Yet another reason Blizzard is awesome

[A Black Falcon]

StarCraft Patch 1.12 Now Released!
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Version 1.12 of StarCraft has arrived! This latest patch includes a host of new features that will make playing against your online friends and competitors all the more fun. For a complete list of all the new features, please read the StarCraft Patch Text.

Some of our most popular ladder maps were also updated. Dire Straits and Rivalry received minor changes, and Lost Temple was balanced and enhanced to accommodate the more recent style of Ladder play. For a comprehensive breakdown on how Lost Temple changed, read the Lost Temple Upgraded Map Page.

We wanted to thank all of our fans for their insightful input and continued support of the StarCraft Universe. We had a lot of fun making this patch for you, and we hope to see you taking advantage of it on Battle.net!

Changes in StarCraft version 1.12

New Features

* Changed Speed from "Fast" to Fastest" for Ladder Games.
* You now can preview your map in the Multiplayer chat screen.
* Added feature that allows the creator of a private Battle.net game to make the game public under the creator's name in Multiplayer Chat screen.
* Added full Korean language support for battle.net and in-game.
* Added a Friends List Feature and button that allows you to keep track of your friends on Battle.net.
* Added Friend mail feature that allows you to email members of your Friends List.
* Added Password Recovery and email registration features (like Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2) so you can recover your password via email.
* Changed the default race type in single custom games to Random.
* It now remembers your last map and folder setting when you create single or multi player games.
* Brood War will now show 'maps\BroodWar' folder as your default map folder.
* When a building is selected and if a ground rally point is set the rally point will briefly animate.
* Added minimap ping (Alt-left-click on minimap to show graphic location.)
* Added alliance colors on units - Shift-Tab changes your color to green, your allies to yellow and your enemies to red.
* Added right-click feature that will set your building rally point.
* Added shift-# to add a unit to a control group.
* The mouse cursor stays on the game's monitor in multi-monitor environments.

Updated Maps

* Lost Temple has been updated, while Dire Straits and Rivarly have been slightly tweaked to balance resources and space for building.
* All maps have been resigned. If you have moved standard maps to different folders you must do so again. If you have maps downloaded from our FTP site you must do so again.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed bug related to seeing Question marks instead of Korean characters when using /where command in Battle.net
* Fixed a bug that hindered Korean text in Battle.net chatrooms and game advertisements.

Link to the page that explains the changes to Lost Temple... it's been changed pretty significantly.
http://www.battle.net/patch/index.html


So... what do I think? Mostly good. A few of these things are bad -- do we have to redownload all the officially released add-on maps again if we want them to still be signed as Blizz maps? Looks like it. :( Also, I really liked the fact that ladder was Fast. Not Fastest. I really dislike Fastest and have never been very good playing at that speed... I'm not great at Fast either, but at least I can do that. Ladder was the one refuge from everyone playing stupid Fastest and now that's gone too... okay, I don't exactly play SC online very often. But still, it's too bad.

Other than that, it's all good. Well, I really love Lost Temple so changing it is weird, but the original version is still accessible (this just changes the Ladder version of the map, I'm pretty sure), so it's not that bad. And some of those changes are good -- moving the top center base enterance farther from the edge of right's upper left cliff, recentering all the base locations for better access to the resources (it was not balanced), etc... top is still disadvantaged with their base enterance, but it's not nearly as bad now.