Moved from D1 forum

[[vL]Kp]

[Yes, my post more properly belongs on the original thread, but it seems everyone moved here, so I must answer here for anyone to see it. I will watch both and happily take my responses back to the D1 forum if people wish to continue the D1 related content there.]

I can't find a download size for Diablo, but DII comes in at a hefty 14.4 MB file size for the download. I would assume, since it is more "advanced" than Diablo, the original game couldn't be much bigger.

Not much bigger, no. The Diablo 1 CD weighs in at 635M (~44 times the size of the Diablo II download). You are probably looking at the size for stub download helper programs, not for the game itself.

The original topic was lost in the exchange, and your post addresses that original topic and not this side issue. Your post is more appropriate for the original thread in the D1 forum.

Oh, and just to continue an off topic conversation on an off topic spin off thread: I suspect why Blizzard is dropping D1 support has more to do with the difficulty of keeping b.net secure and yet compatible with D1 than it does with any financial considerations.

The server protocol used for D1 shares quite a bit with the older RTS family, so I doubt Blizzard will save much if anything until they kill off battle.net support for Warcraft II and Starcraft 1.

Would I release the source code to it, but still hold the rights? As mentioned I don't know all the legal implications of that. I likely wouldn't. Especially when you consider that most of the people that wrote that code don't work for Blizzard anymore.

Although this might have been different back when Diablo was written, it has been common practice for many years that the authors do not retain any rights to a Work for Hire. Since the original authors were paid to come to work, write the code, and debug it (although one wonders about that last point at times...), they likely assigned all rights to Condor, at which point the rights flowed with the company as it was acquired. Thus, Activision Blizzard should be able to release all of the Condor source without consulting the original authors.

Due to reliance on Smacker libraries for some animations, they might not be able to release a full source dump that could be compiled into Diablo v1.09, but they could release most of the interesting parts. Given how many platforms open-sourced games have been ported to, it would not be surprising to see someone plug in a replacement for the Smacker animations. That said, Diablo shares most of its network and portability code with Starcraft. Releasing that code would not enable someone to recreate Starcraft, but the commonality probably would discourage the lawyers from approving a release.

The graphics of D1 and D2 are far from "fine". They look like absolute garbage on current monitors. 640x480 or even 800x600 resolution scaled up on a current 1920x1080 LCD looks awful.

I believe Skywing got most of the older Blizzard games to run windowed mode with a few patches to the DirectX code. This might cause you to fail battle.net logon checks, but it works fine on unofficial servers and for LAN play.