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HiveWE - World Editor 0.6

HiveWE is a fully custom 3rd party world editor. It's completely separate from the original editor and is open-source!

Features:
  • Open and view Warcraft III maps.
  • Edit the terrain.
  • Edit the pathing map directly!
  • Change the tileset to up to 16 tiles.
  • Fly around in first or third person camera
  • Manage your imports with folders
  • Edit global tile pathing
  • Place and remove doodads
  • Edit map loading screen information
  • Import heightmaps
  • View GUI and edit JASS triggers
Limitations
  • Doodad rendering is not 100% accurate (teamglow, billboards, etc)
  • Does not show animations
Required for running HiveWE:

HiveWE 0.6

Additions
- Map script generation!
- Improved Jass highlighting
- Improved Jass autocomplete
- Tabs in the trigger editor now configurable
- Trigger comments shown and editable
- Rudimentary find window in trigger editor
- Move camera with arrow keys
- Shortcuts for opening/saving maps
- Improved doodad pathing placement
- Cool application icon
- Doodad copy and paste
- Doodad positioning with numpad
- Improved themes

Changes
- Camera is now a trackball type instead of TP/FP hybrid
- Camera drag now proportional to distance
- Camera now changes with terrain height
- Doodads height after terrain change now interpolated
- Doodads now selected with one click instead of two

Fixes
- Clicking on minimap now moves you to the correct location

HiveWE 0.5
Additions
- Minimap
- Full undo/redo for terrain/pathing/doodads
- Show destructibles pathing
- Visiblity/Solidity flags for doodads
- Pathing map preview for doodads
- Cliff lighting
- A functioning JASS editor (with some limitations)
- Dark theme
- Doodad palette functionality
Changes
- Check for empty warcraft directory path
- Default doodad palette to Trees/Destructibles
- Tries to run on the fastest GPU
- Now also shows RoC (.w3m) maps in the open map dialog
Fixes
- Can now launch HiveWE while Warcraft is running
- Deep water for terrain palette has proper height
- properly applies water pathing

HiveWE 0.4
Additions
- Warcraft 1.30 support!
- Full BLP1 support
- Loads the shadowmap file (implementation waiting)
- Import a heightmap (PNG, TGA, JPG and many others)
- Load and edit map information! (loading screen/description)
- Trigger viewer! View GUI and JASS triggers
- An option to disabled enforcing water height limits
- Added an experimental doodad palette
Changes:
- Now uses the OS temporary folder instead of the "Data/Temporary" folder
- Greatly increased pathing map contrast
- Trigger and Import editor window modality changed
- Now uses a ribbon instead of the old menu
Fixes:
- Properly set the pathing for water and blight
- Tilesetter now properly enforces 16 tiles
- The correct ground texture variation is now chosen
- Properly scale units and items
- Properly scale doodads
- Saving now chooses the right target

HiveWE 0.3
Additions:
- Warcraft 1.29 support
- Added a Tile Pathing setter
- Added a Terrain Palette.
- Added an Import Manager
- Now shows the pathing texture on cliffs too
- Added a first person camera and allow switching between them
- Added terrain shadows
- Reset camera using CTRL + Shift + C
Changes:
- Removed war3Patch.mpq from the hierarchy
- Added deprecated.mpq (from 1.29) to the hierarchy
- SLK loading is now roughly 4x as fast (improved map load time)
- Hides the brush when palette is inactive
- Some small quality of life improvements
- Improved RoC compatibility for unit loading
- Changed terrain rendering to support different ground texture sizes
- Now remembers your last open/save location
- Further increased rendering performance for doodads a lot
- Now remembers your Warcraft 3 directory if you previously located it

Fixes:
- Fixed tileset/map hierarchy order
- Fixed loading items placed on the map
- Fixed a bug with the terrain being off by one (64x64 became 63x63)

HiveWE 0.2
- Instanced rendering for Doodads and Cliffs provide a massive speed upgrade
- Added tooltips to all buttons
- Centered brush on mouse
- Some code refactoring
- Added tilesetter
- Fixed blocky pixels under oblique angles
- Added terrain saving
- Allow running multiple instances
- Fixed tile variation bug
- Fixed tile texture UV bug
- Added unit rendering
- Very rudimentary animation parsing and geoset hiding
- Improved RoC file format compatibility
HiveWE 0.1
- Initial release
- Draws terrain and doodads
- Editing the pathing map

Technically a Warcraft installation is not required since the editor relies only on the game CASC files. We cannot distribute these due to legal reasons. Just point the editor at the folder containing them when it asks and you should be good to go!

If you encounter any issue with HiveWE then do ask for help! You can post here, reach me on the Hiveworkshop Discord eejin#4240 or message me on GitHub.

Many thanks to Ghostwolf for without him I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far. Also thanks to the rest of the Hiveworkshop community for supporting the creation of this editor.

Backup your map before using HiveWE
Previews
Contents

HiveWE 0.6 (Binary)

Reviews
Retera
This is a state of the art open source World Editor that draws on all of the community's knowledge of how to make Warcraft III maps. This current build is great for drawing terrain and doodads -- and new features are clearly under active development...

MindWorX

Tool Moderator
Level 20
Joined
Aug 3, 2004
Messages
709
Well you got Ralle eating out of the palm of your hand, so it must be important. ; )


What's this all about, then?
It's a proof of concept. The biggest roadblock in making a custom editor have always been the terrain editor. With this work, we have the opportunity to create the editor of our dreams, that wont rely on hacks or other sketchy methods to work. And as he's already showcasing now with his pathing palette tool, we can even add things the original editor couldn't do. In this case, you can change the pathing using a brush instead of pathing blocker doodads, and you can do it on a more detailed level that pathing blockers can.
 

Kyrbi0

Arena Moderator
Level 44
Joined
Jul 29, 2008
Messages
9,487
It's a proof of concept. The biggest roadblock in making a custom editor have always been the terrain editor. With this work, we have the opportunity to create the editor of our dreams, that wont rely on hacks or other sketchy methods to work. And as he's already showcasing now with his pathing palette tool, we can even add things the original editor couldn't do. In this case, you can change the pathing using a brush instead of pathing blocker doodads, and you can do it on a more detailed level that pathing blockers can.
Oh geez.

Before I muted it, I remember seeing all sorts of high-level conversation about terrain generation & stuff... I guess this is why. Huh!

(Why was the terrain editor the hardest part?)
 
[Self-parody video link redacted due to personal information]

In this video, we glimpse the one true existence of a being with the holy HiveWE available to them.
The Open Source World Editor, shown to me in my visions, is the future of the community.
 
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MindWorX

Tool Moderator
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Joined
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Messages
709
(Why was the terrain editor the hardest part?)
It's largely in part because we didn't understand how the renderer worked and we only had a partial understanding of the data format. Because of @GhostWolf we got a better understanding of the data format, thanks to his endless tinkering with it and his own terrain viewer. This knowledge was built upon by @eejin, who then started to work on this editor. So it's been a arduous process of figuring out all the details needed to make this terrain editor possible.
 

eejin

Tool Moderator
Level 12
Joined
Mar 6, 2017
Messages
221
In this video, we glimpse the one true existence of a being with the holy HiveWE available to them.
The Open Source World Editor, shown to me in my visions, is the future of the community.
I laughed. That was funny.

What is so mindblowing about this?

The technology itself could be used as a web renderer to check maps without having to download, but that is not the case right now.

That said, I am obviously missing something entirely.
A custom editor that has features which the normal editor does not have. Like directly editing the pathing map. We can add any feature we like at anytime. And it is open-source!
 

Chaosy

Tutorial Reviewer
Level 40
Joined
Jun 9, 2011
Messages
13,182
Path editing is kinda neat I suppose. But it would not be nearly enough to make me move away from JNGP/Sharpcraft

Ceiling is somewhat high I suppose.
One thing I would like to see personally would be an easier way to import things into a map.
For example, automatically remove the war3mapimported string.
Additionally if the name contains BTN/PAS, put the correct icon paths automatically.

I think that would be relatively easy to do.
 
Eventually you get to a point where it doesn't matter if it can interface with the standard WE because there's no reason you would ever use the standard one. Like how people don't still use MS Word 2003 when you have Word 2016.
If you need to save the old .doc file format, just enable compatibility mode. If you want to save the old .w3x from 2003, that could be called compatibility mode, too.
 

Kyrbi0

Arena Moderator
Level 44
Joined
Jul 29, 2008
Messages
9,487
Eventually you get to a point where it doesn't matter if it can interface with the standard WE because there's no reason you would ever use the standard one. Like how people don't still use MS Word 2003 when you have Word 2016.
If you need to save the old .doc file format, just enable compatibility mode. If you want to save the old .w3x from 2003, that could be called compatibility mode, too.
Welp, unsubscribed.
 

Ralle

Owner
Level 77
Joined
Oct 6, 2004
Messages
10,101
Is this what would happen if all of us collectively shot a load onto the same spot?
That's very... graphic. and somewhat inappropriate IMO.

Anyway,

I believe that for now it is compatible with the standard World Editor. I would advice it to stay this way. The benefit is that you can use either editor for whatever it is best for.
 

eejin

Tool Moderator
Level 12
Joined
Mar 6, 2017
Messages
221
An important note right now is that the normal world editor WILL overwrite the modified pathing map! Right now this tool should thus only be used to edit the pathing map and right after release the map. I am working on a solution to this.
 
Level 4
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Messages
47
@eejin - Hi Eejin. Mind-blowingly good work on this, (and whoever else contributed) it's just fantastic..

As a side note, how would you be thinking to approach creating the terrain editor and it's different utilities? For example, how would you approach creating the terrain brush? Would it necessarily be tied to the mechanics of the war3 engine? I don't see why it would be, so, in theory, would it be possible to write a type of export that would then work in something like Godot, or Unity? What is sorely lacking from the game dev world seems to be a 3D world editor, and this seems like just the job. You could technically create levels for any kind of game, and export them to your alternative editor, or perhaps an export for blender..

Obviously we'd need to use our own assets to make that work, but with a FOSS editor, the sky is the limit eh? I'm just blown away by this. It's so great.
 

Dr Super Good

Spell Reviewer
Level 63
Joined
Jan 18, 2005
Messages
27,180
Terrain render appears to have inaccurate filter logic.

WC3 terrain tile sheets are subject only to bilinear filtering and no mipmaps during sampling. Mipmap images from the terrain sheets are only used for lower texture quality (video setting), and not for interpolation results.

The way the tile sheet system is setup means that mipmap based sampling cannot be used with bilinear interpolation as otherwise one gets bleeding from other tiles around the edges when zoomed out. This is likely why Blizzard did not use mipmaps for terrain but instead kept bilinear filtering.

I guess you already knew this however since you disable bilinear filtering at higher mipmap levels, resorting to nearest sampling to prevent the bleed across. The problem with this that without mipmap interpolation (tri-linear filtering) and anisotropic filtering the mipmap level used for some geometry angles will be too high for the sample density (texel maps to multiple pixels). The result is your typical PSX like unfiltered texture showing square pixels.

I recommend not trying anything funny with terrain for now and instead sticking faithful to how Warcraft III and Worldedit work, no mipmaps for terrain tile sheets. When zoomed out far it does look ugly due to excessive aliasing however at least it does not suffer other problems WorldEdit and WC3 do not.
 

MindWorX

Tool Moderator
Level 20
Joined
Aug 3, 2004
Messages
709
To expand a bit on this idea, it should be noted that it's fully possible to use a model as terrain. Me and a user named @Infinitynexus once did this as a test. This gives you 100% freedom to make the terrain exactly how you'd like, even including animations, light sources and more, but of course it required more work. Our process involved creating the terrain in the "Valve Hammer Editor"(editor for Half-Life maps), export it to an .obj model, import it into another modeling program, texture it and finally export it to an mdl/mdx.
 
To expand a bit on this idea, it should be noted that it's fully possible to use a model as terrain

You mean like this? :p

I could never find a download for this map unfortunately.
 

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I'm planning on releasing one for Mac and maybe even Linux. I'm working with somebody to compile it on a Mac so we should have that available in not too long a time.

thanks man it would be amazing, It's so sad Blizzard didn't release the WE for mac
 
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