HiveWE 0.3 Released!

[StoPCampinGn00b]

A new chapter has begun for @eejin's fully customized and independent Warcraft III World Editor.
A long time has passed since the release of 0.2 (which followed 0.1 by just a month),
but that makes this release all the more feature packed!

• Warcraft 1.29 support • Added a Tile Pathing setter • Added a Terrain Palette. • Added an Import Manager • Now shows the pathing texture on cliffs too • Added a first person camera and allow switching between them • Added terrain shadows • Reset camera using CTRL + Shift + C • Roll the Third Person camera using middle mouse button (Thanks to Azlan!)

Most of the features for HiveWE 0.4 haven’t been set in stone yet, but there are some people working on a Doodad Palette and an Object Editor which is very exciting. Animated models and new map functionality are also something that might land in 0.4 so look out for the next update!

In addition to these additions, there have been many other changes and fixes. See the full change log and details of the main features below in this thread, complete with screenshots and further insights. Don't forgot to visit the download page too!

 

[StoPCampinGn00b]

Further details and changes provided by eejin:


Terrain Lighting

Terrain lighting so you can actually see the terrain deformation. In the picture below the hills were always there, but you just couldn’t see them.

Terrain Palette

A Terrain Palette so you can change the terrain and add cliffs, change the ground texture or make hills and valleys. You can even have brush sizes up to 128 big which is more than 10x bigger than the standard World Editor! (Brush size above ~80 is buggy for cliffs).


At the bottom you will find the option for the diamond brush shape alongside the old circle and square. Furthermore the option to not apply any pathing for newly placed tiles/cliffs.

Import Manager

An Import manager with support for folders and even arbitrarily deeply nested folders. Now you can sort your imports as you please. Many thanks to AboveGame for his awesome work on this!

Thanks to AboveGame for implementing the Import Manager!


Tile Pathing Setter

This handy menu allows you change the pathing of a tile. Making a tile unwalkable, unbuildable or unflyable is now easy. You can choose to apply this for existing tiles too or only newly placed ones.

First Person Mode

Press F1 to switch between Third and First person mode. In first person mode you can fly around using WASD, Space, Control and shift to check out your terrain or quickly change the camera orientation. Press F1 again to go back to Third Person mode and resume editing.


Apart from the previously mentioned there have been a lot more changes, here is the full list:


Changes:

• Removed war3Patch.mpq from the hierarchy
  
  
• Added deprecated.mpq (from 1.29) to the hierarchy
  
  
• SLK loading is now roughly 4x as fast (improved map load time)
  
  
• Hides the brush when palette is inactive
  
  
• Some small quality of life improvements
  
  
• Improved RoC compatibility for unit loading
  
  
• Changed terrain rendering to support different ground texture sizes
  
  
• Now remembers your last open/save location
  
  
• Further increased rendering performance for doodads a lot
  
  
• Now remembers your Warcraft 3 directory if you previously located it

Fixes:

• Fixed tileset/map hierarchy order
  
  
• Fixed loading items placed on the map
  
  
• Fixed a bug with the terrain being off by one (64x64 became 63x63)

Download Here(HiveWE - World Editor 0.3)

 

[Remixer]

Tested it really briefly and seems really interesting, can't wait to have more functions and possibilities, my only concern is compatibility with other tools. For now I can say a few things:
1. The blue "currently enabled/selected" thing is clunky and buggy - for example in the Pathing Palette disabling a selection from for example Buildable won't show up before you click something else after disabling it, and in Terrain Palette unticking "Cliff" box won't disable the blue glow around the selected cliff deformation type (you ought to be able to disable cliff deformation by simply reclicking a selected deformation type (click to enable&disable)

2. The camera view is awkward (atleast for me, why not have it work like on the ordinary editor (Hold Ctrl + M2 to rotate)

3. The tile variation randomization does not seem to work accurately all the time:

See the rock variation of the grass used every time it is on the top-right corner of the tiles?

 

[The_Silent]

May I suggest a terrain "Fill" / "Bucket" Tool.

Replace one area of tiles with another essentially. Without having to do it for the entire map.

 

[Abovegame]

That's a nice idea, i must say.

 

[StoPCampinGn00b]

Reformatted the page with @Maxwell's voluntary genius

 

[Deleted member 247165]

Great addition to any modder! Talented man, the one who created this

 

[_lycan]

Wew lad nice improvements, hope this can one day become the official editor for wc3

 

[eejin]

my only concern is compatibility with other tools

Right now HiveWE is fully compatible in that saving a map in HiveWE still allows you to open it in the normal WE. Any changes you make to the pathing map though will be unfortunately overridden by the normal WE. When HiveWE is far enough along (more feature rich than the normal WE) the choice might me made to break compatibility to allow new features.

for example in the Pathing Palette disabling a selection from for example Buildable won't show up before you click something else after disabling it

I'm not sure what you mean with this.

The camera view is awkward

The normal WE behaviour could be added alongside what there is now to keep the option open since I think there is value in having both.

he tile variation randomization does not seem to work accurately all the time:

Good catch.

May I suggest a terrain "Fill" / "Bucket" Tool.

Interesting idea. I might add this to 0.4

 

[Spellbound]

Would it be at all possible to have cliffs that rise higher than 2 levels high like in Starcraft 2 (without having to extend cliffs below it) or is that a limitation of the Warcraft 3 engine itself?

Another idea for the future would be to allow custom script lines (or text areas, rather, with syntax highlighting) in GUI for actions, events and conditions. Being able to declare locals like sc2 does would also be cool (and perhaps maybe Library dependencies?). This would be great for helping new users to get used to coding in JASS. I can make a visual mockup if anyone's interested.

I haven't tested the program itself (it's not loading ) but if the camera controls are different, having the option to toggle to vanilla controls would be welcome.

 

[Cake is a Lie]

Is it compatible for Warcraft 3 1.26a - 1.27a?

 

[Goblintrain]

I am very happy to see this project moving along!

Hey, it's real easy for me to throw out feature requests seeing as some one else is doing all the work, but here goes.

When you get to the Object Editor tools, it would be really nice to be able to choose Hero-style Icon Interface for all units -i have no idea what that actually entails on your end. I was just reminded about that recently, how frustrating the barriers between heroes and units can be, and wonder how much of that is just arbitrary design decision with no real functional necessity. Anyway, it would be nice if the HiveWE could navigate this in a way that allows the user more options than the stock Editor does.

And TY for all your great work on this tool!

 

[Abovegame]

@Spellbound I think you can't have more than 2 cliffs, i see where are you heading with this but you can make pretty steep hills with the raise tool.

 

[Remixer]

@Spellbound I think you can't have more than 2 cliffs, i see where are you heading with this but you can make pretty steep hills with the raise tool.

I'd also love to have cliffs higher than 2, even if it meant that there would be hole through the ground below them. A terrainer knows how to cover it up. Raise tool creates huge problems with vision and stretching the textures.

 

[Spellbound]

I imagine someone could create new meshes for cliffs that are x3, x4, x5, even x6 levels high. Unlike a lot of people, I actually don't dislike the vanilla cliffs, but I would love if they could be higher (or lower) than 2 levels. Starcraft 2 is a good example why. I also agree with Remixer about the stretching textures and particularly the issues with vision (although the ability to paint pathing does solve one problem using the raise tool creates).

Speaking of painting pathing, how about a tool for painting vision blockers?

 

[eejin]

I haven't tested the program itself (it's not loading ).

Does the console (black window) say anything in it? And what CPU/GPU do you have? It needs to support OpenGL 4.5

Is it compatible for Warcraft 3 1.26a - 1.27a?

Every version of HiveWE will only support saving maps for the newest Warcraft version out there. Maps from 1.26/1.27a should open just fine!

 

[Spellbound]

The black window stays blank before closing. I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960.

 

[MyPad]

All I desire from this hosted project is the integration of Custom Script that is precompiled in any extensible precompiler, such as vJASS, regular JASS2, or Wurst.

With that being said, I foresee this not being too far from the ultimate goal of this project and not too far in the future.

 

[Goblintrain]

@MyPad that "sounds" like a suggestion that would even be useful for some one like myself who is completely illiterate with Custom Script. Even i could use it if i had it pre-organized into a catalog that let me point & click which script i needed!

 

[Paillan]

OilWE

 

[Kyrbi0]

@Abovegame , thanks for the awexome work updating the Import Editor!

Quick question; does this filesystem-aspect also mean we can 'batch import' from an already-organised series of folders/files? Like the custom MPQs of yore, if I organize all my custom resources in the proper folders with the proper file paths, is there a way to import them all at once, respecting file paths & without the need to "fix" them each individually (i.e. removing "war3mapimported\" & replacing it with whatever)?

 

[Abovegame]

I don't think you are able to import folders right now ? Unless eejin added that as well. We can add that in the next version i guess.

I hope i didn't misunderstand you how i see it you want to have a directory tree somewhere on your pc and import the parent directory and it will import all the subdirectories / files as well without any added prefixes like "/war3imported"?

 

[Kyrbi0]

I don't think you are able to import folders right now ? Unless eejin added that as well. We can add that in the next version i guess.

I hope i didn't misunderstand you how i see it you want to have a directory tree somewhere on your pc and import the parent directory and it will import all the subdirectories / files as well without any added prefixes like "/war3imported"?

Yeah, basically. (I think). Basically, I want to avoid having to manually import each & every individual custom resource in piecemeal fashion (i.e. how things are now with the WE). A custom MPQ lets you load it up (respecting filesystem paths & all that), then everything is just 'there', no import needed (& thus no renaming things, etc)

 

[Abovegame]

You are able to import multiple files to the folders you create in the Import Manager. So it's not really importing an individual resource but i get what you mean.

 

[RED BARON]

An even more amazing release than last time, damn work on this is going fast and pointing at an amazing end product. Good work on this - I for one are looking forward to the easy pathing of terrain and of course the better performance.. Those doodads are always some darn ressource hogs.

 

[Daffa]

Let the race commence

 

[MyScorpion42]

EDIT: @eejin does use (modified) versions of these icons, disregard.
Regardless, this looks great! I'm looking forward to the editor not freezing with every edit to a player or unit's data

The unused World Editor icons from war3.mpq\ReplaceableTextures\WorldEditUI for the lazily inclined:

Edit:
Will you make it possible to set a unit to a global variable more easily? Given that all units are created through the mapscript on startup, they could easily be defined upon creation like regions and cameras.

Ideas for far, far future development:
MS Paint tools for Terrain Editor: I'm talking lines, spray, fill, TEXT, all that good stuff. You know you want to
Unit-/Itempool Editors: Use for item drop and random unit/item placement alternative to the Random Distribution triggers used in vanilla WE;
Point Palette: Defining locations in the terrain editor, whether global or automatically destroyed upon death toggleable. Use to easily create ubersplats and other effects upon map startup and to make scriptwriting a more fluent process. Widgets, Trackables, rectangles and regions, Cameras etc. are easy to connect to and disconnect from them.
Advanced unit palette: Define global units and unit groups and add units in the terrain editor to them, ability to set units to only appear at certain difficulty levels. Set unit and proper names using recently implemented natives?
More integrated trigger editor: GUI locals, easy definition of returned handles, better control over function and string names from GUI coding, systems for easy coding of cinematics, dialog menus, multiboards, timer dialogs, quests, and victory/defeat conditions (with tournament support), Sound editor integrated into script editor.
Scratching the aforementioned systems, the ability to make custom GUI functions for easier coding?
Right-click menus on objects in the terrain editor (Rename, delete, copy, cut, remove, properties)
Custom unit ids like in Sharpcraft. I can't get this to work in Sharpcraft for some reason, did the update break it?