I saw in the Ralle Development Update that he considered:
I started with a bit of a false start of taking it upon myself to update the model viewer to support MDX version 1100. But I decided to give up on it considering I know practically nothing about 3D.
If I think from the standpoint of what I can do for Hive instead of what Hive can do for me for just a moment, it may be the case that by transcribing Ghostwolf's repo twice to Java (once to conform to Retera Model Studio APIs and then another time to more directly port it to create Warsmash), it might be, for all I know, that I would be the most capable person to do the MDX 1100 update for the Hive viewer. However, I have never compiled
mdx-m3-viewer
on my own. Instead, I transcribed it from JavaScript to Java based on a
belief that it would work (per the Hive Viewer system embedded in the Hive) and then I ran the transcription that was written based on my faith in the original.
So, I am no Ghostwolf, but I may be able to help with it. This afternoon before seeing the Ralle development updates, when simply idling in my afternoon, I found myself posting complaints on the Blizzard forum because it's been almost a year since MDX 1100 was publicly available, and the Warcraft III game's handling of MDX 1100 is still broken to this day. So,
even the "professionals" on payroll don't have the time/energy to learn this stuff.
If we want an ETA for how soon I might offer this contribution to Hive now that I was thinking of it, we could base the ETA on how quickly I was able to update Retera Model Studio to support the MDX version 1100. Based on records that I could find, it seems that from the moment MDX 1100 went public to the time when I did a huge refactor of the Retera Model Studio internal systems to support the change, it was several months. The internet records are telling me it was 2 months but that feels low. So, especially given that I never actually compiled and ran my own local build of
mdx-m3-viewer
, it seems logical to me that if I took on the task of trying to be serious about contributing support for this to Hive, that given my lazy schedule I might end up doing it in about 4 months, so possibly by September 2023 I might have a branch of
mdx-m3-viewer
that could properly handle MDX 1100 while being backwards compatible with MDX 800/900/1000 (which Reforged isn't, so generally I think we hold ourselves to a higher level of standard than what Activision has to do because we also support Patch 1.26 users).
However, notably the 2 months of development time in a repo where I was exceedingly familiar with all the code was also based on the shared secrets of being told by
@BogdanW3 how to interpret the basic changes on MDX 1100, which he had already been working on a parser for. So, for example, if
@Ralle was going to update this thing himself without input from "experts" in the field telling him what to do (or giving him code to copy from, as Bogdan did for me) then I would expect this might take longer than my September 2023 estimate.
But maybe I'm just making things up. There are probably people hoping that by September, the ChatGPT system would be able to rewrite the entire
mdx-m3-viewer
from scratch. No idea.