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Hello, fellow 40-45(?) year old.

I feel like anyone preferring Warcraft III is in their 30s. Grew up with the Warcraft II Battle Chest and it was a vibe.

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Hey, lots of us 39 year olds who played Warcraft 2!
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I had a pirated version on a zip drive
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people wax poetic about betamax and laserdisk but never heard anyone mention zip drive, in a good or bad way, lol
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Before cd-rs, it felt like magic. Like a floppy but 100 times bigger!
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It was magical for about 2 years, then USB drives came along and made it look quaint.
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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!
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IOMagic Zip Drive?
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38 even!
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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!
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48, and I'm a medieval man.
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Same. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
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Mostly the best of times
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42 here, played a ton of Warcraft II, but my favorite to return to now is definitely Warcraft III (or AoE II).
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33 here, started with Dark Saga in my old PS1, after few months of my first gameplay got a used computer and played A LOT of warcraft 1 and 2.

PS: I still own the same PS1, tho the reader might not working 100%.

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I mean, I’m 37 and my first ever RTS was Warcraft: Orcs and humans. Never liked the hero focus of w3
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Same. I think it adds just too much complexity to an RTS where I want to just have an army to control.

Were it not so buggy, I think C&C generals ranks pretty high on fun modern RTSes.

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Try Generals Evolution mod for RA3.
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38, I played 2, but it was pretty bad compared to Warcraft III. Three still holds up just as well as it did back then.
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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.

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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.
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IMO, Starcraft 1 is better than both 2 and 3.

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.

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Speaking as a 44-year-old, this tracks.
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Red Alert II for me would be great.

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.

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It has Red Alert 2 voices. Check the carousel under the Choose your character section
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Oh wow!! Thanks for letting me know, perfect
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Code won't compile: Tanya - Hahahhahahaha!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssVqnEGpsgI

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Thanks for that link. I now realize it's actually the Warcraft I voices I was pining for!
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Your sound card works perfectly.
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It doesn't get any better than this!
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Sound Blaster Pro!
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The warcraft 2 demo had Easter eggs. One voice sample was "in the retail version I'm much funnier".
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Fantastic, I cloned your repo so long (https://github.com/sebbeth/peon-ping.git - the wc2_peasant branch) and I'm now online with WC2 sounds.
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More work?
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For years I had Pidgin spam "Leave me alone" when I got pings. Man those voices are deeply embedded in my psyche
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Zug zug
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Done building ship!
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We are being attacked!
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If you went to the website, you'd know there are multiple sets to choose from and create your own
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I went to the website, and I'm just scared how overengineered it all seems to be.
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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

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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.

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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?

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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.
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that's what i ended up doing — it was pretty easy:

* download Warcraft II voices

* tell claude to wire it all up

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Fantastic. And Claude can do the first part too!

The age of the WALL-E blobs is upon us!

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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.
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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 :).

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I may or may not have had the ogre finished training clip as my startup "chime"
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Wow. I had a visceral reaction to the “we’re being attacked!” clip. Haven’t heard that for a long time, but it still got my heart racing.
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Job's Done!
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Needs this so bad
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Aye-aye sir! Captain on the bridge!
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Age of Empires II anyone?
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Same. Ouch my back.
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Do you need assistance?
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"Plebs are needed!"
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my man
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