You're Invited - Warcraft III Invitational!

Blizzard's Statement:

Over 15 years since the release of Reign of Chaos, Warcraft III has a new major patch coming and your favorite players are throwing the first Warcraft III Invitational to celebrate it! Hosted by casters Neo and Remo of Back2Warcraft, join us on February 27 and February 28 on Twitch for a slew of special events, including Free-for-All, 4v4’s, and other friendly competitions. Well-known Warcraft III competitors from around the world will be getting together live at Blizzard HQ to showcase their talents in friendly competition! We love and continue to support our Warcraft III community, and we’re excited to see classic competitors like Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen, Park “Lyn” Joon, and Kim “ReMinD” Sung Sik try out all the new PTR changes for themselves—including balance adjustments to many heroes, 16:9 widescreen support, and more – all playable now on the PTR! Be sure to tune in for your own sneak peek and check out our PTR patch notes for more information.

Attendees:
• Neo [Observer] Germany
• Remo [Observer] Germany
• Happy [Undead] Russia
• Foggy [Night Elf] Ukraine
• HawK [Human] Russia
• Effect [Human] Sweden
• ReMinD [Night Elf] South Korea
• Lyn [Orc] South Korea
• FoCuS [Orc] South Korea
• LawLiet [Night Elf] South Korea
• Grubby [Orc] Netherlands
• MaDFroG [Undead] Sweden
• Insomnia [Human] Bulgaria
• Tak3r [Orc] Germany

Remo & Neo


Tak3r, Insomnia, MaDFroG and Grubby


Effect, HawK, Happy and Foggy


ReMinD, Lyn, LawLiet and FoCuS

COUNTDOWN: Back2Warcraft
WATCH HERE: www.twitch.tv/back2warcraft

EDIT:
The invitational has concluded and was a massive success!
You can find replays and highlights of the event here: Blizzard Warcraft3 Invitational 2018 - YouTube

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Sources:
[War III] You're Invited - Warcraft III Invitational!
Warcraft 3 Invitational: Patch 1.29 Tournament by RehcraM

Rise, lurkers of Azeroth and the Hive. Patch 1.29 PTR is here!

So to dive right into it, perhaps the biggest features include, true native widescreen support, the ability for 24 player maps, major hero balance changes, a new ladder map pool for all ladder modes, the major expansions of World Editor limits (Map size dimensions -> 480x480, object limit -> 30,000, terrain tiles -> 16, and many more limits raised), and over 90 new natives for the World Editor. If you had a hard time taking all of that in because it's absolutely crazy and packed into one loosely formatted paragraph, we can't blame you!

Note that all of these changes are in the public test realm, meaning it has separate Warcraft 3 server and download. But don't worry, these features should hit the main server when they are tested thoroughly enough and are clear for lift off. We went over all of these massive changes in detail below.


- Widescreen: The game now supports true widescreen; the game no longer stretches to fit a wide resolution.

- 24 Players: Maps are able to be created and played online with up to TWENTY-FOUR players! Prepare for some map makers to go overboard with this!

- Bug fixes: Mac client launches, clans can be created again, hosting bots and cross-realm hosting fixed.

- Streamer/Caster API: An officially supported Streamer/Caster API that allows us to read out information about gold, lumber, food usage, APM and more when observing games live. No more need to use sketchy hacks for this!


- Hero Balance Changes:

- Heroes: 11 main-race heroes and 6 tavern heroes wield changes, both minor and meta changing
- Move Speed: Nearly all heroes had their move-speed increased from 270 -> 290, some heroes had durations toned down, possibly making for slightly faster gameplay
- Buff: Crypt Lord, Far Seer, Tauren Chieftain, Dreadlord, Firelord, Goblin Tinker, Goblin Alchemist, Dark Ranger
- Nerf: Blademaster (damage items lesser affects critical strike multiplier)
- Adjust: Mountain King, Keeper of the Grove, Warden, Paladin
​

- Map Pools: All ladder mode map pools (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, and FFA) have been updated with vanilla maps and edited(LV) vanilla maps. See the full map pool list and specific balance details in the full patch notes linked at the bottom.


- World Editor limit expansions: These raised limits speak for themselves. Go crazy modders!

- Object limit increased to 30,000
- Map dimension size limit increased to 480 x 480
- Tile set limit increased to 16
- Max execution number increased to 1666666
- Max food limit increased to 999
- Max resource limit increased to 9999999
- Array size increased from 8192 to 32768
​

- Over 90 New Natives: New natives add an array of new possibilities and more control in the editor. @Kam with the help of our users also pioneered the discussion in a Blizzard producer update.

- Full control over special effects : scale, rotate, pitch and more! Say goodbye to dummy units for missiles systems or effect systems.
- Enhanced control over abilities, items and units.
- Even responses to mouse actions.​

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FULL PATCH NOTES AND PTR DOWNLOAD: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20762056755
Editor changes: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20761976724
Map Pool / Balance changes: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20762006793

Hive bug report thread: [Feedback] Compiled List of 1.29 Bugs & Issues

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UPDATE: Warcraft 3 Invitational
In the light of the recent news, Blizzard has decided to set up a giga-event for Wacraft 3 e-sport. Many old-school players are getting together to play on the new patch at Blizzard HQ. Be sure to watch the event on Back2Warcraft stream the 27th and 28th of February.

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We hope that you guys are just as ecstatic for this patch and the future of Warcraft 3 as we are. And as always, please make sure to provide feedback regarding all these PTR updates so we can see them in great shape when they hit live on the main servers. If there's anything you'd like to share or report, please do so respectfully below, patch discussion, or in the Blizzard forums. Thank you everyone for being so passionate about this game and hopefully this will spark something more

Amazing image design credited to the one and only: @Wareditor

Best of the Wurst 4

In this fourth issue of our blog we look at wurstscript's start into 2018, and our roadmap. Once again we're excited to mention that users within our awesome community are getting involved and contribute to the wurst.

The theme for this months code snippet is unit testing in wurst.

WurstScript, or Wurst for short, aims to be a completely integrated wc3 modding solution, with a focus on higher level programming and IDE experience, without sacrificing efficiency of the generated map script.

Updates

• The

  runmap

  command now uses

  war3.exe

  if it is present, which can improve loading time. The game executable detection has also been improved.
• Removed obsolete temp file creation when handling MPQ files, which prevents permission problems on certain systems.
• Compiletime mocks added for

  force

  and

  gamecache

  , enabling them to be ued in object editing and unit tests.
• The compiletime implementation of

  StringHash

  now returns values identical to those at runtime, thanks to @LeP
• We merged many awesome pull requests for the standard library (#23, #25, #26, #27, #28, #30, #31, #33, #34, #35, #36, #37, #38, #41, #42)
  • Big thanks to @HappyTauren @Trokkin @Jampion @karlek @Krankx and @Chaosy
  • Special thanks to @Sir Moriarty for providing us with new and improved FileIO and Sync packages. The biggest PR we have merged so far! (Codeless Save/Load in Wurst)
• We have made some improvements to our continuous integration process, so standard library changes, and pull requests to it are more seamless and powerful.
• Wurst's underlying mpq library JMPQ has been updated to support pkware decompression and file-less data extraction.
• The Wc3libs have been updated as well, providing WTS support and Jass's

  StringHash

  implementation.

*Note*: The showcase is now official - you should submit your wurst maps for a chance in the spotlight!

2018 Roadmap

Our main goals for this year are:

• Enhance

  wurst.build

  and the setup tool to allow more complete and seamless map compilation. In detail:
  • Support configuring

    scenario

    and

    force

    options
    
  • Provide a seamles API for running external tools before or after map builds
    
  • Make the setup tools fully functional from the commandline
• Reach 100+ github repos to become a supported language on Github Linguist. We need you to publish your wurst repos on Github!
  
• Implement most Jass natives/types for compiletime. Mainly for unit-testing wc3-specific code.
  
• Refine, extend, and unit test the standard library.

Unit Testing in Warcraft 3

Preamble: The 'unit' in unit testing does not refer to wc3 units - rather, a unit is an individual piece of source code that is being tested.

Tests allow you to verify the behaviour of your code outside of warcraft 3 at compiletime. Instead of the game interpreting your generated Jass code, Wurst interprets it and can therefore assert correctness and find errors in code, before they happen in the game.

The major benefit of a unit test is that it can cover most imaginable behaviours, even those that rarely happens inside the game, easily, and without wasting time executing such behaviours inside the game.

One of the caveats of unit testing is that compiletime jass interpretation depends on the completeness and correctness of the wurst compiler that is performing the testing instead of the warcraft engine. Wurst does not implement every native, and since we don't know the inner workings of wc3, it can't emulate everything identically.

There are many benefits of unit testing overall, such as:

• Prove that your code does what it's supposed to do.
• Help you improve and understand your code through by to break it.
• Make big changes to your codebase and verify that everything still works.
• Inherently reduce the number of bugs.

The easiest units to test are the ones that don't include warcraft specific elements. Here are some condensed example unit tests for our data structures, arithmetics and string manipulation from the standard library.

Code (WurstScript):

@Test function testAdd()
    new HashList<int>..add(5).get(0).assertEquals(5)

@Test function linearVecTest()
    let v = linear(vec2(3,4), vec2(6,2), 0.5)
    v.x.assertEquals(4.5)
    v.y.assertEquals(3)

@Test function testJoin()
    new LinkedList<string>()..add("this")..add("is")..add("a")..add("string")
    .joinBy(" ").assertEquals("this is a string")
 

Writing Unit Tests

To make any function a test, just annotate it with

[USER=179970]@Test[/USER]

. All functions with this annotation will then be recognized by wurst. This doesn't limit the function in any way and it could theoretically still be used inside your code and not exclusivly as test, however that is not recommended.

A unit test consists of two parts - the execution of the to be tested code and an assertion, that compares the actual result with an expected value.
You can find the assert functions inside the

Wurstunit

package.

The most simple example is an arithmetic test, because we can easily find out the expected value. E.g.

Code (WurstScript):

@Test function example()
    let actual = (10 .squared()) * 6
    let expected = 600
    actual.assertEquals(expected)

As you can see, we calculate what we want to test and then assert that the value is what we expect it to be.

Running Unit Tests

In VScode, use F1 to open the task prompt and enter "run test" and choose one of the options.


You can see the result inside the Output tab.



And that's it! You are now a testing guru. We hope you enjoyed reading this, and we look forward to next month's blog post wherein we'll take a practical look at composing visually beautiful spells in wurst.