After re-looking at this article : Postmortem: Blizzard's Diablo II
We can see the original Diablo developer's used C++ and Microsoft Visual Studio for development. They also used 3ds max to create the 3d models and then later exported them out as sprites to be used within their engine.
I've always wanted to make a post about this but figured no forum would really give a damn. I'm always amazed thinking of what limited programs they had access to and what kind of game was created. (I hope I'm not the only one who thinks like this).
With that said, Diablo 2 was being developed in or around 1999. This means they were using Microsoft Visual 6.0 and 3ds Max Studio R3 (or R2). (And maybe MVS 97 for Diablo 1?). Not entirely sure just going off grave release timelines off Wikipedia.
Out of curiosity, would it be safe to say.. theoretically could you open up their Visual Studio project file and literally re-position some UI elements? Or was all this UI stuff done with DirectX and just C/C++. (I guess you could still re-arrange the button layouts editing the code), but I'm talking about through the actual Visual Editor inside Visual Studio (dragging and whatnot).
If not, how exactly were the layout's created then? Just basically adding images/sprites to the screen and add mouse events for clicks, keyboard events, etc? I know I will never know the answer unless there are any old Diablo dev's here, but I'm just trying to grasp how exactly they created their user interface. Was it all through Microsoft Visual Studio? Plain old C/C++ code talking with DirectX, or something else?
