Evolution of Starcraft: Alpha-Beta-Game Graphics

We've all been caught up in debates over what units look good, the graphics quality, the different unit balances, etc.

We've been talking about how things look, and it sparked me to go looking at what actually happened when Starcraft was first developed. I thought you guys might like to see what the Alpha of Starcraft looked like compared to the actual release of the game. It might give us a little insight into what the final product of SC2 might look like since we're seeing what the "alpha" looks like....


Early Alpha SC1
[img width=512 height=449]http://www.sclegacy.com/features/evolution/earlyalpha5.jpg[/img]

Late Alpha SC1
[img width=640 height=480]http://www.sclegacy.com/features/evolution/alpha6.jpg[/img]

Beta SC1
[img width=640 height=480]http://www.sclegacy.com/features/evolution/beta12.jpg[/img]

You can see that there's a tremendous difference in gameplay, graphics, and unit abilities between the alpha, beta, and the finished version.

If you'd like to figure out some more about the progression of Starcraft into a finish product, take a look at Starcraft Legacy's page... it's the best one I found and the source for everyone else's images as well.

http://sclegacy.com/features/evolution.php

 

Holy crap man looks WAY diffent and some look like toys.

 

This has been posted more than once here. And it was old when those were posted.
But, to shoot down any ideas that the same or a similar thing will happen with SC2.
SC was first announced quite early in it's development. StarCraft 2 was announced after 3 years of development.

The engine was a modified version of the WC2 engine. They realized this would not be good and made an entirely new engine. StarCraft 2 did not start out as a modified engine of another game (the idea was there to start off from the WC3 engine but that was shot down before they actually did that). StarCraft 2 started as it's own completely new engine.

Many of the changes in SC late alpha and beta were sizing/lighting/angle of the sprites and even then the basic quality did not really get enhanced.

 

Cool. The desrt picture, however is a mod that utilizes the unit graphics of starcraft beta. Pretty fun.

 

Paragon, link me the post, because it's not here. I searched it before I posted.

Also, I'm just giving a relation to what can happen between a beta and the final release of a game.

 

Yeah a link would be helpful and would tone down the asshole-ness of the first couple of sentences

but yeah this is pretty late-stage compared to the first
nonetheless, very interesting! owerup:

 

A pic...
http://www.starcraft2forum.org/forums/index.php?topic=471.msg9729#msg9729
That cause the link...
http://www.starcraft2forum.org/forums/index.php?topic=471.msg9790#msg9790

June 14. Almost exactly 2 months ago. Maybe I'll post a link to it in 2 months to get some power ups...

 

Congratulations, paragon. You have successfully tracked down a post that was in no way related to the topic it was posted under and had no text relating to the "evolution" of the Starcraft graphics.

It wasn't in the context that I posted it in, either.

Congratulations on making a moot point.

I very much doubt anyone on this forum would have dug that deep and found that post other than you.

 

i dont think it would be the same with SC2

alpha beta would be not too different from each other

but atleast make the TERRAN structures more shiny and metallic! (brings back SC memories) lolz

 

Just because SC2 has been "in development" for 3 years doesn't mean that most of the work that will be done in the game has already been done. It may have been a few guys outlining the design, building the basic engine, drawing up concept art. Spore has been "in development' since The Sims (the first one) was released, but it wasn't for several years that more than 5 people started working on the project. I mean, the Zerg aren't even presentable to a level that they'll even give us screenshots, how for along could it possibly be? I fully expect the final product to be drastically different than what we have already seen.

 

A LOT of the posts on this forum are not related to the original purpose of a thread. Entire threads have been driven completely off topic and then spanned for multiple pages due to a post like that one.

Hey look! Starcraft had some crazy evolution!
is the same as
Hey look! Starcraft had some crazy evolution, lets discuss it!

Congratulations on making a dick statement.

It took like a minute to find it using Search. Not exactly deep. Besides, haven't you see the Kel-Morian Mining ads? "Real men dig deep"

 

this coming from PARAGON of all people, gimme a fucking break dude

I don't doubt it took like a minute to search for it, but it's a lot easier to find something when you know it exists and can at least recall something about it

 

Actually Joneagle X this is a great post, whether or not someone talked about it before. It relieves me to no end to think there's potential for GREAT improvement here. Thanks a lot!

Actually the Dragoons in late alpha looked pretty sweet hehe. Nice specular highlights.

 

Except there isn't potential for great improvement here as outlined by my post.

 

except you can't say for sure that there won't be big changes in the future, and your post seems to totally disregard the points 10-Neon made

 

LOL Archlimit I love your new sig.... badass!!!!!!!!

@ Paragon , my feeling is that if its within another post that is completely unrelated and doesn't have key search words that might be related to the topic I'm searching for, such as "evolution" "graphics" "starcraft" "beta," etc, then it doesn't count.

Given that it fits this category I think that post would be extremely hard to find unless you searched by image code..... So I just assumed it wasn't there.

And in fact, they just posted ONE picture of what the alpha of SC1 looked like... not a progression.

BTW, just because you spend your whole day looking through stuff like that and have seen it before, doesn't mean that the majority of users haven't.

Had to ADD THIS ON!!! So many ppl posting:

Why not? I've seen better graphics than Blizzard is putting out right now... just look at some console games.

SC looks awful craptoony to me. I hope they approach it in more of the "realistic" way that they did for SC1. I know SC1 was still animated, but at least they looked semi-realistic rather than like Felix the Cat.

Of course, they'll probably have to raise the requirements for the game if they start with a new graphics engine, but I don't see why its not possible.

At the VERY least you can see that units might not look anything like what we're seeing right now, especially in relation to certain units like the Nomad which look terrible at this stage.

If you go to the link and look at the valkyrie they're TOTALLY different from Alpha to Beta.

 

Oh, and to add to Joneagle's point. I think there's a HIGHER chance, or at least it's an easier task, to switch up unit/model design in SC2 than in SC1. The reason I'm saying this is because SC1 was sprites. So I would think that, despite there was an evolution with numerous changes, they were probably fairly dedicated to a certain unit design before drawing in pixel by pixel every angle of unit movement and behavior. I think I could whip up a low poly rigged SCV a LOT faster than drawing in different actions and different angles for each action.

 

I agree, with computer-animated graphics it would be a lot easier to replace the style, skin, animations, and performance of a unit.

In fact, I think ArchLimit would know better than any of us... I can't stop watching his animation.

 

Haha, thanks Joneagle, I appreciate that

After hours and hours of work its nice to know that ppl get a kick out of it

 

Ummmm... its pretty f*kin amazing.....

How long does it take you to design just one of those?

How long would you suspect it takes Blizzard to do the same based on your experience (relation to the forum, lol).