4 patches in... Still no syntax highlighting

[Zwiebelchen]

How can something so basic take so long? Why is blizzard focusing on such ridicolously useless things like footprints instead of giving us essential Features like proper syntax highlighting in the trigger editor?

I am sick of manually copy and pasting my Scripts in from VSCode.
I am sick of not having a proper function browser available right away.

Blizzard nowadays is so useless.
Weve had TESH since the beginning of time. How hard can it be to implement something similar for a professional game studio?



Sorry. Just venting my frustration here.

 

[Drake53]

Honestly, Reforged has so many issues, I can't blame them for not giving a feaure like this priority. Besides, JASS is obsolete so I personally don't see the point of this feature anyways.

That said, my advice to you would be to circumvent the trigger editor entirely. There are two ways to doing this, both obviously require 3rd party tools.
You can keep programming in vJass, and try using my tool here to compile and build your map. This project is intended for C# though, so if you try this and run into issues, just let me know and I'll see if I can help.
The second approach would be to use lua, or one of the languages that transpiles to lua.

 

[DracoL1ch]

It's not that high in the priority list. You see, barely anyone today plays this game, and less than that even open the editor. More people will see new footprints than that shiny synt highliter.
And Willy has already said billion times - you have to choose which language to highlight, JASS or LUA, and they still unsure.

 

[MasterBlaster]

barely anyone today plays this game, and less than that even open the editor

And far less than that actually code their stuff by hand.

The truth here is simple - the amount of people that own Reforged and could use a syntax highlighting feature is very, very small. As such, it doesn't make any sense to waste likely very limited development resources on implementing a quality of life improvement that will only be appreciated by a tiny minority of players, especially in the situation where the game has so many problems, some of which like missing ladder or custom campaigns, have a vastly bigger impact than syntax highlighting.

That said, I do hope that once they manage to bring back the missing features and put out all the fires (*cough* bugs, performance issues, desyncs, etc. *cough*), such quality of life features will be on the table. But for now they aren't and in all honestly, seeing the state Reforged launched in, they really shouldn't be.

 

[TriggerHappy]

From what I remember TESH was never implemented due to licensing issues. Some basic syntax highlighting would be nice (like SC2 has) but no matter what they come up with its likely going to be inferior to editors such as vscode or intellij which I prefer/suggest using anyway. Also as others have stated its ultimately a feature that would affect a small part of the player base. The majority of players don't make maps, and the majority of map makers just use GUI.

I share your frustrations though. The game and editor are both fairly buggy and unpolished and 3 months in not much has been done about it. Granted the whole covid situation is going on but despite that the quality is not something I would have expected Blizzard to release.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

It's not that high in the priority list. You see, barely anyone today plays this game, and less than that even open the editor. More people will see new footprints than that shiny synt highliter.
And Willy has already said billion times - you have to choose which language to highlight, JASS or LUA, and they still unsure.

This is very shortsighted. After all the mapping community is what kept this game alive for 17 years.
Mapping features should be at least as high as ladder features on the priority list.

 

[DracoL1ch]

This is very shortsighted. After all the mapping community is what kept this game alive for 17 years.
Mapping features should be at least as high as ladder features on the priority list.

dont tell them to me, make THEM believe it first

 

[looking_for_help]

From what I remember TESH was never implemented due to licensing issues.

Are you sure about that? I don't really see how licensing could be an issue as Scintilla is free to "use in any free project or commercial product" (citation taken from the Scintilla website).

 

[TriggerHappy]

Are you sure about that? I don't really see how licensing could be an issue as Scintilla is free to "use in any free project or commercial product" (citation taken from the Scintilla website).

Yeah I might have been mistaken. Not sure but I thought I remembered someone stating that.

 

[Blarto]

Stop complaining and solve problem yourself. There are already better tools for editing (Eclipse/VSCode and even N++ highlighting). Blizzard is inept and the wc3 department is probably run by 1.5 people and 2 of them are janitors. So don't expect anything.

Here is one solution ->

Have your vscode or Eclipse or N++ or whatever you use to compile into 1 jass file and just save map like this.

2nd text macro "injects" variables to your script so Jasshelper works without knowning about stuff placed in map editor.

Example

//! textmacro inject_map_variables_to_vjass
library MapToVJassBindings
private function Regions takes nothing returns nothing
      set rct_Whitefog = gg_rct_Whitefog
      set rct_Whitefog2  = gg_rct_Whitefog2
      set rct_Whitefog3  = gg_rct_Whitefog3
      set rct_Light_1  = gg_rct_Light_1
      set rct_Light_2  = gg_rct_Light_2
      set rct_Light_3  = gg_rct_Light_3
      set rct_GS3 = gg_rct_GS3
      set rct_GS2 = gg_rct_GS2
      set rct_GS = gg_rct_GS
      set rct_MS3 = gg_rct_MS3
endfunction
private function Destructables takes nothing returns nothing
endfunction
private module B
        private static method onInit takes nothing returns nothing
            call Regions ()
            call Destructables()
        endmethod
endmodule
private struct A
    implement B
endstruct
endlibrary
//! endtextmacro

If you use Wurst or Lua then make a tool to inject the saved scripts into the MPQ after you save map. And don't expect to use fancy new tech and expect it to be as usable as a 15 year old language that's proven to work reliabely.

 

[looking_for_help]

Yeah I might have been mistaken. Not sure but I thought I remembered someone stating that.

Maybe that refered to the old TESH, I am not sure whether it had a license at all (and no license would mean no permission). But it would have been rather difficult to port anyway as it was written in Delphi...

The TESH 2.0 however doesn't have these issues, so it should be no problem (in principle).