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Blizzard Issues Update For 16-Year-Old Diablo II
Blizzard this week issued an update for the popular Diablo II game. The update, dubbed v1.14a, comes roughly five years after Diablo II was last updated, and four years since the release of Diablo III. Blizzard says the update aims to resolve glitches introduced by modern operating systems. While Blizzard's commitment towards its 16-year old game is unquestionably commendable, it appears the new update is causing issues for some.
it's still very much a work in progress. Many of the fixes that people have worked out to get the game to run properly now no longer work with resulting in a poor overall experience and alll kinds of new bugs
It seems that updating an existing install (with all the patches and workarounds required to keep it going on a Intel-based Mac) is problematic.
Backup your game-characters and delete the game. Then download and re-install from scratch. That works fine.
The download doesn't show for some reason in the normal clients-download under "My Account" on Battle.net (only the Windows version).
If you go to the generic downloads section https://battle.net/account/clients it is there.
Please note: For LoD you need to download/install DII first then LoD.
You don't need the original game CD's, but you will need both the game-keys.
You can easily find those in your account settings on battle.net if you previously registered.
Just got LoD going on a iMac 5K. Pixels are really big :-) because the 800x600 display gets stretched (thankfully with correct with aspect-ratio) to full-screen. Leaves a big black border on left and rights sides, but that doesn't really bother me.
Mouse-handling seems quite imprecise (hard to pickup stuff from the ground), but I'm using a MagicMouse. Must see if USB works better.
And let others do it. I mean, they're doing more than anyone else, but they're doing so much more one wonders why they are putting the effort in when a much much MUCH simpler method is available.
Yesterday I was trying to install D2 and LOD from my account into a Windows 7 install and it just would not work.
So, I put in the good old Blizzard support ticket highlighting all the issues I had.
Today it's been fixed and works perfectly.
Not saying that I caused this, but you are all welcome anyway ;-p
Leg Godt!
I cannot say my experience with Windows 10 has been stellar with some older games. So it's nice to see a developer making at least some attempt to officially fix their game to work with newer OS versions. It means they believe in their user base, and support their games. Can't say that about some game developers who just want to sell you a new game that is probably worse at running on Windows 10. At least in my experience, I totally gave up on Windows 10 and gaming. I guess much of the problems stem from Windows 10 beefed up security and yet many of my issues have been not about running games, but performance of games. Although some older games, simply do not work in Windows 10. Par for the course I guess, as many older games don't run on Xbox One either.
Irony :P
To the show the just ended.
It sure is tough to keep one running. Finding ribbons is tough but have you tried locating daisywheels lately?
Wow... I really feel old.
Blizzard is planning to update Warcraft 3 this week as well, bringing player communication improvements as well as some surprises with the new 1.27 update.
Twinstiq, game news
Well, they better. I paid $39.00 @ Target for that shit. As long as they continue to tweak the Voodoo driver and modem code, we're all good.
I've worked long enough in software to know that what really happened is that the new operating systems are just exposing previously hidden bugs and uses of undocumented behaviour in DII. Software companies are just like little kids, always pointing the finger at someone else.
By 'previously hidden bugs' you mean code that worked perfectly when run on the old Operating System? Why would developers only be allowed to write code that strictly follows Microsoft's API? Even Microsoft's Office developers aren't that slavish.
They went to the trouble to include a native Mac client, but they ignored Linux. It's a nice effort to get back to the reputation of the old Blizzard, but it still seems a little half-hearted. It's a cruel criticism, I know, but even Microsoft is taking Linux seriously these days, so I'm not sure why big game studios are still dismissive.
For one thing, those libraries can be replaced. If it's not their code, then they "can't" open the source, but they CAN open their own. And others will hook in libraries to do the same damn thing.
Second, what interest? And why? And none of it couinters what I said, only says "weel, they may have a reason not to", which isn't something I said they didn't have, I just pointed out that it would be much less work to release the code and let someone else do it. And "Oh, we might port it. One day. Maybe. Possibly. We haven't in sixteen years, but we can't port it if we don't have exclusive ownership of the code" still gets a "Well, no, you can port it if you don't have exclusive ownership of the code". And the libraries they use would need porting,so when that's not going to happen,they'll have to rewrite it for new libraries. Which if they opened it all up would have already been done.
Finally, no, if you knoew how bliz codes, you won't have any advantage hacking their battlenet servers. If they are relying on crappy programming and that crappy programming being hidden, then they have crappy programming and they shouldn't be relying on it.
I've been Modding Diablo2:LoD for several years, and while it's neat to see an official update, most Modders I'm aware of use a base version of 1.10. Blizzard removed some really useful bug-features with v1.11 that make the later versions less open to modification.
I'm using Windows 8.1 and running Diablo2 v1.10 without trouble, but I can appreciate where Apple's chip changes in the last decade could be problematic.
You DO know that you don't watch the codec, right? You watch the video. You can do what's called "transcoding" where you decode from one codec and reencode in a different one. The video is still 100% watchable, but you never see the codec change.
I couldn't give a rats ass what the codec is. Use xvid if you want. Or Theora. Or MP4. If as the other respondent claimed, they want to port, they'll need to change the coding for the video, because Bink isn't available for Android or accelerated on iPad.
Up until last year, the Diablo 1/2 battle chest was still selling in my local Target and other places for $20. 15 years after release. I asked a clerk once when the last one was sold and he looked it up and said a month before. Pretty amazing for a 15 year old game.
As an example, SimCity had a bug where it continued using memory after freeing it. It worked, if only accidentally, in Windows 3.1, but the Windows 95 team had to add a special shim for SimCity to put the memory allocator in a special mode where it waited a short while before *really* freeing memory. This shows at once a) the folly of your position and b) that Microsoft is going through a lot of trouble for backward compatibility and that if your application breaks the rules and therefore breaks itself in the next version of Windows, you only have yourself to blame.
Slashdot here with another story that's over a week old! News at 11.
I've been playing it on Windows 7 just fine, I was hoping this update would focus on spam bots.
I can't enter a game without the max number of players immediately joining, spamming the entire chat for several minutes shilling for cheats or websites that sell items, then leaving.
It used to be that you could set the maximum level difference and all bots were level 1, but now they use leveled bots.
Freaking spam fest.