Blizzard perparing the ground for more eSports

I was so happy reading the recently announced system requirements for Starcraft II. As you can see, Starcraft II will run on a meager 2.6 Ghz single-core, 1 GB RAM and a 128 MB GeForce 6600 GT or equivalent (in Sweden, you cannot even buy 128 MB graphic cards anymore).

This is an important strategy from Blizzards side to make sure that Starcraft II will replace its predecessor on the eSport scence. In many of the important eSport countries like Russia, Ukraine and China, to name some, you can't expect everyone to have a top-of-the-line system, which probably also is true for their internet cafes. Also, for me, it would be awesome if Starcraft II would run on my work laptop so I could bring it to friends to play!

Lets just hope this will be enough. Starcaft eSports has recently been through a lot of trouble due to the recent match-fixing scandal and the split between Blizzard and KeSPA, the Korean eSport organization, over IP issues. Worries has also been raised over rumors that Blizzard will charge TV-companies that broadcast SC2 matches, which would stress the already strained sponsors, and ultimatley allow less money to spend on players. In worst case, this could even making professional gaming impossible.

There are bright spots however. It seems the Korean gaming community have largely accepted many of the controversial changes SC2 brought, like auto-mining, multi-building selection and multi-building placement. Also, we already see a lot of the famous players appearing in SC2 beta matches on YouTube.

Finally, all creds to the Blizzard developers, we all know how hard and time-consuming it is to cram that last piece of performance out of a system!

MS serious with Windows CE?

Many people, me included, have waited a long time for Microsoft to announce their future policy regarding Windows CE. Windows CE/Windows Phone 7 hasn't been doing to well lately on the extremely competitive smartphone market. Also, Visual Studio 2010 don't include support for writing C++ or .NET CF applications for Windows CE, and they already dropped OS design support back in Visual Studio 2008.

Windows CE 7 was announced recently, but are MS going to back it up with the tools needed? Also, it's a bit unclear what is really new in WinCE 7. I thought WinCE just finally started to look good with version 6, introducing the new memory architecture allowing unlimited number of processes and unlimited memory per process, among other things, and I hoped for more in WinCe 7.

Hopefully Microsoft will also release dedicated tools for developers, to bring back our confidence. And if they do, I wouldn't mind it including a C++ compiler with support for C++0x! If not, well, most of our code compiles under POSIX as well ;)