The world is changing. I barely understand how reinforcement learning works but they said it can win at chess using intuitive strategic moves without being given the rules of chess. It is not that anybody knows how to replicate the human brain in a computer. Not at all. It's more that they can make an AI to win at any game, and then now or in the coming days someone is likely to use this technology to play four-dimensional chess against human kind. We will never know when it happens. We will not be told. But if you watch the movie The Social Dilemma, listening to former Facebook, Google, etc employees try to warn everyone about something they cannot describe well... it gives the impression that what I am suggesting might not be as crazy as it sounds.
After I watched that movie I did not use the Warcraft 3 social online systems anymore until posting this message. This includes Discord, here on Hive, Reforged forums, and what have you. I consider Reforged to be an example how well a super computer can play four-dimensional chess against humankind and their social systems.
The goal of the game is for you to go on your Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever it is and talk about Reforged instead of playing it, and ultimately for you to not play it. You are kind of like a pawn in the chess game, but certain pieces have more moves available and are more similar to a Bishop or a Rook. One of the chess pieces in this category of being more important was Kam. That was why it was so important to take that chess piece. We had to make Kam spend all his time chatting on Discord instead of chatting with technically skilled people to get work done. And ultimately, through me and perhaps several others, the play in this game of chess was ultimately to offset the balance of the minds of Kam and others he worked with, so that they would be emotionally compromised and spread that to what the game itself became.
We have all heard a lot of people voice their gripes with Reforged. That's because you are chess pieces that have been taken. You are useful to make others stop playing Warcraft III. And the game is nearly won. You can continue to serve the goal of the social dilemma if you get incensed by this supposed dismantling of the Classic Games "Team 1" and share with your friends how incensed you are and support something like Frost Giant studios instead. Their level of corruption by the supercomputer remains to be seen, but you can rest assured somewhere a reinforcement learning system is studying the people who work at Frost Giant and how to manipulate them.
The goal of the supercomputer is ultimately at odds with my goal of making a Warcraft 3 mod or system of mods. But actually I do not know how to beat Google's AlphaGo at chess. It is easier not to try. So perhaps in a sense I joined with them. I struggle to know what was decided strictly of my own volition, but working on Retera Model Studio's predecessor as it became what it is now for me was coupled with a time of some level of emotional compromise, followed by a radical decision that I should rewrite the game of Warcraft III entirely on my own without the influence of other people so that I can become the sole ruler and sole proprietor of how I entertain myself.
I knew at the time that the computer playing four-dimension chess against the world wanted me to announce to everyone that I was remaking a Warcraft III clone to solve all bugs, patches, API design flaws, etc. It was clear by late 2019 that the machine was guiding me to make sure I went this way. That feeling of hatred leading up to Jan 28th, 2020 that could only be solved by producing a video of a supposed replica game was indescribable. Unimaginable. It's so interesting. I continue to fail to bother to investigate the other people touching what we call Warcraft III. Apparently I am very selfish. As I wrote this project in January of 2020, quickly realizing that it was so tremendously hacked together and made from stolen knowledge from other Warcraft III modding tools that I myself did not even fully understand, I always passively assumed that my actions did not matter because beyond any doubt Reforged would be a success. So my personal sense of rebellion was simply an anecdote and an entertainment.
What I knew then that the computer playing four-dimensional chess against human kind did not was that its valuation of us is based on the notion that we are human. And human is loosely defined. If I get enough brain damage, perhaps I will act in a way that is not in my own best interest and not what the supercomputers expect of me. And I am referring to the future.
The computer played a game with my head to try to get me to replicate the likeness of Warcraft III on my own from sourcecode. It is a probability machine. The probability that I would be the one person who would see this through is indefinitely low. If we want to speak in terms of highest probability outcomes, any attempt to replicate the likeness of Warcraft III ends with making concessions in the interest of time. Maybe you have to make it in Unreal or Unity.
Nobody believes me, anyway. The narrative I am presented with is that I am mentally unfit and that there is not a supercomputer playing four-dimensional chess against humankind. And this narrative claims Reforged is not a checkmate against a certain niche category of creative thinkers. They tell me nobody is manipulated to decrie it on social systems, instead they do so willingly. I am free to play Reforged as much as I want.
Everyone and everything with the power to do so tries to stop you if you try to rewrite the exact likeness of the sourcecode of Warcraft III on your own given only the open source projects of Hive Workshop to copy from. Wise map makers say you would further split the community if you created yet another version of the game. They say you should provide them with better custom models instead. And from their perspective, they are right about it. I guess there was that time the owner of this Hive website told me I would be raped by lawyers for trying to replicate the likeness of the game's sourcecode for my modding purposes.
So I do not have faith in almost anyone on this website except for Ghostwolf, eejin, DrSuperGood, d07RiV, PitzerMike, and a small handful of others who already (mostly unknowingly) did enough for me by providing humankind with the sourcecode of their projects and offering me a sacred look into their knowledge in a way the 2002 developers of the Warcraft III program failed to do and have continued to fail to do.
That sounds really negative but when I say I do not have faith in any of you, what I mean is that I have a strong desire to believe in myself regardless of your actions or opinions. There is a certain confidence that Khyrberos will continue to make trolls and Smegmastico will continue to make Reforged assets while Ujimasa Hojo will continue to make great Classic Assets (And Derivatives).
But few people seemed interested in doing what I am doing partly because I struggle to be interested in teaching them how. I would rather to focus on accomplishing my vision with my own two hands.
Last night I got off of an obligatory call at 4 am, so then I worked for two hours. I was trying to perfect the system of Ramps used in HiveWE that I had copied to create my project. The ramps are named with four letters and a variation numeric value. For example, AAHL0.mdx ramp is a 0 height, 0 height, high ramp, low ramp art asset going in the order bottomLeft, topLeft, topRight, bottomRight.
And it was yesterday when I realized while looking at a pecular cliff on the map (6)Stromguarde.w3m that HiveWE had it wrong. It was oriented off by one. It's not bottomLeft first. Actually, it starts on topLeft first, but the model is oriented by 270 degrees of rotation to face the front as is our custom on Warcraft III.
But after I made this change -- in a lazy way by assigning x to have the value of y and assigning y to have the value of negative x (I was too lazy to add the rotation matrix to the glsl shader code for cliffs in general) -- it made everything look proper. And I am doing HiveWE a disservice by figuring this out without contributing it back to the original source material.
But then the ramps, which occupy two tiles, were absolutely ruined by this change. And so I was trying to learn how the ramps work, and while I was at it I learned all about the X character in the ramp models and how it is not used, but the World Editor let me put it into a map and then the editor just hides it, so I did some guesswork from that 4 am to 6 am time finally and I learned how these ramps were being formed more or less in my replica HiveWE code and I oriented the deleting of the adjacent tile which eejin or whoever titled "romp" and so I romped the proper tiles again.
Even so there were still so many bad corner cases in the ramp texture file choice. A dirt ramp loaded as a grass ramp. So I made a 2d visualizer program and I looked at a printout of the numeric values of the ramp raster since that was pretty easy to do and I wanted to understand better. And sure enough when we romp an adjacent tile and put a ramp there, I was forgetting to keep with this new ramp the source Grass or Dirt cliff tile metadata with the ramp instead of with the offset location. So I did a silly thing.. I just wrote over the romp tile's cliff texture data with the ramp's data. This will probably have some adverse consequences later and break other ramps. Who knows? I did not investigate further. On my tiny test case, doing this fixed it!
So then I still could see that the normal vectors in the ramp models are stupid and incorrect. Even for basic cliffs it looks nothing like the original Warcraft III and it frustrated me greatly. I know how it should be. The cliffs and ramps should mesh together as though in a single giant model and recalculate the normals between then that touch to achieve the proper lighting. I looked in the World Editor and I am not even sure the lighting ever was proper. It is just a heuristic that looks smooth enough not to bother the eye.
So I put a hack in the glsl shader I used to draw the cliffs that uses the deleted terrain cell's normal vector for the cliff mesh anywhere it touches the edge of its cell. It's a gross hack! I am sacrificing runtime checks to pick which normal to use with an if branch in every parallel cpu on the graphics card, when these decisions should be made and cached in advance. I have a certain confidence that the 2002 game was architecturally different, not trying to batch models per kind, and so they could make the normal vector for one AABA0.mdx be different from another AABA0.mdx. There's probably something like that going on.
And I went to sleep and then I woke again and ate something and then I decided if my ramps are smooth now, I should eliminate the lag. So I put the pathfinding system in a giant per-player queue. That's the reason why telling 300 units to move causes some to stand still. When I do that, the lag goes away, finally, this had been a problem for a long time. It's a concession I have to make. They did it, so why can't I?
And the pathfinding cap on the units has to be per-player to avoid misuse in competitive play.
And so this long standing problem where selecting and land unit and then right-clicking an impassable area, causing the pathfinding to search the entire map, suddenly doesn't drop me to 5 fps on a 2018 high-end gaming rig. I want to believe I solved everything, but I do a little combat chase -- an enemy grunt attacks me when I have two grunts and three headhunters -- and I keep kiting the enemy with my guy.
And I find FPS still drops to 35 on this ridiculously high-end rig even after the fix because I have some code to redo the pathfinding search when chasing a unit who moves by more than 10% away from the original path we found to travel to reach him.
It's unbelievable. Reforged is better by a mile. Reforged FPS is fine on this high end gaming rig. The problem is that I was being snarky and wasteful with memory in my first prototype, and I do roughly 1048576 node value resets every time an attempt to pathfind restarts, and I did not put this into the queue to spread the calculations across frames. Or at least, I think that's the problem now that I pondered it for a while. I am away from the computer and was not able to test it.
The truth is that, my dear reader, in my honest attempt to inform you anecdotally of the events of my day, it seems quite likely to me that I may have lost you. We enjoy World Editor because it shelters us. It shelters us from what we would have to do to tell the computer to simulate a game of toy soldiers without it. These details and technicalities, despite being critically important, are something we collectively desire to ignore. Warcraft III World Editor just isn't as powerful as Unreal Engine, because it was not made to be an engine. And in my efforts to separate what was an engine on the Warcraft III system and what was content, I have already struggled and leaned towards committing the same development sins again wherever possible. In the end, my presiding theory is that I just want to mod Warcraft III, not make a new game.
So, I laughed at Draco's comment. "What a surprise!?" Warcraft III was never designed to be modded. It is not a moddable game. And already my attempt to rectify the problem by reinventing everything is a swiss cheese filled with development holes and oversights that leave Blizzard's game as something beautifully superior (for the time being).
But I know that most of you are pirates. Warcraft III community in the last half dozen years to me has been a bunch of people from the poorer half of society and from countries I have never even visited, and they ask me in broken English to help them, providing me no help in return. And I know because years ago I violated Hive Site rules and made a fake account and posted a request in broken English and nobody did it for me, but everyone believed the request was legitimate. (I later reported myself to Ralle.) The point here is that we are a people mostly focused on ourselves and pressed for money. Add in a little bit of mass manipulation and it's scary to me to try to imagine how many people might really have Refunded the Reforged and are not just joking. I prefer to uphold my sacred honor that if I agree virtually to preorder the game, and I pay my money, that is an agreement that I am not going to simply revoke at random. But maybe people will tell me that is just a personal problem. I have a recording on my phone from 2017 where I spoke into a video recording, "If Blizzard makes Warcraft III poop expansion adding nothing but a new poop unit, I will still buy it!" I told the recording. "If they were going to do a remaster, then they have to focus on a different target audience than me!" And that is honestly what I told my bathroom mirror in 2017.
Good thing is, Reforged was for a different target audience than me. And we know because originally Reforged Beta couldn't load non-Reforged custom models, or even the custom heroes on the Warchasers map. So it shows custom maps were not the target of their internal testing, let alone the kind of modding I wanted to do.
So I was really let down by the "community" of people who are not like me that Reforged should be targeting because of their pointless outrage. I thought being annoyed with the game was the uncool mod developer thing to do; that way I felt okay doing it.
But maybe I'm kidding. There never were such a people to be outraged to begin with, that's what I felt like. There are just a bunch of pirates pressed for time and money, and given the choice between a 1 GB free download and a $30, 30 GB DRM version that requires Windows 10, I think the choice for which game for them to install on their pirated, malware-infested Windows 7 computer with that little Activate Windows watermark in the corner is obvious. They cannot financially support the further development of Reforged, which is why despite the promises even in this post I am assuming there is no money in Reforged updates so I would consider it naive to expect something like Custom Campaigns to make a comeback. If they do, it would be because of a humanitarian effort inside of Activision, basically akin to a charity. Legally mandated or otherwise "expected" charity kind of rubs me the wrong way, although it wouldn't hurt if I was a more charitable person.
So the point is, all of you have to feel let down because you cannot financially support the future of Reforged, but I am Reeeeing my own Forge and so I don't care.
I am the son of the wind and rain. Thunder beckons and I heed the call!
If I die upon this day, in battle I will fall; upon the Altar of the Storms I WILL BE REBORN!
Edit: It is highly probable that I will disappear from "the Warcraft III community" entirely henceforce. I am not very interested in pursuing further discussion until a working prototype of my game project is complete. Upon my sacred honor of having claimed to be making it, I must now undergo the long and arduous trial of focusing all of my weekends on this task without distractions like Discord or YouTube or even this forum site. The probability of success, as the elves say, is zero. And so I have no choice but to take joy in romping the ramps instead of talking to you.
