Looking for a Warsmash Map Editor

[Retera]

To practice what I preach regarding open source, I have been trying to move my life as much as possible onto GNU (FSF-endorsed Linux based) systems. Most recently, I removed the Windows drive on my gaming PC and installed the PureOS from the Purism special purpose corporation, so that I achieve purity of open source.

But there is a glaring flaw on my PureOS Warsmash experience. Although I can run Warsmash just fine on this system, I do not have a working map editor. Wine will not run, because although some portion of it can be installed, it complains that the tech stack necessary to really get Wine going requires some non-free software. So, I will probably inadvertently block myself from running the official Microsoft-owned World Editor on this computer. As a result, I would like to have some World Editor to make maps. At the moment, this generally leaves only HiveWE, but as discussed in one of my "War3 Open Source Stack" videos where I used HiveWE to make a map and Warsmash to play the map while on Windows, well... HiveWE is targeting the advanced Warcraft III map developer. They even went so far as to remove the Trigger Editor, assuming that the advanced user already has their own means for procuring map script code.

I think that when I tinker with Warsmash, at least for the time being, I would prefer a classical and simpler system. Warsmash is only set to run JASS maps and not LUA maps at the moment, so a fairly simple classical World Editor would likely do the trick. But I am stuck pondering whether I ought to make it myself, or try to be a team player and utilize projects made by others.

Does anybody else have an opinion on this? If I made a competitor to HiveWE that comes packaged with Warsmash, what are the odds that anyone else would use it? I might make it some day, even if it was only for myself to use on GNU/Linux systems, but I was curious to create a thread in case anyone else will reply.

 

[Bribe]

I have had an interest in making a WebApp trigger editor that works similarly to the War3 Trigger Editor, but outputs Lua code on the right-side column as the user clicks stuff. I'm assuming WarSmash would be able to run a WebApp without much effort.

The main reason to NOT use code directly is for inexperienced users who don't know what to type and are worried about breaking stuff.

War3's World Editor was built by a team of paid people, and it allowed them to develop it a very hold-your-hand kind of way that pulled data from the Object Editor and pre-placed units on the map, with cutesy pictures showing what each thing is. A web-app GUI without those same visual assets would possibly be doomed to fail to achieve the goal of giving people a real alternative or successor to the Trigger Editor.

 

[Retera]

The main reason to NOT use code directly is for inexperienced users who don't know what to type and are worried about breaking stuff.

I guess for me, the reason as an experienced user to use the trigger editor is that it is decently fast at drafting something that works. The integration with "terrain editor" that lets me click a specific unit to establish a specific unit event is for me an example of something that feels like it would be a waste of time to set up from a script-only configuration.

I realized after making this thread last night that perhaps wc3libs by tdauth is actually something akin to what I was imagining here, and I don't have much experience with it nor a complete grasp of where it is at compared to HiveWE. But when I tried to compile it last night, I got hung up on the last step running it where there was some issues causing crashes when it parsed the TXT files from my MPQs.