Creating object editor data from tables

[oephun]

Warcraft 3's map editor (World Edit) has a dedicated module (Object Editor [OE]), for creating game object templates that can be used during gameplay to create runtime objects (units, items, trees, etc). The OE allows map makers to modify the values of object fields in a type safe manner (an integer field cannot be set with a string value). But there are some problems with the OE. It is slow (copying/deleting/renaming objects is not instant). It uses a fixed tree structure (organizing units by race). The object fields listing is also fixed (sorted, there is ctrl+f search functionality though). The point is that the OE is not a very good editor for editing tables, but it is type safe.

This post has a small proof of concept tool (w3o-from-csv.exe) attached, that can generate object editor data (units, items, destructables, doodads, buffs/effects and upgrades, but not abilities) from '.csv' files.

For example, putting the following table in a file called my-units.csv

unitId,baseUnitId,hitpointsMaximumBase,startingStrength,movementSpeedBase
H000,Hpal,101,1,999
h001,hfoo,1500,,1

and running the w3o-from-csv tool on it:

w3o-from-csv -uf my-units.csv

would generate a 'war3map.w3u' file that has 1 hero unit and 1 normal unit in it.

tip: editing a plain '.csv' file, even in a good spreadsheet editor (LibreOffice Calc, Excel, etc), is not great. Editing a 'xlsx' file and then converting it to a 'csv', is better.

edit: this tool is no longer a proof of concept (it can now generate abilities as well), you can download it from here.

 

[Cokemonkey11]

Why not just use wurst

 

[oephun]

Why not just use wurst

How would the above table translate to wurst? What tools are there for editing the data in wurst?

Putting the data in a table format allows you to edit it using powerful tools like 'LibreOffice Calc' and 'Excel'. The 'csv' format is also simple enough to parse, so that map specific tools could easily be created that check/generate/modify the data and also use it to generate script code (jass, wurst, lua, etc.), for example.

 

[Cokemonkey11]

Wurst has object editing natives

Compiletime execution

Rich standard library with slk exports

If you want to use Excel then fair enough, good luck

WurstScript • Manual

Formal description of all language features.

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