A Grumpy Modder's Suggestions and Feedback

[~El]

A friend urged me to post some feedback, even though I was reluctant after already mentioning all of this multiple times, but for completeness' sake, I'm going to go through a list of a few topics that I believe are important for the modding scene.

These are mostly going to be repeats of my older posts, in no particular order. Some are likely not going to be implemented, whilst others may be more useful to the wider scene and thus should probably be implemented.

The most important point here is thus: there are better venues for modding than wc3 already, and if Blizzard wishes to bring back the most productive members of the WC3 modding scene, then extending and improving the engine is what should the focus be.

Spoiler: Legacy and New Mode

The WC3 engine is old and a lot of old maps heavily rely on old bugs, quirks, tricks and others such present in the game. Repeatedly updating the game has already proven to be somewhat destructive to such old tricks, breaking multiple maps that rely on them. Furthermore, trying to attain backwards compatibility limits the scope of the changes that may be implemented.

My suggestion is thus - split the JASS and game code in two, one legacy mode for running maps made before Reforged, and one new mode, for running maps made after whatever big changes the future patches bring. The new mode would allow the Classic team to experiment with much wilder changes, without having to strictly adhere to backwards compatibility.

Spoiler: Miscelanneous Suggestions

Please refer to this fairly brief post I made some time ago. This thread also has many other good suggestions.

Some points from this post I'll repeat anyway, since I believe them to be more important.

[Feedback] Request Features for JASS and the World Editor

Spoiler: Persistence

It is possible in the game as-is to save and read data to the player's PC, but a more robust method of persisting data (both from GUI and JASS) would alleviate a lot of the pain. Preferably, there should be an option to choose whether to save it locally or to the cloud.

Spoiler: JASS Improvements

JASS is an old and archaic language and it shows more with every passing year. Some performance improvements would be highly welcome, in addition to extra features that a lot of people requested - native structs/classes, native dynamic allocation, better syntax, better error handling, etc. This would work well with a legacy/new mode.

Spoiler: Bitwise

Why are there still no bitwise functions in JASS? It's a bit of a niche thing, but when you need them, you need them. I doubt they are hard to implement, and they would save a lot of headache.

Spoiler: UI

Modders have longed for the ability to better manipulate the UI via triggers. It's been shown possible through the use of memhack on old patches, and it can be used to attain highly pretty results, and helps distinguish one map from another in extremely unique ways. Make that a reality, and you will win back a massive crowd of modders back.

Spoiler: Less hackiness, better APIs

A lot of advanced things in WC3 require the use of obscure tricks that are prone to crashes if misused, bugs that can get patched out, etc. They should be instead replaced with native JASS/GUI functions that are more pleasant to use.

Some minor examples: morphing units, changing unit movement type (flying/ground), changing attack type, changing attack range, changing a unit's model (possible through morphing, but severely limited), controlling resource harvesting, etc.

There are more, and all of these have been mentioned countless time in feedback threads.

Spoiler: Option to disable OP limit

The OP limit has been raised 10x in 1.28, but an ability to entirely disable it would prove even more handy. A simple function like `SetOPLimitEnabled(bool)`. This will prove indispensable for complex systems.

Spoiler: More terrain tiles per map

16 is the current limit. I believe it was introduced due to the limitations of the computers at the time. There should be no need for it nowadays.

Spoiler: Make strings in the String Table garbage collected

Maps that deal with a lot of string manipulation (especially ones that employ big save/load systems, or just create a lot of strings) suffer from RAM usage bloat and can eventually slow down or crash, because strings are never garbage-collected even though they are never referenced in JASS code.

Spoiler: Control doodad placements at runtime

Currently, there's no way to anyhow edit static doodads when the game is running. In practice that means that if you want a dynamic environment, you need either use destructibles or units, both of which are fairly limited and incur a higher overhead than doodads do. An API to control doodads placed in the map when the game is running would help.

Spoiler: Selecting default graphics mode for a map

A lot of old maps depend on extremely precise placement of doodads to attain higher level of detail. Furthermore, a lot of maps use custom content that would not mesh with Reforged's new style. Giving the map makers the option to select which graphics mode to use by default would be a nice addition.

Spoiler: Old graphics, new lighting system

The lighting system in WC3 is extremely old and tends to produce visual artifacts when thera are more than 3-4 light sources in the same area. I say, new lighting alone would bring up the visual fidelity of old maps by a long shot, so if it is available even in "old graphics mode" it would be a very welcome addition.

Spoiler: Read the old suggestions!

There are many more suggestions made by other users on Hive that should all be taken into account. The latest thread is here, and it is definitely worth skimming over to see what other users want.

[Feedback] Request Features for JASS and the World Editor

 

[_lycan]

I do not believe that you will be able to cross-play custom games, only melee, reason is that you will need to import custom maps for reforged, original wc3 maps will still work in old wc3, but reforged maps will only work with reforged.