This is a list of things that were either planned or completed for Starcraft and Broodwar, but were scrapped or removed in the final release.

Independants
A race of independants. I am assuming that these belonged to a hostile computer AI. This probably includes the following:
Units

• Independant Command Center
  
• Independant Starport
  
• Cargo Ship
  
• Merc Gunship
  
• Merc Biker
  
• Raider
  

Portraits

• Independant Advisor
  

Heroes

• Grom (Biker)
  
• Sally (Cargo Ship)
  
• Greedo (Gunship)
  
• Boskk (Raider)
  
• Peter (Raider)
  

Critters

• Spot (Badlands Critter)
  
• V'ger (Space Critter)
  

Neutral Accessories

• Cave
  
• Cave-In // Possibly a "warp", or planned cave system
  
• Cave-Out
  
• Mining Platform
  
• Jump Gate // Possibly a "warp"
  
• Ruins // the same as the temple doodad
  

Observer Mode
This function was completed but removed for the final release. There were 2 additional slots in the lobby used for observing games. When a player was defeated, they had the choice of becoming an observer.

Voice Chat
This function was completed but removed for the final release. All code was implemented in Starcraft Beta, but removed in Broodwar Beta. There are still some game commands in 1.16.1 for this feature that appear to be forgotten/unused.

Abilities

• Roar (Ultralisk Ability)
  
• Afterburner (Valkyrie Ability)
  
• Essence Flare (Arbiter Ability)
  
• Burst Lasers (Wraith upgrade. The wraith originally had a weak ground attack much like a Scout, and I am assuming the burst laser upgrade altered the attack to what it is now)
  

Rank System
The rank system was like a "level up", where a unit would obtain a new sublabel after killing a number of units. It is unclear what kind of bonuses this yielded, if any.

Cheat Codes
There were originally 24 cheat codes as opposed to the 17 we have now. Some were probably used for debugging purposes.

There were some units too like Repair Bay, but I didn't bother researching it.

source?

Most likely it's from his own work going through StarCraft's files. I've seen all of those Independent units, the Neutral Accessories, and Burst Lasers in the .dat files before.

Yup, I've seen a lot of that stuff too, but some things are new and that's why I'm asking.

This was present in Version 1.00 of Starcraft. One of the patches (1.03 or 1.04 or sometime around then) took the upgrade out. Originally wraiths were AA only and you had to research Burst Lasers from the starport addon (whatever that's called) before they could AG attack. The upgrade is still in the game, but it doesn't do anything - seems like they simply made it non-functional instead of making it permanently researched, which is a pity for us map-makers.

As for Abilities, there's a Zealot sound effect file that is called something like 'zcharge' or whatever, so I think the SC2 charge that they had might have originally been in SC1, but they replaced it with the permanent speed upgrade instead.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 10 2011, 12:02 am by Lanthanide.

I went through both Starcraft and Broodwar beta files. Primary reason being there are many debug strings (for assertions) used in the beta executables which help a lot with BWAPI when figuring out what some things are(names of constants, variables, functions, and structure members). There may have been several other things planned, but these were the most obvious.

Some of them weren't planned, but rather were completed.
For example, Observer mode was there. StarVOX(Voice chat provider) interaction code was all there(along with voice over network commands). The provider itself (I think StarVOX.dll) was not distributed with the beta. Additional cheat codes (like enabling developer mode) were there, though I needed a workaround since figuring out what the name was would take forever.
I'm pretty sure that with developer mode enabled, some cheats or developer commands were usable online. For example /makeunit or /mu to spawn a specified unit for any player at any location. The commands all had strings (for debug logging).

I don't remember clearly but I think the "Rank System" is still in 1.16.1 right now, but is disabled. It yields no bonuses.

Many of the other things came from the beta's string tables. (TBL files)

Interesting. Too bad they never implemented voice chat or observer mode. I think both would've been pretty popular, if done correctly.

Having an independent race (natives or whatever) would have added a cool twist to StarCraft.

They also used to have attackable doodads. There's beta pictures where the trees were on fire. :3

On my original Starcraft 1.00 retail box (Protoss face), every single screenshot of in-game action had different content to what was seen in the final playable release. Probably they still use exactly the same screenshots on the boxes now, although they've cut half of them out due to smaller box sizes these days. About half the screenshots on the D2 box showed inaccuracies also.

Some of the changes include: wraiths using AA missiles to attack an archon, Tank's attacking Carriers, doodads that don't occur in Installation tileset (small clusters of brown crates), Hydras appearing in installation tileset levels and I believe old-style graphics for pylons and/or nexus'.

I believe the rank system would be exactly the same as in SC2, probably they thought it was useless. The voice chat thing probably wasn't going to be "Blizzard" quality and the observer mode was probably taken out so people won't have to deal with laggers. Can you tell us the game commands for 1.16.1?

Game Commands for 1.16.1: http://code.google.com/p/vgce/source/browse/trunk/docs/Blizzard/Starcraft/packets2.txt
I didn't write a doc for the beta game commands.

Here are text commands for the developer mode: http://code.google.com/p/vgce/source/browse/trunk/docs/Blizzard/Starcraft/betaCmds.txt
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWEE_b8Xduo

If you're able to hack it: http://code.google.com/p/vgce/source/browse/trunk/docs/Blizzard/Starcraft/betaHacks.txt
Note: "Enable Voice Chat" should be "Enable Voice Chat options"

I won't respond to anyone asking where they can get the beta.

I know a friend who had SC beta, tanks used to have an air attack. Pretty funny how that works.

How do I place the vulture with the old adjutant portrait in early versions of SC? Are there any other units like him which were removed?

Also, this sort of reminds me of the Unfinished Business mod for baldur's gate 2. It's a series of quests which were scrapped for one reason or another in the game, and were later added in by looking at the dialog and items associated with them. They apparently did everything but put the actual stuff in the game.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 13 2011, 3:09 am by rockz.

This sort of thing happens with any large game developed over several years. The difference is to what extent the leftover work remains behind and whether any of it can be made functional. It seems that very little of SC's leftovers can be salvaged unfortunately.

Diablo 1 had a bunch of unused item graphics and NPC talk sounds, including several about 4-5 different quests that never ended up in the game. A couple of them invovled going into houses within the town for example, and there was a whole separate NPC called 'Tremain the Priest' whose role was eventually rolled into Cain's. The whole end of Diablo used to revolve around the 'map of the stars' which gave you a time-limit that you had to complete the game in or Diablo would become almost impossible to beat. There were several unused enemies also, which were put into mods.

Diablo 2 had a few unused item graphics and sounds, but not as many as D1. It also had a lot of mentions to D2X classes Druid and Assassin, as they'd effectively started work on the expansion by the time it was released and some bits leaked into the D2 release. One thing that had been in the game for a long time was Kick, which all characters had. They took it out because it wasn't really useful in D2's frantic pace (it knocked enemies back a short range but did minimal damage), but it came back in the expansion as the basis for several Assassin skills.

This is blowin mah mind

Hey there's unused effects such as plasma drip and venom and magna pulse.

EDIT:
idk how to edit a post but ill make a new one, so I'm looking at a beta picture and it seems that air units can "twist"

Attachments:

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Mar 16 2011, 4:03 am by xboi209.

High Templar, Defiler, and Queen all used to have an attack.

A protoss dragoon was originally named templar

Attachments:

Hey Heinermann, is it possible to get unused buildings that's still in SC right now to work without crashing? If you do, I have some wireframes for few of the buildings. Hey anyone know how to view smk files? I'm wondering why there's some extra smk files and a Diablo 2 smk file? Smktools.exe won't work for me because im on 64 bit windows so it won't let me run it =(

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 17 2011, 2:38 am by xboi209.