Top all-time · #707
Michael Lyons
Personal blog · codeofhonor.com · on HN as netcoyotegamesprogramming
Michael Lyons writes Code of Honor, a personal blog at codeofhonor.com about games and programming. Since 2012, 91 different Hacker News readers have linked it 127 times, most often “Tough times on the road to Starcraft (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Patrick Wyatt's blog as a source on StarCraft and Warcraft development, pathfinding, linked lists and hardware-fault stories, and recommend it as a gold mine of first-hand accounts.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called a favourite, a gold mine of frontline accounts, a treat to read, great anecdotes, and worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Game design, programming and more
Most-linked posts?
- Tough times on the road to Starcraft (2012)15 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2017-05-04
- The StarCraft Pathfinding Hack11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2014-04-15
- Tough times on the road to Starcraft9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-09-07
- Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-09-10
- The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-07-25
- Whose bug is this anyway? (2012)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-01-04
- Whose bug is this anyway?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-12-18
- StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-09-27
- The StarCraft path-finding hack5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-02-20
- StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames (2012)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-01-10
What Hacker News says?
One of my favourite stories about this type if stuff is from Patrick Wyatt on developing Guild Wars: https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway See "Your computer is broken". They essentially inserted a stress test into the game that verified if the hardware was still doing calculations correctly, and if not, inform the user.
Comment linking /blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway
on “ECC matters”Submitted StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames as a story · 435 points
HN discussionHasn't been updated in a while, but if you haven't read it yet and like old(-ish) tales from the games industry, check out Patrick Wyatt's Code Of Honor: https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Tough times on the road to Starcraft as a story · 360 points
HN discussionAre there any known arbitrary code injection for starcraft? Like how you can use a regular controller to reprogram super mario world to play pong? https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v5mqg/using_b... https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execu... Is this how we are going to accidentally let AGI loose into the world!? /s On a more realistic note I think this will degenerate into a game of…
Comment linking /blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack
on “DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment”Submitted Whose bug is this anyway? as a story · 267 points
HN discussionWhile not about radiation hardening or redundant hardware, this article shows how StarCraft's developers discovered and handled random hardware failure: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway The bug webpage mentioned in the article is dead, and clicking the link subtly redirects you. Here's the archived version: http://web.archive.org/web/20140824005145/http://www.guildwa...
Comment linking /blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway
on “Compiling an application for use in highly radio-active environments”Submitted The StarCraft path-finding hack as a story · 250 points
HN discussionRing arrays are so useful it would be unheard of if those games did did not use them, regardless if it is ES/SNES "Object Attribute Memory" or something equivalent. Every game today and then "should" have one or more ring array in them, but sometimes a junior dev or one in a crunch will use a linked list in rare situations. A notable example is when Starcraft used a linked list that caused a difficult to reproduce b…
Comment linking /blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft
on “Super Mario 64 has been decompiled”Submitted The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select as a story · 223 points
HN discussionBoth Jeff Atwood[1] and Patrick Wyatt[2] have written posts pointing out that the bug is more likely to be in your code than in the platform. There are instances where writing it yourself is the better option, but more often than not you will want to offload that burden onto a library that deals with the details so you can focus on doing what's important to your system/business. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/…
Comment linking /blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway
on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C”Submitted The Making of Warcraft, Part 2 as a story · 213 points
HN discussionThey certainly used linked lists all over the place in StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo [1]. I don't know that many game developers would use complicated data structures like the one you've described here. Linked lists are fantastic for insertion/removal in arbitrary places. Game development is not really about showing off with cutting-edge CS research, it's about getting things done. Maybe your arenas with generatio…
Comment linking /blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft
on “Learn Rust with entirely too many linked lists (2019)”Submitted Tough times on the road to Starcraft (2012) as a story · 212 points
HN discussionFrom https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-... > whenever harvesters are on their way to get minerals, or when they’re on the way back carrying those minerals, they ignore collisions with other units Maybe that's part of the fluid behaviour you noticed. The blog contains more technical posts about StarCraft 2, so you might find that "special sauce" somewhere else in there :)
Comment linking /blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack
on “Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)”Submitted Tough Times on the Road to StarCraft as a story · 165 points
HN discussionI strongly recommend reading Pat Wyatt's blog [1] for some insights about an early Starcraft development from more technical point of view. [1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
Comment linking /blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft
on “Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)”Submitted Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists as a story · 133 points
HN discussionGreat book. I wish there was more literature in this vein. Some other fun reads from the Blizzard team at http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Microsoft's forthcoming Minecraft Education Edition is written in C++”Submitted The Making of Warcraft (2012) as a story · 80 points
HN discussionAlso worth reading is the three-part article by Patrick Wyatt on the issues encountered whilst developing Starcraft[1], which were a huge factor in its delayed release. Of particular interest is the path-finding hack they used [2] [1] http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-s... [2] http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-h...
Comment linking /blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack
on “Dirty Coding Tricks”Submitted Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency as a story · 73 points
HN discussionStory of Ensemble Studios: http://insidevoice.com/ensemble-figures-out-how-to-go-from-e... A career narrative from Rich Geldreich (of http://www.binomial.info/ ): https://sites.google.com/site/richgel99/ The Making of Warcraft: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-... SimCity, Part 1: Will Wright’s City in a Box: http://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity-part-1-will-wrights-ci...
Comment linking /blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-1
on “The Making of Prince of Persia (2011) [pdf]”Submitted The making of Warcraft part 3 - Code Of Honor as a story · 38 points
HN discussionhttps://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-... is a great article on the woes of path finding even when given a good basic algorithm. Nice contrast of theory and practice.
Comment linking /blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack
on “Introduction to A*”Submitted Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists (2012) as a story · 33 points
HN discussionIt has also been pointed out that these problems are not intrinsic to C++, but rather due to the way he was using it: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/avoiding-game-crashes-relate...
Comment linking /blog/avoiding-game-crashes-related-to-linked-lists
on “Nanomsg – MIT-licensed ZeroMQ alternative”Submitted Whose bug is this anyway? (2012) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSame story happened to Starcraft 1, in which Blizzard revamped their Warcraft-2 lookalike game to a more isometric view to match something the competition seemingly did. https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-... "At some point I talked with Mark and Patrick about how Dominion Storm knocked us on our heels, and they let us in on Ion Storm’s dirty little secret: the entire demo was a pre-rendered…
Comment linking /blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-down-in-flames
on “Tim Sweeney on the First Version of the Unreal Editor”Submitted Marketing Yourself as a Programmer as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
