Programming (explanations for the non-programmers, mostly)

Someone did those and got nasty letters from Popcap, after which Popcap ended up producing implementations of peggle and bejeweled in WoW that were given special dispensation to be obfuscated despite the usual policy against obfuscated addon code.

 

I'm too new for most of that. By the time I got involved, "terminals" were nearly all CRTs, with only one or two actual printer consoles still visible.

 

I don't know a ton (or anything at all really) about Morrowind in particular.

In general, the way modding works is some variant of "there are points where the game engine runs scripts, and you can provide replacement scripts".

 

... OMG.

You said "a" bejeweled clone. I didn't realize it was the Bejeweled clone.

FWIW, I did at one point long ago maintain a WoW mod, called Chatterbox. It was one of the ones that let you randomly have your character say things when you take actions. So, sort of like the thing of setting up macros to say something when you cast a spell, except that it could say random things, and also it could say them only-occasionally.

 

I was surprised that it ran smoothly, given what I knew about the API. So, yeah, that was pretty impressive. And I am very glad they paid him to work on it, rather than doing their own in-house instead.

And yeah, Chatterbox was 2009ish. I ragequit WoW over the RealID crap in mid-2010 or so, and haven't touched it since, but I think someone else took it over.

 

If you assume that it has to mean something, you can guess at what it might mean, and people apparently do.

That's what I mostly do when reading code in languages I don't know. I submitted a patch to a Minecraft mod written in Scala. I'd never tried to use Scala before, I just sorta stared at other code and guessed at stuff.

 

I believe so. My mental model:

First line: "int a = 10;" I don't know what "int" means for sure, but this sounds like it's saying something similar to "let a = 10". Second line, "int b = 20", same thing. So at that point, a is 10 and b is 20. "a = b" can't possibly be an assertion of truth, so I assume it's changing a thing. So a now acquires whatever value b has. Since b is 20, a is now 20.

 

Only sort of.

First off: They never, ever, acknowledged the substance of any complaints. The one and only official statement they made (on the old forums, thus now deleted) was that the game and forums would be better off without the people who objected. Their backtracking messages referred only to the volume of complaints. And, for extra credit, what they said was that they wouldn't do it for the time being. Which, in conventional English, means "we will do it later".

Secondly, when the new forums went live, they did actually put a real name on every page: The real name of the logged-in user. And the forums had no https support. Which means that if you were on a laptop, in a coffee shop, using the local wireless? Everyone there could see your real name and the name of at least one of your characters, if they wanted to.

Thirdly, they told a number of lies during the whole process. For instance, they asserted repeatedly that the real name thing was okay because "real ID was only intended for use with people you know in real life". But they had it start out by default showing real names for all of your friends to all of your other friends. Furthermore, they wrote a lot of things about how to use it that clearly involved people you met in-game, and the forum thing, which they asserted they had been discussing and planning for weeks, was an absolutely crystal-clear intent to use the system with people you don't know IRL.

Fourth, the idea was dangerously stupid. The problem they were supposedly solving was "trolls", but their proposed solution was to give the trolls a reliable way to inflict real-life pain on anyone they disliked without even having to post. Which is to say, to make it worse. The angry teenagers don't care if anyone knows who they are yet, whether or not they should.

Fifthly, just-world fallacy: The idea that a system which allows people to be hurt is dangerous only to people who do things to deserve being hurt is painfully stupid, and suggests that no one at the company had ever even heard of LGBT users, even though one of the very first responses to the announcement was from a trans player.

Sixthly, they never actually acknowledged any of that. And every aspect of Real ID that now offers some semblance of privacy, so far as I can tell, began to do so only after real people got hurt by it in a way that multiple people had pointed out to them would happen if they didn't have some privacy features.

I don't really know what happened. My indirect guess is that the "merger" where the Activision people took over "marketing" and "publishing", leaving the old Blizzard people to focus on "games", resulted in a large deal with Facebook earlier that year, and the actual motivation for the proposed change was "link this to facebook". (Amusing side note: One of the people who told me she thought I was overreacting is someone whose facebook account did not, at the time, contain anything remotely similar to her legal name.) Thing being, "marketing deal with facebook" would be a case where the Activision people could override the Blizzard people, because it was "marketing" and not "game design".

FWIW, I haven't given Blizzard a penny for anything since that announcement, and I have no regrets about this. Yes, their apology for the profanity-laden slew of homophobic slurs in the video they aired during Blizzcon was very nice. In fact, it is the nicest apology I've ever seen an MMO dev offer for choosing to run a video they edited which was full of homophobic slurs (allegedly bleeped out, but still quite recognizable). Possibly because no one else would have run it in the first place, because they would have realized that it was inappropriate.

But at the end of the day, they proposed to endanger the lives of every trans user, every user with a recognizably ethnic name, and a whole lot of other people, and they never admitted that there was anything wrong with this, or that it could have had harmful effects. And they did indeed do several things which leaked real names galore (such as bugs in their addon API that made it easy to extract them for arbitrary users on at least one occasion). And several things which got people real-life harassed, repeatedly, before getting fixed. And I am pretty much done with them.