As an egotistical maniac forum troll myself, I'm not sure if I ever bothered to play DoBRP or if I did it was most likely in 2009 and I forget. But while I was chatting with an Activision employee in 2017, he asked if I could make an AI to train on Sc2 WarHD models and original War3 models and then AI generate the rest of the game's worth of assets. And I told him nah, that seems like it would be hard, and it's probably better to pay some artists instead. A few days later I messaged him and said, but hey, if you do pay for artists to make a remaster and end up making this new game version with all new models and everyone's fan models are cast aside as outdated and thousands of hearts and dreams are broken, maybe I can finish my model editor program to give people a way to still make their dreams come true even after all that.
This is a very near exact paraphrasing of the late night ramble I sent him in 2017. And as my luck would have it, it came to pass almost exactly as I suggested. So, now my username is synonymous with the greatest Reforged graphics 3D model program, not because I did anything smarter or better than other people but because "Retera is an inside job." So naturally, to further my growth as the monster that consumes all of Warcraft 3, when Reforged released I pivoted to rewriting the entire Warcraft 3 game on LibGDX engine so that I can publish it to the world, destabilizing the technology governance structure that keeps folks like Activision in power over this old modding community. And so my good friends at Activision were sacked, and their replacements started to break everything in 2022 and released buggy and unfinished patches with issues like the caching of all assets at all file paths, so custom maps with models that replace other models wouldnt work anymore. And slowly, after a year and a half of complaints since 2022, the new guy whose boss just wants him to keep melee versus mode stable, occasionally would fix the customs bugs. So you can probably find your 2008 map file of the game you liked to play and host it up on Reforged, and by the good works of the people (who are now sacked) it would most likely emulate the old game and let you play that just fine. But on some maps and for some unknown reasons, some people report crashes and "desyncs" in customs now, probably affected by the instability of the 2022 and beyond peoples' apathy regarding custom games.
But you know I used to speak from legitimate experience. If I said there were crashes that's because there were, because I poked the game's technology systems and was an accurate technologist in this way. But now I'm mostly not; just parroting random things I see online.
In 2022 when I realized Activision was going to push their stupid cache bug patch into production and break all customs and make us yearn for 2021 Reforged as if it was good, despite all the parts of Frozen Throne that were lost, I just didn't want to do it anymore, man. I looked at Arclight Rumble and I was so let down by human society. That's where the money goes, to that, and not to fixing Reforged in any great haste. So I did it. I took the open source rewrite of Warcraft 3 project that I had been working on and I recompiled it to run on my phone. After all, unlike everyone else on Earth, I finally had the code. I was the technologist. I could do anything.
And as I scrolled through the map list, picked a map, and ran my units around from the comfort of my phone... Maybe it was the sleep deprivation from staying up all night recompiling over and over... Maybe it was Arclight Rumble... Maybe it was knowing that the market research is right, and these people in our society will fund Arclight Rumble more than Reforged... But I began to realize that as the Warcraft 3 enthusiast, I cannot win. Because if I win, and if I publish Frozen Throne on the Google Play store in rebellion, they would finally come down at me to obliterate me, and consume my livelihood like the hounds of hell. Because in this world, the technology is modular but the people and their wealth (or the transfer of it) is "real." And so the apathy of Activision on Reforged had warped my mind. Because Activision is not apathetic. Activision did not stop existing. The appearance of apathy corresponds to the people, the users, and their relative unwillingness to shovel money into Reforged versus Arclight Rumble. It is synthetic apathy, not the real state of Activision as a whole.
And so when my work life changed and after a work dinner with a lot of alcohol (I don't drink often at all) I got up the next day and pretended I was Bilbo Baggins, disappearing away. "20 years is hardly enough time to live amongst such excellent and admirable Warcraft modders!" I said. And then with photoshop I made myself disappear off of the video. It should have ended that day. The video went live. It was Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos's 20th birthday, and by chance without even thinking about it, on the night in which I recorded my video I was wearing a generic red shirt.
It blew up on the internet like nothing in my life has ever done. During one of the clips while I was quoting Bilbo, for a few frames of the video there was a bad photoshop of a fake Cease and Desist letter of Activision telling me to stop open sourcing Warcraft 3. Obvious fake was obvious; it had been photoshopped from a recruiting email and still said "Activision is an equal opportunity employer" at the bottom.
By the time the video had 10000 views, more than all the views on any material I ever made regarding the open source rewriting of Warcraft 3 ever
combined, I could see from the analytics that all the views were page links from reddit. People were clicking a link to the few frames of the video with a fake takedown in the background, then leaving. They don't care about me, they were just obtaining nuggets of confirmation bias. So, then, within less than 48 hours, I deleted my own video. I'd like to think I had meant the original video more to try to add some type of mystery/silliness to trying to move on in my life among the small few friends who regularly watch my too-tiny-to-be-allowed-to-monetize silly YouTube channel.
But it doesn't die. The internet has no off switch. My video being taken down just made them all think Activision did it. You know, in the synthetic apathy of Reforged, I sort of forgot Activision actually had a reputation they need to uphold. Some WoW YouTuber picked up the story and got 100000 views swearing profusely about how Activision legal team is an evil tone deaf group that shuts down their most passionate modders on the 20th birthday of their game.
And to be honest, I can't beat social media. I tried doctoring my rewrite into WoW so that I could make YouTube videos of myself making WoW maps in War3 map editor to see if I could hack into peoples' brains and make that crowd question what they've been told. But it only really can reach so far.
In the end, to be the maintainer(s) of the official Reforged in this social media society is to be in some type of especially bizarre hell, and I can no longer be trusted to help them. I don't know what's broken on Warcraft 3 and what's not anymore, so I'm just going to go play with my rewrite of the game over there in a corner while the rest of the humans come together and do their jobs and decide whether they care about this game.
I think, based on the leaks, that after my YouTube antics the last man holding the line from the original Reforged team in 2022 left his job. Wouldn't you?
The harder you try to support the fans of Warcraft III, the farther you seem to fall.
So, you're right, there was more to that story. And now I shared a bunch of irrelevant off topic history about myself, which might help me cope but probably doesn't help you much.
So, how can I help you? You're probably going to spin up your Activision program with its pretty blue Play button and click on there, and it's going to scan "Documents/Warcraft III/Maps" and the DoBRP is either going to be there, or it is not. If it is not, you will have to make a choice. If you're like me, you mount the 2008 computer hard drive backup and scroll through the history of every map you ever played, pull up DoBRP, and copy and paste it to the Windows 10 or 11 Documents folder mentioned above. But you're not me, so you'll probably go get the map either from Hive downloads section or from epicwar. Epicwar has a ton of snapshots of ancient gobbletygook so if you grab it from there it will probably crash on Reforged client, not because of anything wrong with Reforged but because of the 2009-2011 patch cycle which changed the script system to try to stop people from putting "run as administrator arbitrary code execution" viruses inside of maps.
But if you get a version of the map from Hive map section, and I'm only saying this while spitballing from bed with the absolute lowest level of effort and not even looking for myself -- then you might find a version of the map published to Hive by the original author. Most authors were probably excited by the Frozen Throne updates and probably published a version of the map for the 1.30 or 1.31 prepatches -- patches where Frozen Throne was updated with the new modding features of Reforged to prepare for its coming, but they were before the new menu and new graphics and all the bugs. Then on 1.32+ with the Reforged, those same faithful and inspired map devs probably stopped updating their map, because social media told them to hate the game and also Activision slapped a lot of bugs on it versus how it literally was working before the new menu but after the engine upgrades.
So if you download such a map, made by a disheartened individual and tagged by Hive map systems as suggesting patch 1.30 or 1.31, and you use this as the map to put in your
Documents/Warcraft III/Maps, then it should launch fine on Reforged because it is from after the 2009-2011 virus problem and loss of backwards compat while fighting literal evil map viruses in a big hurry at the office.
And if you get your friends together in a game and play this map, if it exists, it'll probably work and be okay, but one or two things will be off in the unit data, like models that were deleted and replaced by other things such as Steam Tank or Ballista, because Reforged. And then while you're playing the game after 2 hours of RP when it's really getting good, one of the players will suddenly get kicked out of the game with no warning. And at that point, you'll have to decide: does it make you mad that Reforged
tried? They
tried to base their fancy new thing on Frozen Throne instead of Starcraft 2 engine, and in so doing tried to be backwards compatible. It's almost perfect until it isn't. Would you rather them not to have tried at all, and simply authored a new game? What do you want?
And that answer to that question -- what do you want -- is something that only you can decide. I know that I want to be able to fix the code of Warcraft 3 and keep it running for the rest of my life, even if society falls into the hands of lesser technologists. But that's just me, I'm being a bit silly. If you want the short term experience of a working game
today, then nevermind about me. Just play Reforged. But don't expect fixes if the map backwards compat reaches a hickup. Either you fix the map, or you don't. The game is unlikely to regain any obscure system or functionality lost from the era of Frozen Throne.
Edit:
Anyway, that's all pretty off topic and I'm still hoping a serious RP-er will reply with better information
A random version of DoBRP from Hive seems to launch fine on my rewrite of war3 made on LibGDX engine. You wouldn't want to actually use that since I didn't implement the shops selling the units feature yet (Mercenary Camp). But I looked through the script file, nothing complicated and none of the return bug exploits removed in 2009+. So I mean you can probably just play whatever map you like the best. If it works on literally a different game engine, it probably works on Reforged.
