I wonder how well AI audio generation would work here, to produce a voiceover video like the original input.
As the author rightly points out, in its 27 years of existence, commentary around the game has become a domain specific language. Not just Korean or English.
This approach of automated scripting and using AI to understand roughly what was said and then make it coherent is really cool.
yt-dlp -f "bv[height<=720]" <url>
That will download up to 720p quality.
It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected by LLMs later on. For example, 12 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (two-Hatchery build).
Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest would be to increase the probability of slang words in the dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using HuggingFace's library: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...
What do the numbers in front of the building mean? 12 Hatcheries seems like… well, 12 seems like a possible but implausible number of hatcheries to build (hypothetically it is possible of course). And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful. So that makes me think it is the position in the build order list. But, they list other builds, like:
> The second is the 12 Hatch, 12 Pool, 12 Gas
Which doesn’t make a ton of sense in with that parsing. I mean it must not be a straight list. Maybe it is a tree, and 12 is the depth for this building? But that seems late, I can’t think of 11 buildings to build before gas. Maybe they include units too? Or maybe just drones/overlords?
My favorite Brood War slang term is Ee Han Timing [0]: basically when you take a risky build that has to do damage in a small timing window. A ton of exciting Brood War moments come from exploiting tiny timing windows.
I attempted playing a few world cyber game US regional matches and I was always amazed how much faster everyone else was. Then I remember when they live streamed it from Korea and I saw how fast they played and I was blown away. From a strategy point of view, something so basic about the game that I missed was when a blog introduced me to some math for a protoss zealot power up that defeated a zergling in 2 hits rather than 3. That's when I realized this is a chess game and I got hooked.
The numbers indicate the supply you should be at when you build the structure.
so a 12 hatch 12 pool 12 gas means you get to 12 workers and then build those 3 buildings in that order as soon as you have the resources for those.
For zerg the workers actually become the building, so I assume you hit 12, build the hatchery, build another worker, build the spawning pool, build another worker, and then build your gas refinery.
> Very few of members of the foreigner community are fluent in Korean. Foreigner access to Korean BW discourse is a contradicting concept: if you speak Korean fluently, you have no reason to be in the foreigner community, as it only has access to material that is strictly inferior and more limited. For this reason, Korean-speaking members in the foreigner community are exceedingly rare.
I can vouch for this in general - after becoming fluent I've stopped looking up anything related to Korea in English because the quality of information is much worse. I'm sure the same holds for other languages and places.
Then your opponent calls you all sorts of vile names and questions your sexuality, etc.
https://youtu.be/Nm-PXmOELAw?si=Z-RXbdqNzkSF3cqx
my brief search didn't show me any more obscure Korean only strategy videos, so maybe this one is just for the lowly foreigners :(
There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).
"1rax double" is equivalent to "1rax expand" or "1rax CC". They use multi or double to mean expand in the early game. Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card or "han-bang" which means an army or attack on few resources.
I am not sure what short-hand they use for barracks, gateway, etc.
In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you should fit in the new building.
It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on conventional rules of thumb anymore.
There’s a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning English.
Talking about software development in Spanish (my native language) is a succession of imported terms from English.
I don’t think there’s a good way of doing that, and I’m interested to see how automatic translations deal with it, because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that process.
And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of course.
As you get later into the game people who play more seriously also use the in-game clock, or timing a building placement relative to how complete a different building is to determine building timing. This helps with subtleties like whether you lost your scouting worker or not (-1 supply), if the early game got really weird because you had to build more units to hold some aggression, etc.
It feels kind of sad to admit as a chess player, but "Najdork variation" is one of the funniest typos I've seen.
That’s a really interesting one to me! One thing I’ve noticed is that Koreans do not seem to have the same hangups / negative attitude towards cheese strategies as westerners do!
As a side note, I have gotten into watching a "foreigner" BW channel everyday called ArtosisCasts. The videos are very strategic and high level commentaries on games as they are watched for the first time, with some after-match highlights for especially interesting maneuvers. It has really made me appreciate the depth of the game, as well as explain how I was so bad at it in high school. It has actually made me think a lot about startups, economic optimization, and how you approach the "meta" of any activity you're undertaking.
He asked his partner what strategy he should use, the person responded with "13 gate" (meaning: keep building probes until you have 13, then build your first warpgate). Cella pretended to misunderstand and instead built 13 warpgates, which is a horrible strategy, but they still won the game. They only won because his partner could barely defend him in early game while he was building the warpgates. After surviving early game, it wasn't a fair fight even with a horrible strategy, because it's a professional against "normal" people on the Internet.
I don't think the video exists anymore, Husky famously removed his whole channel with a lot of StarCraft 2 early history, but I found this Reddit thread[2] talking about the game (WeRRa was Cella's team at the time, that's why they call him CellaWeRRa).
[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Cella
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dyjk9/cellawerra...
(Some chess corrections, in case the author is reading: the moves at the start of chess games are called openings in English, not openers; there are not distinct white-piece and black-piece openings, although of course an individual player will probably study a given opening from the point of view of one side or the other; their study is considered fundamental all the way up to the highest level, in fact more so as you increase in skill; and the Sicilian variation in question is the Najdorf, not Najdork.)
I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.
As you can guess, I was a Terran main. While my recipe for Protoss friends was plain heavy metal, I took my frustration out on Zerg players. One thing I loved to do was to have two science vessels cast Defensive Matrix and Irradiate on each other, and fly them over enemy drones. People who haven't seen it before got mightily confused by what's going on. Doubly so when they decided to throw a "quick reaction" Mutalisk squad at them, only to watch them all die.
(That was even funnier than calling in a nuclear strike and flying a building over the red blinking dot to hide it. You'd think a random Engineering Bay floating in enemy's main would be a clear giveaway, but people always got so stressed by the "nuclear launch detected" warning that they couldn't connect the dots in time.)
SC:BW was a game like no others.
yt-dlp -x <url>
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 <url>
yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 <url>Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text:
Claude:
Today I'll teach you about the 12 Hatchery build. I'll explain the types of 12 Hatchery builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and the build orders in a simple but detailed way.
Against Protoss, this is the build you use when you want to start with the most economic advantage. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with 12 Hatchery, so I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
The first is the two-hatchery build that starts with 12 Hatchery:
12 Hatchery
11 Spawning Pool
10 Gas
This build uses early gas, and it's often used when you want to quickly transition into a three-hatchery build with three gas bases.
The second build is:
12 Hatchery
12 Pool
12 Gas
This build allows for moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast three-hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the "safe three-hatchery" build, and you can think of it as a build that enables both quick Mutalisks and quick third base.The attitude seems to be that throwing in the occasional cheese is not so much meant to win the game, as it is meant to make sure your opponent wastes resources on defending against a potential cheese at all the other times.
This is very similar to the function of a bluff in a theoretical analysis of poker. Very simplified, the optimal frequency of bluffing is when bluffing just about breaks even against optimal play from your opponents. But throwing the bluffing in masks when you actually have good cards.
What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words. German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.
> The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time.
You can see some good examples of that when you look at railway related terms in German. They used to be all English, because that's where we got the technology from. But over time they have been replaced with mostly German native-looking terms. (Well, native looking, but many of them like Lokomotive re-created from the same borrowing from Greek or Latin as in English. But eg station is now Bahnhof. And train is Zug.)
But if you are known to never cheese, your opponent might bet on greedy strategies, sometimes known as "economic cheese": you don't prepare any defense, and skip scouting, to build an overwhelming army all of a sudden at some given time like just after an important couple of upgrades that boost the army (a timing attack).
The "normal" play (economic growth plus scouting) is usually the superior strat, but if your scouting fails to detect a cheese attempt that must be countered with a very specific defense, the game is lost. The occasional cheese keep the players honest so they spend resources in scouting, instead of going greedy.
StarCraft has its own bluffing scheme, that is faking a build so the opponent goes for a specific counter, but actually going for something else.
If I remember correctly, that building was for enabling creation of zerglings and other units in hatcheries (and also for researching upgrades) - but one building was enough to unlock those units in all hatcheries; and it did not produce any units itself, so building more of them wouldn't increase your unit output either.
You could in theory built several of them to research multiple upgrades in parallel, but there were only like 3 possible upgrades anyway, so it would make sense to build 12 of them.
The only reason I could think of would be as a sort of redundancy, so you can keep building zerglings even if the enemy destroys some of the pools. But 12 also seems excessive for that.
So what exactly was the motivation here?
Sorry if I'm talking rubbish here, as I said, it's been a while.
I'm absolutely puzzled by this. Not British but I've been to both countries and can't say I noticed much difference in their bread.
What do you consider to be the key distinction between German and British bread? Why do you think it is such a dramatic change that you can't countenance using the same word?
First:
Hello, today I'll be teaching you about the 12 Inner Base build. I'll explain the types of 12 Inner Base builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a detailed but simple breakdown of the build order.
Against Protoss, this is a build you use when you want to start with a more economical opening. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with a 12 Inner Base. I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
The first is the Two Hatchery build that starts with 12 Inner Base. The order is:
- 12 Inner Base
- 11 Spawning Pool
- 10 Gas
This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into Three Hatchery play with three gas bases.
The second build is:
- 12 Inner Base
- 12 Pool
- 12 Gas
This gives you moderately fast tech tree progression and moderately fast Three Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly referred to as the 'Safe Three Hatch.' You can think of it as a build that gives you both fast Mutalisks and fast three base play.
Hello, today I'll teach you about the 12 Natural build [note: actually 앞마당/frontyard in Korean StarCraft terminology, seemingly transcribed as 안마당]. I'll explain the types of 12 Natural builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a simple but detailed breakdown of the build order.
Against Protoss [토스/Toss in Korean], this is a build you use when you want the most economic opening. Against Terran, there are several builds possible with a 12 Natural. I'll explain some of the most commonly used ones.
The first is the Two-Hatchery build [투에처리, should be 투해처리] that starts with 12 Natural. The order is:
- 12 supply: Natural expansion
- 11 supply: Spawning Pool
- 10 supply: Gas
This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into a Three-Hatchery build with three gas bases.
The second build timing is:
- 12 supply: Natural
- 12 supply: Pool
- 12 supply: Gas
This gives you a moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast Three-Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the 'Safe Three-Hatch' [안 3에처리 in Korean], and you can think of it as a build that enables both fast Mutalisks and fast third base.I think the real issue is that, like learning to play the piano, StarCraft demands extreme levels of practice to master its physically demanding control scheme. To then lose to an inferior opponent who merely bluffed you feels profoundly unfair. For whatever reason, Koreans seem to be better equipped to handle the cognitive dissonance associated with such an unfair system. Perhaps the Korean school system (and its infamous final exam) has something to do with it?
These "backyard bases" are also often encountered on team maps; deciding which player takes the front is strategic. P&T can build batteries and bunkers together, but Z gets a buff on creep and can spread it forward much faster.
However Korea had a much bigger scene, with lots of players, coaches, teams - so they probably have more institutional knowledge. So the suspicion, or assumption is that Artois can be the high-school coach level, but there are university coaches and professional coaches, who perhaps are even better. And they are better since in Korea Brood War had much bigger monetary backing - and social backing too. If everyone in your highschool played the same game, there would be more players. Then if there were around 12 (or more) professional teams, they would find more talent, but also better coaches.
And it's not that Koreans dominated completely, players from other countries could win against them too, but usually they would not, especially as a whole match consisted often of few games (usually: best of 3 (so you need to win two games to proceed), best of 5 for finals).
To rephrase this differently, the two main English speaking comentators nowadays seem to be Artosis, who is technical and the second is "Falcon Paladin" channel, who is entertaining and commentary is often "what he sees on the screen" (with no, or sometimes even bad takes about strategy - or explanations "why we see what we see").
If Korea has 50 such commentators, then probably some will be entertaining and some will be very technical.
On a side note, Starcraft Brood War is not only very well balanced for play and entertaining to play - it is also very entertaining to watch, since units are relatively distinct and it at least partially avoids the "unit blob" problem (where one group of units attacks another group of units) due to existence of various units that make area damage (for example.. tanks). And yes I know that in big battles there are blobs, but at pro level they generally work really hard to spread the units across the battlefield - even if the units are primitive and have bad pathing. I digress, just wanted to say that the game is simply pleasant to watch - because it has a certain clarity.
Keeping loanwords is just simpler - we're going to learn them from English anyway.
I've lived in both places multiple times for years and decades. But even a cursory visit should show you vast differences. The Brits don't even believe in rye.
You can do a simple visual comparison from the comfort of your own home:
> But if you are known to never cheese, your opponent might bet on greedy strategies, sometimes known as "economic cheese": you don't prepare any defense, and skip scouting, to build an overwhelming army all of a sudden at some given time like just after an important couple of upgrades that boost the army (a timing attack).
Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say.
And the optimal cheese frequency is when cheesing has the same expected win-rate as 'normal' play.
> StarCraft has its own bluffing scheme, that is faking a build so the opponent goes for a specific counter, but actually going for something else.
Yes. I didn't say cheese was bluffing. Just that the strategic considerations around cheese frequency are similar to the math for bluffing in poker.