, if only for the fact that I've thoroughly enjoyed the games he's worked on and writes about.

The problem is that the performance you get from overclocking is not worth the instability.

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway

I think many MMO developers enable Nagling: WoW ( http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=236446&TabID=1990410&ForumID=1110924&TopicID=6371439 ) and Guild Wars ( http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway )

Note that the listed Windows "fix" doesn't actually disable Nagling - it just turns off selective acknowledgement (the MSMQ registry setting does nothing to the game stuff, since it's only for the MSMQ and not global as far as I can tell).

Furthermore it has no effect on the servers - if they have nagling enabled you're still stuck with it.

It's a shame really. Yes TCP has higher overheads but it really doesn't have to be that crap, and much of the crappiness seems to be due to selective acknowledgement + nagling.

TFA part 2 : http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/avoiding-game-crashes-related-to-linked-lists

The author suggests to ditch the STL in favor of "intrusive lists". In intrusive lists the links are part of the data structure. It breaks the data/container separation but provides many benefits in term of performance and reliability.