CallMeCrazySam wrote:Well it's a 20 year old game that wasn't designed to be played on modern hardware or designed to be modded at all.
Not gonna argue about the former statement but the latter one is a nice joke, you should definitely add it to your favorite pasta when you demanding MORE SPACE for PERFECT GEMS and RUNES.
In earlier days of d2 (classic d2) game database was only partially exposed, I'm not even sure if they ever published text tables or was it binaries only back then. But what Blizzard did with subsequent updates and expansion is a whole different story, especially when they introduced 1.10 version: they softcoded quite a lot of stuff that was cemented into the game engine before. It was completely unnecessary for them to do so, there was a source code at their disposal after all, so one of the reasons should be quite obvious: it was done to aid modding community.
Ironically this whole site is dedicated to Median XL and this mod is a pinnacle of d2 modding, it is (it was up to MXL17, to be correct) a perfect example of what you can achieve without ever touching game engine.