Archive for June, 2007

Starcraft II - Interview with Lead Producer

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Starcraft 2

IncGamers interviewed lead producer Chris Sigaty about Starcraft II during the announcement weekend.

IncGamers: RTS games were the games that made Blizzard into a major gaming company, but now it’s been a while. Warcraft III was 2003. What took Blizzard so long to get back?

Sigaty: [Amused] Well, there was a little something that came along called World of Warcraft. We made the decision to make Starcraft II right after the ship of the Frozen Throne. But we couldn’t start in true earnest because of the impact of World of Warcraft. It was so huge, and so foreign to us at the time. RTS and action RPG games (like Diablo) were our bread-and-butter.

We made the decision to do it, and there were always a few people working on elements of it, but we couldn’t collectively attack it, because our artists would be pulled off to help work on this or that [for World of Warcraft].

IncGamers: There was a big gaming website that stated – definitively – that this big announcement would, in fact, be a Starcraft MMO…

Sigaty: [Laughing out loud] Yeah, I read that.

IncGamers: So why, at the last minute, did you switch things up and go with Starcraft II instead?

Sigaty: [Still laughing] Well, here’s the deal. Last Monday, we decided that because they said that, we wanted to screw them over and go with Starcraft II.

Read the interview here

Valve survey

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Steam - Valve

Game developer Valve, known for games like Counter Strike (Source) and Half-Life (2), has published the results of a (continuous) survey they are doing through the Steam service.

Some interesting facts (based on results as of 10:32pm PST (06:32 GMT), June 05 2007):

  • Processor Vendor
    • AMD 48.56%
    • Intel 51.44%
  • Windows Version
    • Windows XP 92.88%
    • Windows Vista 5.04%
  • DirectX10 Systems
    • Vista with DirectX10 GPU 1.25%

See the full survey results here

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Firefox

release notes:

  • MFSA 2007-17 - XUL Popup Spoofing (low)
  • MFSA 2007-16 - XSS using addEventListener (high)
  • MFSA 2007-14 - Path Abuse in Cookies (low)
  • MFSA 2007-13 - Persistent Autocomplete Denial of Service (low)
  • MFSA 2007-12 - Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.0.12/1.8.1.4) (critical)

Download Firefox v2.0.0.4

Skype for Windows 3.2.0.158

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Skype

Skype version 3.2.0.158 release notes:

  • feature: Getting Started Wizard improvement
  • bugfix: Installer error 1603
  • bugfix: Sound setting not saved on Vista
  • bugfix: Accessibility problems with screen readers resolved
  • bugfix: Delay when playing notification sounds
  • bugfix: Incoming call is not sent to Voicemail if user rejects it
  • bugfix: On some rare cases conference call participants were muted
  • bugfix: Skype crashes sometimes when ending a call
  • bugfix: NTLM proxy authentication did not work
  • bugfix API: App2App transfers did not work as expected
  • Language files updated

Skype Website