SPECIAL MELEE MAPPING CONTEST - 1v1

PRIZES AND EXPOSURE SPONSORED BY BACK2WARCRAFT

Create a competitive 1v1 melee map that excels in terrain, dynamic, and creativity, but most importantly balance, for a chance to win $100 among many prizes!

• First Place: 30 reputation points, your entry on the award icon, a T-shirt from B2W, and $100 from B2W through paypal!
• Second Place: 20 reputation points, an award icon, and a T-shirt from B2W
• Third Place: 10 reputation points, an award icon, and a T-shirt from B2W

In addition, higher quality maps will have a chance to go on competitive map pools in 3rd party leagues and tournaments.

[Link to contest thread: [$100 Prize Pool] Melee Mapping Contest - 1v1]

StarCraft: Remastered is set to release today, August 14! Watch Day9's officially Blizzard sponsored SC:R live stream here, with pros facing off in the glorious wide-screen re-textured 4K HD: Twitch.tv/Day9tv StarCraft also just went live on the Blizzard app. It includes both the original Starcraft and Broodwar free, along with the option to buy the remaster. This is great news for classic games as a whole. Features Starcraft Free Remastered Same Legendary Gameplay ✔ ✔ Offline LAN and Campaign ✔ ✔ Connected to the Blizzard App ✔ ✔ Observer Mode ✔ ✔ Modern OS Support ✔ ✔ Presale Unlocks: Korhal Command Center, Aiur Nexus, and Char Hive ✔ Cloud Saves ✔ 13 Languages ✔ Remastered Dialogue and Audio ✔ Remastered Graphics up to 4k with Widescreen Support ✔ Enhanced Narrative ✔ Matchmaking & Leaderboards ✔ You can find all the info and purchase the game on Blizzard's StarCraft: Remastered home page.

Note: The JASS Checker has been reverted to the old version for now because of recently discovered instabilities.

I have just updated the JASS checker with a new feature I have been working on the past few months. It is super technical, so to sum it up, it is now more precise with reporting leaks than before.

The long story is this: The JASS checker performs a static analysis of the JASS in a map. What this means is that it does not run the JASS code but sort of looks at it. The limitation is that it might not know what value a variable has so in the case of an if-statement, it would have to assume that the 'then' statements are executed and then the 'else' statements and their results are combined.
However, in this latest version it makes an attempt to keep track of the value of things. This was super important to make the JASS checker more precise, especially because the blizzard.j file makes use of the global variable

bj_wantDestroyGroup

to determine whether the helper function must deallocate an allocation inside an if-statement. Because of the former way this was done, it had to assume that the allocation was never leaking and thus failed to report leaks in worry that they might be false positives.

I made a mess of this. The JASS checker is complex and pretty good. Use it!

Warcraft 3 Patch 1.28.6 PTR
Link to Patch 1.28.6 PTR battle.net post

The public test realm for patch 1.28.6 is out now! This means that you can test the new patch on a separate server (Mac & PC PTR installers are is included on the battle.net post, green link is above).

The two biggest things that come in 1.28.6 are both ladder centric. One being a new map pool for ladder, and the other being various changes to existing melee maps, also for ladder. They include a selection 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, and FFA maps. In a sense, it is a balance patch, but not one where the stats of the four races units and heroes are altered. You can read the changes in detail on the battle.net post up top as well. Blizzard also stated two other things: That they're looking into fixing game search times and lowering the latency even more.

The takeaway: After months of updates aimed at improving compatibility and technical aspects, (besides the 8mb map size limit being lifted) the first major wave of content arrived. There's still lots more to improve, but it's great the progress made finally being turned into significant substance. We await the modding and the custom game scene to see similar progress in the near future.

Current 1.28.6 PTR map pools:
- 1v1 Map Pool (New)
- 2v2 Map Pool (New)
- 3v3 Map Pool (New)
- 4v4 Map Pool (New)
- FFA Map Pool (New)

August 18: PTR is back up!