We're pleased to showcase our latest Hosted Project!
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@NightKnight , the Warcraft III Reforged UI Designer is a tool made to create User Interface designs and systems for Warcraft Maps without code.
The creator was kind enough to share a few thoughts on the state of the project, its origins, and his vision of its future:
In your words describe what your tool does.
It uses graphical elements as in images and texts to represent the UI design graphically inside the app and then translates that representation into code that is put into the editor to produce the same design in-game.
What sets your tool apart from other methods of UI manipulation in Warcraft 3?
The only other UI manipulation method is through directly writing code to describe the UI. There isn't any way to design graphically, so a lot of testing is required. What the tool allows you is to see what you're creating at runtime and so greatly simplifies the designing process, saves so much effort and time, and most importantly, supports jass, Lua, and typescript, and it requires no code knowledge, meaning any user can use it to design UI without any pre-required experience. Before the tool, GUI users had no way to design UI without being forced to learn coding.
What drove you to create the tool? What was your inspiration?
Designing UI with typing code instead of graphical designing is like telling a graphical designer to make an image by only describing it using text. It is slow, painful, and takes too much time. So I was expecting Reforged to bring its own UI Designer panel into the editor in some future update. That of course didn't happen, and after seeing that no one in the community was interested in making an app for it, and having learnt Typescript through wc3, I decided to start my first attempt at making an external application, and it was that.
What's on your development roadmap? Short-term and long-term?
A lot of powerful features have already been made into the application like horizontal bars, duplication patterns, and dds/blp support. A lot much more powerful features are planned as well, like grid snapping, responsive patterns, relative positioning, proper element layering, more layout features, and game UI customization as well as complex frames like vertical bars.
Download the tool, browse the project forum, and check out some of our community's creations below. Happy designing!
Trade System
UI Lock
Quest log
