I was the kid with the backpack Zip drive and Zip disks, like a weird Santa Claus of game piracy. Duke3d, Descent, Quake, you name it. All of it was in service of modem dueling each other. Wild times!
I recently replayed Warcraft II and fell out of my chair when I realized the original did not have control groups. Those were only added with the Battle.Net edition!
Not to be a patronizing old fart, but may I assume that you played II after III? If so I can understand it, but II was very special when it came out, and I never revisited it after.
I think it's a case of being better when it came out than another thing was when it came out, despite the other thing being comparatively better without the context of its time.
2 is a much harder game in my opinion. I don’t think even at the hardest difficulty level Warcraft 3 has any levels that require you to do a contested marine landing and then build a base before immediately being attacked again. The final Orc mission took me forever to beat. And the expansion? Good lord.
III has a better and more interesting story telling. But gameplay wise I really like the starcraft 1 system without the heros. I think warcraft 3 adds too much complexity and gimmickry that takes away from fun RTS gameplay.
That said, Warcraft 3 mods were the shit. There were so many fun and inventive modes of play that you could just barely do with starcraft and not at all with warcraft.
Warcraft 3 custom map mod was the birth of Defense of the Ancients Allstars which then became its own game by Valve as Dota 2 (and Blizzard was pissed and tried legal stuff to reclaim) which now became Deadlock = Dota 3.
A plea to the various lab engineering teams: please create a json format or whatever that lets me configure this with voices locally. I am a happy user as of late of the Codex app by Open AI. It would be great if I could just give it some JSON somehow and it just works. I suppose skills can do this and I will try that later on. But I think this stuff matters, and it would be nice to have it built in and encouraged.
Uh, are you sure you did? I mean it's just using the hooks API of Claude code to play a sound via the terminal itself?
Heck, they even outlined it in the readme
> peon.sh is a Claude Code hook registered for SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, Stop, and Notification events. On each event it maps to a sound category, picks a random voice line (avoiding repeats), plays it via afplay (macOS) or PowerShell MediaPlayer (WSL2), and updates your Terminal tab title.
Looking at the install script and peon.sh does not raise any over engineering flags for me. It's as simple as the functionally makes it necessary
Yes; it could be a README, a folder with subfolders of sounds, 1 or 2 files with functions totalling less than 200 loc for unix, maybe 700 total to have windows support and some extra features.
I get how they got here ; its how claude and codex approach projects, but what does the rest achieve? Your maintenance rituals shouldn't exceed your usecase at this scale.
Okay, but the install script is around 200 LOC and the peon.sh is just under 500 LOC ... So by your own numbers, it'd be expected loc size? What's exactly over engineered here?
The fact he added config files to let people create their own package?
I wrote a fun bit of code to do something like this but for bell sounds in emacs terminal sessions and other things (even using the peasant). but I agree it seems very over engineered. There is a json manifest file to explain which sounds should be used where in this repo, why not just use directories for each alert type, making it easier to modify, it seems completely unnecessary to me. having an install script seems crazy as well. The task is to play the right sound(s) that match the passed argument. the thing I did was like 23 lines and most of that was filtering and looking for ascii bell to play the sound then remove it from the stream and other options.
Extremely easy to do with sound recording software or youtube mp3 downloaders. Takes a little imagination and makes programming less onerous in a deviate kind of way.
Showing my age here, but the original samples are available too, and in MP3 or WAV format - they're in the installation directory of the game (in case of StarCraft and W3, hidden in a weird pseudo-ZIP data file (used to call it "Virtual File System")). That's where we sourced them from to set them as system sounds, back when Windows versions were still in four digits.
If you're enough of a fan to want to use these voices, chances are you still have the original installation media (or original bootleg copy) somewhere around the house :).
