A list of all things 1.28.X BREAKS - damage report

[klemen]

Just leaving this out here, perhaps people can finally stop singing cumbaya with Blizzard.

1. System spec requirements seem to have increased for no visible improvements. We have several reports from our community with lower-end systems from XP era having severe FPS drop while they could play the game with no problem for the last 10 years.

2. war3patch.mpq no longer works, at all. This was a very nice and useful mechanism for modders to add additional assets or replace the core assets without touching the core archives. Now it seems by testing that Blizzard completely ignores this archive and all modifications need to be done on core archives. This also means you have to patch the core archive on every update because the brilliant new update system simply downloads the whole archive and replaces it.

3. Data migration is a complete and epic fail. These are just off the top of my head:
-players with several GB of maps get a failed migration, W3 crashes with "SFIle.cpp - not enough storage is available to process this command". Temporarily moving the maps somewhere else happens to solve this one.
-two Warcraft III folders sometimes appear in Documents
-"another process is using some file that needs to be migrated" even though it is not true: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/20753916604 the only solution is to manually move the files and pray for the best
-migration failed message with no explanation whatsoever

4. Borderless window should not be the default. Why not add it as an option and let the default stay the same as it was for the last 15 years? Did I mention this new default is also broken with alt-tab and gamma right now?

5. Still investigating this one but the disconnection rate even just from idling in channel has increased a lot. Something somewhere in ghost/gproxy combo is now working less reliably than it did in previous patches. Disregarded, was found to be a bug in gproxy.

6. Weird Unicode symbols in Documents path -> Unable to validate game version. The only solution is to create new user with only ascii chars which is really really bad. A shitton of people from balkans, Turkey and east europe have non-ascii in their name. This is just unacceptable bug!

 

[Kaijyuu]

Re: Requirements.

I've noticed the game being much more sluggish too, especially on maps with large numbers of units and effects. However, for Blizz to fix this, they'll need detailed reports; remember this is a handful of people trying to maintain 15 year old code that was largely written in crunch time. Steps to reproduce problems and solid numbers comparing the new and old versions will be the best way to get this fixed.

 

[klemen]

Shouldn't be too hard to test..
1. Benchmark FPS of 1.26
2. Benchmark FPS of 1.28

I might try that on my old athlon machine.. perhaps by running a replay so it is reproducible and the same workload.

 

[TriggerHappy]

1. Tell the players with low-end machines to run the game with the -opengl flag. It's a massive performance benefit for me on my laptop. I'm not sure how well opengl is supported on older PCs though.
2. Blizzard is aware of this (it was intentional), and as far as I know they are planning to give us an option to load custom mpqs.
3. Data migration definitely needs improvement. It has worked 100% for me personally though.
4. True.
5. Maybe it has something to do with the internal latency values being changed (but not the actual latency?).
6. True.

 

[TriggerHappy]

I found something interesting when browsing 1.28c.

When starting up the game, it now loads "War3Mod.mpq" if it exists. This should fix the issue with war3patch.mpq not working anymore.

 

[klemen]

Funny.. this actually seems to work. Not sure why it was necessary to rename the archive.. the only question is whether this will still work with the next patch.

 

[pyf]

It is my wild guess that these two files do not serve the same purpose.