Wednesday, August 26, 2009  The Story of ThunderGraft  For those
who aren't familiar with it, ThunderGraft was possibly the
coolest of the three modding tools I released (the other two
being MoPaQ 2000 and MPQDraft). Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft,
and Warcraft II: BNE all use PCM WAV audio (22khz 16-bit if I
recall correctly) for their sound effects and music. Diablo used
raw PCM WAV audio, while Starcraft introduced (and the other two
used) a special "WAV compression", which compressed the audio in
lossy ADPCM form, resulting in a compression ratio between 3:1
and 4:1 (though at the cost of audio quality); WAV compression,
however, was implemented transparently in the MPQ API - the
games saw what they read and wrote to the MPQs as simply PCM,
and that's all the audio streaming API was capable of playing
(in other words, the audio streaming functions were identical in
all four games).  ThunderGraft was a utility that added the
ability for all four of these games to play MP3s and Ogg Vorbis,
in addition to stan