That being said, I recommend upgrading your passion for modding towards bigger and better things
I am not so smart. I was able to do what you describe by moving the passion onto smaller and worse things, actually. For example, 2D games are very easy to make. I created an editor for a 2D game many years ago. After a long period of time, and a lot of fun, that became a basis for being able to create a 3D game. Sometimes if your goal is too big -- maybe I wanted to play an RTS like War3 where I was the boss of how it worked -- we can get there by starting very small.
Might be a bit awkward to ask in such a convo but can one use the original WE alongside HiveWE without any issues?
I think the answer to this is generally yes. But last time I used it, one thing that stood out as a paradigmatic difference was the handling of pathing map data. Warcraft III World Editor has a bunch of automation so that terrain tiles like "Rock (Unbuildable)" and cliffs/ramps and doodads like Fence (that have the oblong customized shape of their pathing information) basically all bake into one giant image file that defines which portions of the terrain are passable versus impassible. It is even sufficiently sophisticated that if we place a Bridge destructable -- which is a temporary object, not a doodad -- that Blizzard's code will erase away the pathing data for the cliff faces under that bridge while baking, so that whether they are blocked off is decided by the dead or alive texture data of the bridge at runtime during the game. It requires blanking out the baked pathing file that is actually in the map. In contrast, HiveWE reads the pathing file very much like an already existing image, and lets you paint onto it. This means both that if you place a Bridge in HiveWE across a river, your unit won't be able to walk across the bridge until you manually erase away the pathing information under the bridge using the pathing editor, and it also means that if you open the map on Warcraft III World Editor, do nothing, save the file, and reopen the file in the HiveWE then (at least last time I looked) your edits to the pathing data will be lost because the Warcraft III World Editor automation will rerun and will regenerate the pathing. (But of course that would fix bridges.)
Looking at the HiveWE changelog between the last time I used it and now, it appears they added a tool to export/import this pathing map data to a file, and there is mention of fixing how deleting doodads interacts with the pathing layer, which suggests that maybe HiveWE is increasing the amount of automation and becoming less different than Warcraft III World Editor and that my information might be out of date.
But I think the paradigm of what I'm saying is likely common to other places in HiveWE. Often times, HiveWE is a more advanced editor with better features than the Warcraft III World Editor, which is trying to go beyond what already existed and make something better for those cases where something better is needed. And sometimes increased functionality comes at the cost of efficiency. Last time I used it, it was annoying that it didn't do the automation for Bridge objects in the way that I grew up with on Warcraft III World Editor. You might say that I was using it the wrong way -- trying to see if I could
replace the Warcraft III World Editor in my life rather than using HiveWE as an added tool in the arsenal of available tools to become even an even more capable map maker. That's also partly how I can get in a paranoid mind state that would tempt me to say something false and slanderous about HiveWE in response to the OP's woes on this thread. Me speaking badly of HiveWE, it's kind of like... imagine if I were at an art show for the greatest artists alive today, and I was looking at a painting that one of them was making which was only halfway finished -- and this artist was very supportive of other artists and was publishing educational information about how his art was made so anyone else could learn it -- and instead of praising this artist I said, "Yeah but it's not the Mona Lisa. Maybe it's actually a conspiracy from the people who own the Mona Lisa to promote this guy's work, because he's educating people about how to make art without teaching them the extract strokes to make the Mona Lisa themselves." That's roughly an allegory for the level of ridiculousness and stupidity of me speaking badly of HiveWE earlier in this thread, if that makes sense. It probably comes from a place of deep paranoia and mental unwellness within me.
It's possible that I want to use something like HiveWE for full replacement of map editor -- so that, as Wlizer asked in the OP, I would have an answer for
How do you continue with your map projects?
And for me personally I think when I used it 3+ years ago, it was the case then that HiveWE was moreso an enhancement for people who were already using the Reforged World Editor than that it was a replacement someone could switch to. But as was stated earlier in this thread, HiveWE is an AGPL licensed source code, which is very importantly different from Reforged World Editor. Because it means that if HiveWE isn't capable of doing what you want -- for example if it doesn't handle Bridges in the way that I like and as a result it takes me 10 minutes in HiveWE to place down a bridge that took 2 minutes in Warcraft III World Editor -- then instead of complaining about that and talking about Epstein it's actually possible I could edit the HiveWE and publish the edits and file a request that my changes become a part of the official version.
By contrast, if Warcraft III World Editor is broken, then it's just broken forever unless someone at Microsoft Activision feels like donating you their time to fix it. That's pretty bad. I can see why that leads to the sentiment:
Its the most garbaggame I have ever seen.
![A]mun](https://cdn.hiveworkshop.com/data/avatars/m/140/140771.jpg?1674379729){kind=avatar}
but I still believe proprietary software should be heavily reformed. IP law in general should be reformed.
