Introducing the Trigger Viewer

[Ralle]

As some of you might know, I slave away making changes to the site and logging them in my changelog. Sometimes these changes are nice and helpful but not worthy of news but sometimes they can be quite significant.
Today I am happy to announce to you the "Preview Triggers" function. On every map without map protection in the maps and spells section you will find a little link right next to the famous "View Resources In Use" called "Preview Triggers":

This shows you a replica of the World Editor's Trigger Editor with all triggers of the map. These triggers can be copy-pasted into [trigger] tags with correct indentation and each trigger also has a link so you can reference it in a post.

This will be a useful tool in many situations: when showing examples of how things are made in the World Editor Help Zone, when spell and map moderators take a quick look at the source of a map to form an opinion, when browsing for a spell and looking at how its made before deciding to download it and many more.

This tool also brought along with it a much more exact specification for the war3map.wtg file format which is big progress for the modding community. Now we are one step closer to knowing everything there is to know about the file formats in maps so we can one day seize control and make our own full alternative World Editor!

Please post all feedback related to this tool in Site Discussion / Bug Reports. I am very interested in differences between the World Editor and this Trigger Viewer in terms of rendering text. I know there are a few cases where they are not the same. Please help me make it more accurate .

 

[StoPCampinGn00b]

Yay it's out! Nice work chieftain.

 

[Ralle]

Thanks

 

[MindWorX]

Damn that's sexy. Could you add a few examples to the post perhaps? Just links to a few resources. Apparently I'm very skilled in only selecting protected maps.

 

[Ralle]

Just hit the spells section.

 

[HappyTauren]

Holy moose that's cool as fvckkkkkkkk

I mean I absolutely won't need it but it looks really useful and it's obvious a ton of work went into this. You've really come a long way from setting up a rather simple PHPBB site

 

[PurgeandFire]

Awesome! Looks gorgeousss

 

[KILLCIDE]

Looks great, Ralle. I almost said that we could probably get rid of the rule in the Spell Section where submissions musnt include code / triggers in the description until I noticed that syntax highlighting isn't supported.

 

[UmbraUnda]

Awesome! Very useful.

 

[Kostyarik]

Hah, that's a good one =)

 

[Marcos_M]

Damn!
Awesome feature
10/10

 

[BloodSoul]

Nicely done. One of the most coolest features!

 

[Eat_Bacon_Daily]

Holy shit man. You just created the solution to all the "can someone unprotect this map so I can see how he/she made this trigger". You also simultaneously turned hive into an amazing open source for triggers/code resource. Praise be to Ralle the one true king of hivesteros!

 

[KILLCIDE]

can someone unprotect this map so I can see how he/she made this trigger

It doesn't work for protected maps.

 

[Spellbound]

That's an amazing feature! It'll surely come it very handy.

 

[Ralle]

Thanks everyone!

Looks great, Ralle. I almost said that we could probably get rid of the rule in the Spell Section where submissions musnt include code / triggers in the description until I noticed that syntax highlighting isn't supported.

Syntax highlighting is on the list of things to do. I just had a vanilla trigger viewer as my focus to begin with.

Now to those of you who like homework. I would like examples of triggers using the following types of data:

destructablecode
ordercode
techcode

 

[PrinceYaser]

Very Coooool, Chief!

 

[Daffa]

HOORAY FOR NO MORE TRIGGER INCLUDING SPELL UPLOADS! Oh wait, still not yet.

 

[A]mun]

Very noice.

 

[A Void]

That's amazing! Hive has been improving a lot! Thanks to Ralle and skilled people who worked hard to make sure this was implemented. =)

 

[Shar Dundred]

Awesome new tool, indeed.

I want to point out, though, that it doesn't seem to work for campaigns,
showing the message that the map was protected.

Just suggesting to replace the message for campaigns or, if that is not possible,
change it to "This map is protected or a campaign file".
Not a big deal, though, just wanted to let you know. =)

 

[A Void]

Awesome new tool, indeed.

I want to point out, though, that it doesn't seem to work for campaigns,
showing the message that the map was protected.

Just suggesting to replace the message for campaigns or, if that is not possible,
change it to "This map is protected or a campaign file".
Not a big deal, though, just wanted to let you know. =)

Campaign is not a map file, it's a collection of maps.

The button shouldn't even be included for campaigns.

 

[EdgeOfChaos]

Very nice feature! Thank you
Only one issue: there's no syntax highlighting for JASS codes

The part I'm most excited about is the .w3g format specification. Maybe now I can finally write some GUI restoration tools... I've tried to parse these before, couldn't understand it at all.

 

[Ralle]

Ah yes, campaigns. It's on my list. Would be nice if each map was extracted and available with a trigger viewer each.

The part I'm most excited about is the .w3g format specification. Maybe now I can finally write some GUI restoration tools... I've tried to parse these before, couldn't understand it at all.

Ah. With this new spec I believe it should be easier, but I think this topic is too close to talking about map de-protection which we aren't permitted to.

 

[Heinvers]

You've got some nice lil' feature going on. I checked it and it works. Well, there were a couple of protected maps but that's another story ^^

Cheers.

 

[1)ark_NiTe]

That's a pretty incredible feature. Good job Ralle. Once I get rid of enough of the embarrassing 10 year old code in my mod I'll be sure to unprotect so everyone can laugh at my feeble attempt at improvement

 

[Silva]

Sweet addition.

 

[Arhowk]

Did you have any plans of open sourcing the code? I'm working on recreating the trigger editor for DotA 2 and it would be nice to see some of the styling and the mechanics used in trigger files.

 

[aple]

This is a fucking amazing idea and so cool and seems perfectly executed. <3
The only thing that really seems to be missing is the ability to copy it right off the site and paste it directly into WC3.

Is this going to work with Galaxy Script for StarCraft II maps as well?

 

[Map Designer]

I will see this... sometime :3

 

[aple]

@deepstrasz It's not about being lazy, it's about further convenience and simplification of the process to make it even easier for people to grab code off the site to put into their map. You shouldn't even have to download the map just to get some code, I mean it's possible for someone to just put all of their JASS/vJASS code into a Forum Thread or even in the description of a map in the Maps/Spells/Systems section with no actual downloading or opening in the Editor of the map required. This can only actually be done with JASS/vJASS though because GUI variables are handled in the Variable Manager which you don't get direct copy/pasting capability to like with JASS/vJASS, at least not without also using JASS. his could probably be got around by making it copy the variables section of the Trigger View as a normal trigger that has all the variables in it like those maps.

 

[Ralle]

Did you have any plans of open sourcing the code? I'm working on recreating the trigger editor for DotA 2 and it would be nice to see some of the styling and the mechanics used in trigger files.

I don't know. Most of the work lies in parsing those exotic file formats and cross referencing names of objects. The rest is UI in HTML/CSS which you can read off the site directly. I don't think that in your case it will really be much help.

The only thing that really seems to be missing is the ability to copy it right off the site and paste it directly into WC3.

Now THAT would be awesome. I have no idea how to do that. Not sure if I can create such rich copy-paste on the web.

Is this going to work with Galaxy Script for StarCraft II maps as well?

That wasn't planned and due to how inactive SC2 is, I am not sure it will be worth it.

 

[aple]

Not sure if I can create such rich copy-paste on the web.

Is there no just direct byte editing of the clipboard? Maybe there are some exploits you could do with certain text or image formats that could make the data of said text or image correspond directly to how a trigger get's put into the clipboard when copying from in the Trigger Editor?

Maybe when it is finally possible to make that fully community-made World Editor, like you mentioned in OP, it could be much easier because it could interpret text as a trigger (So you could just copy the text from the website and paste it in the Trigger Editor and it'll create a new trigger). I dunno.

 

[Zeuxach]

Wow very nice! It is certainly very useful! Congrats!!!

 

[Ralle]

Is there no just direct byte editing of the clipboard? Maybe there are some exploits you could do with certain text or image formats that could make the data of said text or image correspond directly to how a trigger get's put into the clipboard when copying from in the Trigger Editor?

I don't think that's possible.

Maybe when it is finally possible to make that fully community-made World Editor, like you mentioned in OP, it could be much easier because it could interpret text as a trigger (So you could just copy the text from the website and paste it in the Trigger Editor and it'll create a new trigger). I dunno.

That is still possible. Both if it is 100% web based but also if it's a new desktop app which I think people would prefer anyway.

 

[WaterKnight]

Is there no just direct byte editing of the clipboard? Maybe there are some exploits you could do with certain text or image formats that could make the data of said text or image correspond directly to how a trigger get's put into the clipboard when copying from in the Trigger Editor?

Not sure exactly what you want but of course one could inspect the clipboard data the WE trigger editor employs as it already has copy/paste. The other question is if there is binary clipboard setting functionality in web development, which I have not seen before but oh well, a short google search -> Copy to clipboard BINARY data in browsers

What I would like to see on the download page is additional player/force data information, basically the slots you see in the game lobby because when we had our Funmap Evenings before for example, you would have to host/open the map in order to know the setup to then decide if the map makes sense to play with the currently available playerbase. The force/player information is in .w3i. You can check out GitHub - inwc3/wc3libs: general java wc3libs (wc3libs/W3I.java at master · inwc3/wc3libs · GitHub). I am currently busy IRL, maybe Frotty can help you out further if required.

 

[GhostWolf]

I tested the clipboard idea for a bit. While you can copy-as-text things to the clipboard, a normal copy/paste doesn't seem to use the clipboard.

 

[KILLCIDE]

What I would like to see on the download page is additional player/force data information, basically the slots you see in the game lobby because when we had our Funmap Evenings before for example, you would have to host/open the map in order to know the setup to then decide if the map makes sense to play with the currently available playerbase. The force/player information is in .w3i. You can check out GitHub - inwc3/wc3libs: general java wc3libs (wc3libs/W3I.java at master · inwc3/wc3libs · GitHub).

Thats smart. What do you think @Ralle

 

[Ralle]

Ah, interesting. Very good idea. Will look into it. Where do you see this integrated? Trigger Viewer?

 

[WaterKnight]

That's definitely no script code. As I would expect this as a picture or lobby-like table, put a link next to the "Players" information in Contents compartment and make it spawn a popup?

 

[Ralle]

Ah, good idea, thanks!

 

[Chaosy]

I am late to the party here, but great addition. Thanks.

 

[aider]

Thank you for this function