Aaron: First, give us a background on how you came onto the Starcraft Modding scene and a rundown of what you had hoped Aqueous Rift would be.
Xenophanes: Basically, I was and always have been a Apple computer person. Blizzard has always supported Mac's, so naturally I was playing WarCraft and WarCraft II back in the day. StarCraft was released and was available to the Macintosh community, however BroodWar was delayed by several months for the Macintosh. This obviously was upsetting to me because I wanted to play BroodWar with my buddies who had PCs. Interestingly, when BroodWar was released Blizzard released an update for the main StarCraft program for both Windows and Mac's. I was looking at the file sizes and the version notes and realized that it was likely that Blizzard prereleased the program that would actually run BroodWar, but it was disguised as an update for StarCraft. Further investigation by burning CDs with various file components made me realize that the StarCraft/BroodWar application was really only responding to the type of data sets available to them when the program was launched. Simply, I was able to "fake" a Macintosh BroodWar CD, replace the patch file with the BroodWar data file and trick StarCraft on the Mac to run BroodWar months before it was supposed to be released for the Mac! I quickly wrote a tutorial on how to do it and spread it through the internet. BroodWar for Mac was released after that, but people were still doing my "trick" because the Mac version of BroodWar was around $30 or so, but the PC version of BroodWar had dropped to $15 by that time. Unfortunately, I received the first of several "cease and desist" letters from Blizzard. They didn't like the fact that they were losing revenue because of a "hack". That was the start of the modding scene for me. Before I knew it I developed all the units that made sense and the only question was putting them into the game. Around that time the mod utilities started showing up. StarDraft was first followed by StarGraft and that was the start we needed. When TileEdit came out we expanded into making new tilesets as well.
Aaron: What made you think of adding an element of naval warfare to a game that puts little to no emphasis on aquatic warfare?
Xenophanes: I was always puzzled a little why StarCraft didn't have any water units because they were so integral to the strategy in WarCraft II. Yeah yeah.... I've heard the reasoning "they don't have to build water ships because they have space ships". Sure, that is true, but last time I checked we have advanced tactical aircraft that can circle the earth not to mention intercontinental ballistic missiles, but we still use aircraft carriers and submarines, so I didn't necessarily buy this logic. So, I started brainstorming as to how and why and what would be StarCraft water units. Why build warships on the ocean? What if there was a planet that was only ocean with no land? How would you live there and defend it? This was the genesis of the idea really.
Aaron: Was it just a series of Custom maps or did you have a Campaign in development?
Xenophanes: We had a full campaign in development. Simply, it was going to be a parallel storyline that was taking place in a "backwater" part of space which consisted of 'wet' planets. For some reason that area of space had an abundance of water, thus the solar systems developed planets with a higher percentage of ocean coverage. We had heroes and a full line of story lined up.
Aaron: Why was your project cancelled?
Xenophanes: The project wasn't really cancelled as so much as it died. I went to graduate school and couldn't continue working on the project full time like I had during college. The people I put in charge couldn't execute the project because they didn't have the capability to put the final touches together. Furthermore, Blizzard sent me two more letters telling me to stop our project. One saying we were violating the terms of agreement by editing the program files and one to say that we were infringing on the copyright by saying "StarCraft: Aqueous Rift" was our title.
Aaron: How far did you actually get before the powers that be at Blizzard Entertainment shut you down?
Xenophanes: We got pretty far. We created GRP files for most of the units although we were constantly editing them trying to make them look as authentic as possible. We created one full tileset and were going through two more (I actually created one more for a different expansion at Campaign Creations that I don't know if it actually got used). We were trying to add them in using StarGraft, but the program was buggy and took a lot of effort. Simply, I had generated a mpq file that contained our GRPs, modified data files, that would be used in conjunction with StarGraft. I had a working alpha that had "fake" grps to test. My crew didn't understand why I was anxious of releasing the good GRPs, but I had already seen other projects get ripped off where someone took their GRP and used it for a different expansion. (GRP's are the actual graphical files that contain the information of what the unit looks like and how it animates.) The biggest issue we ran into was making the water available to units. What we did was to set the lowest level of land to look like water, thus land units could walk on it. Next we changed the unit flags of the water units to that of larvae which can only survive on the creep. We then changed the water to be creep (although it is "land" that looked like water), so any water units (flagged as larvae) would die if they tried to leave the "water". This solved the issue of water units leaving to the land, but to keep land units from going onto the "water" we used map triggers to kill any unit that tried to enter the water above a certain amount. It worked pretty well although it required that all multiplayer games be run using Map settings, so the triggers would be active. We even set up our own Battle Net server that allowed us to run hacked versions of StarCraft! We probably spent too much time goofing around playing StarCraft on our own Bnet server instead of working, but that is the way things go when you get a bunch of people who love a game together. Anyway, we were very serious about making it multiplayer playable and took many steps to make it possible.
Aaron: Can we hope to see anything in the future coming from Aqueous Rift?
Xenophanes: I have been considering trying to revisit AR with StarCraft 2 engine because it looks easier to modify for that type of use, however I am older now with a child and a full time job. Who knows I would be more than happy to help out and give over my ideas for a project if there is a capable crew out there willing to try to make something that matches the look and feel of StarCraft. I personally feel I have a fantastic vision just little time for its execution. Who knows maybe someday I will bring the crew back together and give it another shot.
Aaron: Have you worked on any other modifications for Starcraft, or any other game?
Xenophanes: I did work on the Gundam mod for StarCraft where I ported it to Macintosh. I worked with the guys from the Antioch Chronicles when they were trying to produce their final expansion. They had some issues trying to add the units and GRP creation. I think that ultimately failed although they had some really sweet units. In fact, the only expansion/mod that I know of that successfully had widespread use of StarGraft was Sicle-Craft, but I could be mistaken. I assisted in making tilesets for another mod, but I don't remember the name for it. I also had a side StarCraft expansion that was much smaller in scope called Forgotten Battles. It was going to add one unit for each side and be nice and simple, but that ended at the same time AR did. There was a Map pack that was sold by some company (which ultimately got sued by Blizzard) that needed to be ported to Macintosh. I did that for free, but it was never released for Mac by them. I also did some goofing around and map making with Myth II (great game!) by Bungie and a little with the original Halflife. I really love making expansions/mods for games, however I just don't have the time any longer.
Aaron: Is there anything you want to say? (Like a "set the record straight" type of statement)
Xenophanes: Some people claimed that AR was impossible. There were many "nay-sayers" out there. Generally, I think people were just frustrated because they wanted another expansion and it was taking quite a while. Doing what we were doing was not only possible, but we were very close. When I moved to graduate school I was in the final phase of compiling custom MPQ files with our data. All that remained was to straighten out the StarGraft issues (Sicle from Sicle-Craft was helping me out at the time). AR not only was possible, but it is still doable now. It is just that few people have the skills to bring all of the graphical, data editing, compiling, and tweaking together to pull it off. We had a good crew, but life got in the way. Maybe if that was my full time job and was paid for it there would be a different story.
Well, there you have it. From the man himself, Xenophanes, the story of Aqueous Rift. If you have any questions that I didn't cover here for Xenophanes, feel free to leave them as comments and I will try to cover them in a future interview.
