"Project WarSoc"

[FireBlaze]

I like the no player limit, as it very well could usher on a new golden age of map making =D. Too bad sc2 is about to come out and obsolete it, so you might want to consider porting it over when it comes out.
Also, what do you mean by prehosted games?

 

[Vercas]

Hey... i suggest you to make something like and Dinamic Grahpical User Interface... and advanced one
I saw something like that on Wc3Campaigns...
Maybe, using custom natives, you can make a better DGUI
And how about some more WE hacks?
So long, the units have normal collision with infinite height and depends on movement type, but not special collision heights!
instead of using entity engines, you can add units an extra collision type!
To make them like real 3D things...
And, with these you can also make an EntityAPI, and i think it's self-explanatory
This will help users a LOT!
And i think one more thing SHOULD be added : GUI packs with all the natives you added... You must realise thet, by making these GUI functions, RTC will attract much more users! double or triple!

 

[Super-Sheep]

Is this dead?

I'd like to see some progres..

 

[Vercas]

Me too...

 

[FireBlaze]

I'd like to see someone answer my question about prehosted games

 

[Craka_J]

According to what MindWorX told BoneBreaker (Which he won't tell me!) it's very much alive. Finding the time to post on the forums is the issue here, apparently. So I believe it's still moving, it's just that its developers cannot find the time in their schedule to actively read and post at the Hive, which is understandable in my opinion.

However, even a small update from one of the big guys of this project such as MindWorX would be a lot more reassuring and relieving.

~Craka_J

 

[SFilip]

Hopefully everything that needs to be said, summed up:

• Mindy has been very busy IRL lately, but I've been actively working on the project whenever I had the time (which turned out to be more often than I'd expect actually).
• There isn't really much of a point in occasionally just posting "we're alive". A simple bot could do that.
• There isn't much of a point in posting the "progress" as in case of this project it would be either technobabble which 2 or 3 people would understand or a very nasty, roughly estimated percent (I really hate it when I see people say "MY MAP IS 62.79% COMPLETE").
• Project is alive until you see a thread with the title "Project RtC is dead".

For what we know now DGUI (and pretty much anything related to drawing stuff on screen or "deep engine hacking" like collision) won't happen anytime soon. Technical impossibility. Maybe later, maybe never.

Prehosted game refers to the fact that, right now, players can't join an ongoing game - they all must join it before it starts. With WarSoc API, you'll be able to bypass that.

And finally:
"Patience is the companion of wisdom." --Augustine

 

[Hakeem]

Technobabble is what you use to shut them up.


As well as the 2 or 3 people that understand.

 

[sk8er754]

If you can just manage the prehost ability with more then the current people being able to join a map, that would be awesome.

RPG games are sorta dead in wc3 I think mainly cause people like alot of player interaction. 30minutes into an rpg, and u have only 6people or so left. The 3rd person camera in wc3 also sorta sucks lol.

If someone could combine a good 3rd person camera inside a warsoc rpg map you could probably have like a mini WoW.

A mb limit of over 5mb could help in some cases.

 

[redmarine]

If you can just manage the prehost ability with more then the current people being able to join a map, that would be awesome.

RPG games are sorta dead in wc3 I think mainly cause people like alot of player interaction. 30minutes into an rpg, and u have only 6people or so left. The 3rd person camera in wc3 also sorta sucks lol.

If someone could combine a good 3rd person camera inside a warsoc rpg map you could probably have like a mini WoW.

A mb limit of over 5mb could help in some cases.

Wc3 : WoW | A modification for 'Warcraft III:The Frozen Throne' Craka_J is going to use this extension to make his map a mmorpg.

 

[Vercas]

I bet it will be more popular than WoW itself!

 

[terradont]

I bet it will be more popular than WoW itself!

Haha, yeah right

That will probably not happen, but it can get really popular.

 

[Super-Sheep]

I bet it will be more popular than WoW itself!

I bet not.

 

[Vercas]

WTF?!
you think negative..

 

[redmarine]

WTF?!
you think negative..

You're exaggerating . It'll not become as popular but it'll become a popular mod.

 

[Craka_J]

WTF?!
you think negative..

He's thinking realistically. WarCraft III is an old and dying game and many more people play World of WarCraft already that prefer it over WarCraft III, and I seriously doubt that some engine bending modding tools would renew the activity and popularity of WarCraft III, out populating a game that has over 10 million players. However, I'm sure many modders for WarCraft III who once modded for WarCraft III will return.

~Craka_J

 

[Vercas]

Hehe guys, i knew what i said... >=D
And when Wc3 : WoW will be bugless, it will be like a magnet for WoW players!

 

[SFilip]

Rest assured that Blizzard will bring it down if it becomes too popular.

 

[Craka_J]

I doubt that it'd attract enough of their monthly payers for Blizzard Entertainment to feel inclined to revoke the Wc3:WoW project.

~Craka_J

 

[terradont]

I doubt that it'd attract enough of their monthly payers for Blizzard Entertainment to feel inclined to revoke the Wc3:WoW project.

~Craka_J

I agree. If a project is bringing players back to wc3, i don't think blizzard will stop it.

 

[Vide0Gam3r]

Okay, so if I read this (and the few pages after) correctly, it says that:

-It will be like FPS game servers, where other players jump right into the action.
-You'll see yourself as Red and everyone else as blue. (That might be a little troubling...)
-People still play this game and it still has working community (I am so thankful for that).
-You can't use existing maps, they will have to be designed around this engine.

And alot more.

Edit: And after reading some more posts, WC3: WoW WILL be popular, as it will cost 0$ a month.

 

[Tiranasta]

I have a question. Using Warsoc, would it be at all possible to create/replace/remove a unit/doodad etc. for one player, but not for another?

For example, a house in a certain area. Would there be any way to make it that for certain players that house is there, but for others, say, a signpost is there instead?

Probably not, but worth asking.

 

[Captain Griffen]

I have a question. Using Warsoc, would it be at all possible to create/replace/remove a unit/doodad etc. for one player, but not for another?

For example, a house in a certain area. Would there be any way to make it that for certain players that house is there, but for others, say, a signpost is there instead?

Probably not, but worth asking.

Of course. No need to keep stuff synced at all except where you sync it.

However, you may run into some fairly serious issues with movement if you change the pathing map; that could theoretically be avoided, but it'd confuse the shit out of people.

 

[GeEom]

tried this before, maybe imposible, i can help though

I and my friends within wc3 previously tried to slash out of the restraints presented by battlenet, etc

experiments held on the asia server by us could be useful to you

the reasons.

the theory was, of course, that wc3 is THE most flexible game engine avaliable, world edit alowing any clever, time disposing person , to create games in a 3D engine, without (nessisarily) going into coding
however, the system has always been, to many opinions, very flawed.
the player limit, the single host system, the inability to dump ingame data to a users profile so it can be retrived and ditch the save/load system, leaks, forcing jassers to trawl for days, expanding their map sizes for an error that Blizz. could so esily stop, a lack of an open game system, where players could come and go throught the time of 1 game, alowing for replacements to leavers, no waiting for loast players, or even a PROPER orpg.

brief summary

a summary of the below could be to say, simply, that warcraft 3 itself needs to be edited, maybe via a 3rd party, maybe via a trojan image of somesuch, but also that world edit is not equiped to create maps suitable for the proposed systems, and that a Large scale, well funded, organised atempt at hacking warcraft, creating a new world edit, and producing some State of the art new maps, and upgrade some old ones, to pave the way to the USE of these systems, is required to make this work. Blizzard have briefly said that a review and update of the flaws in wc3 is underway, and that i should try Wow in the meantime, to me this says, 'sorry, but were not interested in the hyper flexible open system we created erlier, because frankly, wow is raking in the money, so we dont care '

my team took two main viewpoints, one wanted to do what you are trying to do, break the system, and expand it to alow the changes you want, the other saw that this was going to be, in effect, too hard, and so thought we should extract the wc3 system into a new program, editable by us, and either hyjack or replace battlenet servering to efectively give us controll of wc3, and distribute the new program by freeware

the origional path we followed was to try and compress more than one player into one players slot, by expanding the bandwidth and ip masking, however before we even contemplated the GUI (not world edit gui, the lobby graphical user interface) involved, and how to edit it, we found that changing ip reps, and mucking with transmisions to b net and sub host sizes etc, all crashed the b net server, (that is to say, we pulled asia out twice, before getting emails from, presumably, the server operators, and concluding that this path was not going to work,


as the self proclaimed leader, and founder, of the movement to expand, i wanted to stick frimly legal, and stop any nessisary change for players.

heres what will help you:
the break throughs we made were major, the only part of any wc3 map exported to battlenet is some small details, and an image file, the map preview
by extensive C++ coding, and a few hours of hired machine coding, we were able to download the battlenet code, and create a mock image file which replaced the code within the hosted battle.net lobby area for the game
we proceeded to expand the number of hostable IPs to 24, (total players 25) and set a joint host program, which meant that each player who downloaded the map in the lobby, became a *potential* host, and the first two were activated, meaning at anytime there were 3 hosts to a game, and if any left, they would be added to.
the imediate issue was map design, every encountered map had 12 player limit, and so we were unable to test our image system , beyond to say that our *host out* system was perfect, we even started to try and create a valid image , within the image, which would make the venture undetected , and uninteruptive, to players. by decoding map files into what we call *joss* (a play on jass, dosent stand for anything) which is the compiled and playable map code, we found the changes made by player number, and proceeded to make a 25 player map.
the first map was unplayable, even with 1 player playing solo, we couldnt see any extra player slots in the lobby, and the map crashed when started
the issue was fixed, at length, by adding code, into a finnished jos map file, to enshure 25 player start points, and by cracking into the automatic player variables, and expanding their arrays/numbers to 25, we also found the data sections extracted by battlenet, and found that we needed to edit three other numbers, that would tell battle.net that the map was 25 player, as oposed to 8, as before editing.
upon playing, all our atempted hosts crashed their computers.

we asume the stump against which we fell was that the lobby screens are inequiped to graphicly represent the new player slots,
unprepared to hire another machine coder, nor trawl through wc3 again, we looked through what we had, and found pretty consistantly that a lack of space, a lack of expanded GUi area in the lobby that could be scrolled, etc. causes errors within the lobby script, and crashes wc3, and in most cases the computer of the host.

our atempt at fixing this via the image file, to update the lobby further, went beyond the img file size alowed ...

the project was abandoned




i no longer play, although i intend to get back into it , small scale, and mabye put another map out, i think alot of the origional *team* has *retired* awell, as i can judge with what little contact ive had with them




it is possible, but what needs to be done is create a world edit mod which will compile with more player possibilitys, and also automaticly post-add the lobby edit script to the image file,
as far as we could see , this is all that can be done, unless you want to re-release an actual mod of wc3 as freeware, and server your own battle net, and it was simply beyond our limits

good luck, if you get in touch i could recover some documentation, and send you the 'trojan image', respect what your trying to do

if not, im always open for any help or advice you need.

 

[GeEom]

apologies

sorry to double post, but thats my thoughts on warsoc as a b.net editing system etc, and this is, theoreticly, of that topic

---- ---- ----
blizzard wont like this, let alone back it
---- ---- ----

blizzard have vaugely expressed to me, and i also think its pretty clear, their abandoning wc3 to rot

wc3 production has been dropped over 80% since release, there are far less new ones about.
its cheaper, to sell stock in canceled sale areas, and even just to shift it.
it has not been updated very regularly atall, remember back at the start of roc, when all they did was spam us patches, and even deep into TFT we got a news blast atleast, every 3 months or so
and then Wow hit us
frankly Wow gets money post sale, which puts blizz in a possition they love, why would they back a wc3 wow? i can realy imagine them saying 'oh yes, lets get all of our wow play and payers , who used to play wc3, BACK to wc3, then we will sell more copys of it' especialy when a month or two played by every person on Wow is equiv. to a copy of wc3, which has to be produced and transported for every sale,
also, ilegal wc3s are easy to come by: dont tell anyone, but i lost my cdkey twice, and balls to full pricing the game again+ waiting a few weeks, i went online and bought a new key for about £3, and then when i cracked my TFT disk, i downloaded a .iso image of it, which i belive i can install from, for free!

in short, no, blizzard will not back anything on wc3 realy, ESPECIALY anything WoW, as wc3 dose not give them much, or even any money now, whereas every 'real wow'er dose, lots,

---- ---- ----
popularity
---- ---- ----

frankly Wow is huge, its strictly Fps Rpg style, which has a large fanbase

wc3 has a complex and hard to reach multiplayer system, which we, fans and alot of 'nerd' sterotypes, dont realise,
although im hardly a greek/nerd style person, id say on a computing level, i outrank my peers,

all new systems have very easy ways to get at what your playing, wow is well laid out, simple, and fps,
the vast % of people love fps, not on the whole 'us' but the majority,
why?
fps is easily learnt, and you need never learn it again, its a very simple system, and once youve learnt that system you can choose a fps that suits your style, and play it with ease,
strategy games on the whole require a large arsenol of keys and complexitys to play, you wouldnt catch wc3 on a playstation controller, and so, you wont catch the fps crowd, the large croud that increasingly plays WOW, ever playing any strategy

whereas to us, more conesaer (?) gamers, who are on the whole inteligent and objectivist, wc3 is a jewl of opensource and easy gaming that can be created in any style you wish, and is free (read above, + no pay to play? its free. period.) to the 'average' person, this is a complex, confusing enviroment, that forces learning and effort upon someone.

ofcourse wc3:wow will not gain the player levels of Wow, blizzard now consider it economic to advertise on sky tv, etc. now whereas i have encountered wealthy and generous people on wc3, (inteligense creates money, and gathers around this game like dust, its hard not to walk into the cream of society in this games comunity) not least me ( ) i doubt we will be getting Ozzy osbourne, and that midget dude, on international TV any day soon singing our praises

we will get no revenue from this venture, maybe if the founders of the system could prove their identitys they could secure lucrative jobs n their futures in gaming, however I for one already have secured futures in architecture, law, enginearing, acounting, actuary-ing (???) etc, and its hard enought to choose what direction to follow as it is, safe to say anyone in a position to fund / run this venture for profit, is already well off,

however, if sucsesful this will spread like wildfire though us, and leak into strategy gaming, and higher dedication gaming on the whole, im shure an easy instruction pack will emerge, telling someone how to download and run wc3, our mod, and get up and running, maybe even a java program to automaticly install a whole package, and pigy back wc3 to make use of its b.net acsess ( you know when you click test in world edit, imagine that as a desktop link, only to b.net, and running our system )

THE KEY to the SUCSESS of this venture will be this : Quality
any fool can make a TD, and any vicious fool can make a loop in world edit that will crash your computer for you, there is currently ALOT of shit on B.net, if we start the system anew, with our editing, we could finaly controll this:
a quality aproved zone, where aproved maps, for registered authors, who can be ashured that their work is SAFE and LISTED AS THEIRS, and also a free zone, very like what b.net operates currently, where development, and those with reasons to hide thier face, namely viruses, crashing, and map theft, can abide
If it becomes EASY to set up and reach, and the games are VARIED and of high quality, we will get every internet wielding strategy gamer alive, and further more, more advanced stages of the Fps players may venture here, and prehaps if we create a template for easy and decent fps creation within wc3, they would thrive aswell

we have the power to recreate and renew this game, and bring it under the controll of a democracy that has no limits and is operated by the players and creators, banishing blizzards detachment from what was, and will be again, the best place in existance for varied and free gaming

----
footnote
----

has anyone noticed that Dota players follow the same pattern within our comunity to fps players in the world, as it is easy to learn the system once, and from there there is enough variety to forfill every style and taste, without having to learn anything new, the game has grown a dedicated fan base.

 

[Herman]

I didn't read the whole post, but I got the general idea from the beginning paragraphs.

Why not just straight-up make a brand new 3D video game, totally disconnected from Blizzard?

Setup a system almost identical to B.net, except that it is made solely for the customized maps, and anything you could ever want to change around, could be changed around

I was thinking about it, and I think it could be done, it would just take a seriously heavy investment from different contributors (people to help cover costs, time from professional programmers, and what else it would take)

And then, I s'pose you would also need to include a certain amount of pre-made 'maps' and some tutorials on creating a new 'map' (I say 'map', because they don't necessarily need to be called maps, individual programs could suffice)

EDIT - I just read the rest of your post, your pretty much talking about the same thing I was thinking. I think it could be shaped to be a money-making investment, maybe some kind of monthly payment that isn't too expensive.

My bit really isn't about playing, but some kind of 3D world in which you can control literally, every piece of data you'd like to control, and make any kind of mini-game type of game that you desire. I think that would be something very special, maybe too much of a fantasy to ever be done realisically.

 

[redmarine]

I didn't read the whole post, but I got the general idea from the beginning paragraphs.

Why not just straight-up make a brand new 3D video game, totally disconnected from Blizzard?

Setup a system almost identical to B.net, except that it is made solely for the customized maps, and anything you could ever want to change around, could be changed around

I was thinking about it, and I think it could be done, it would just take a seriously heavy investment from different contributors (people to help cover costs, time from professional programmers, and what else it would take)

And then, I s'pose you would also need to include a certain amount of pre-made 'maps' and some tutorials on creating a new 'map' (I say 'map', because they don't necessarily need to be called maps, individual programs could suffice)

EDIT - I just read the rest of your post, your pretty much talking about the same thing I was thinking. I think it could be shaped to be a money-making investment, maybe some kind of monthly payment that isn't too expensive.

My bit really isn't about playing, but some kind of 3D world in which you can control literally, every piece of data you'd like to control, and make any kind of mini-game type of game that you desire. I think that would be something very special, maybe too much of a fantasy to ever be done realisically.

Or we could just wait for StarCraft II's Scum Editor + Battle.net 2.0 instead of additional 4-6 years.

 

[Herman]

Could

 

[redmarine]

Could

It's simply not worth the effort.

 

[Herman]

Depends on what you want.

That Scum Editor is not the same thing as what I am talking about.

 

[GeEom]

start anew vs. modification

what warsoc embarks on is not imposible, my previous efforts, combined ith overlookedschemes, in theory it could pull together, hoever ithout significant advertisement effort andme or someoneelse advanced making a program that ill literaly let a user install one package, with ease. it will never take off

however i would push this to the very limit before considering makinga new game,

one option, not overly probable but worth consideration, is a legitimate update.
its not unheard of that a user group has sucsesfully apealed to gaming companys and been alowed to input towards a viable update.
if blizz. could be convincedof the profit-viability of updating warcraft tft, not least ith systems we have already built ten times over to remove the leak paradox, add quality controll, ditch the player limit etc. then prehaps they will do it
it couldalso be said that they promised continuous expansion of that durotar campaign, and that, despite updating it to a deffinitive close, they've stopped

it is not imposible to sucseed ith warsoc though, just hard, very hard

good luck

 

[spunge]

what warsoc embarks on is not imposible, my previous efforts, combined ith overlookedschemes, in theory it could pull together, hoever ithout significant advertisement effort andme or someoneelse advanced making a program that ill literaly let a user install one package, with ease. it will never take off

however i would push this to the very limit before considering makinga new game,

one option, not overly probable but worth consideration, is a legitimate update.
its not unheard of that a user group has sucsesfully apealed to gaming companys and been alowed to input towards a viable update.
if blizz. could be convincedof the profit-viability of updating warcraft tft, not least ith systems we have already built ten times over to remove the leak paradox, add quality controll, ditch the player limit etc. then prehaps they will do it
it couldalso be said that they promised continuous expansion of that durotar campaign, and that, despite updating it to a deffinitive close, they've stopped

it is not imposible to sucseed ith warsoc though, just hard, very hard

good luck

Your W key is broken. There is nothing hard about creating a installer. It is not advanced in ANY single way or form in the programming world. Add resources to you PE file and then extract. It's as simple as that. Not to mention there are numerous installers already out on the web and any extraction tool works just as well. As stated before, this was never meant to be something that was mainstream, although it would be nice. Word of mouth is still an excellent way to get news around.

 

[Herman]

Hmmm, I like that idea, I know very little about real-life programming, or game-design, or anything of that sort, but appealing to improve war3 sounds like a really good idea, although, it would have to be immediately viable as "profitable", and I'd say the most theoretically problematic issue would be that war3 is so good because it is free...

 

[Eleandor]

If I understand it correctly, Herman's idea is to make a 'universal' game engine from scratch with a graphics engine, sound engine, physics engine, basic gameplay such as units (about any game uses these, one way or another) etc. build-in, but where you can add game content and game mechanics in a low-level editor?

The actual game would launch in a "game" lobby where the "maps" you select are considered complete "games" instead of "modifications"?

 

[Herman]

Yeah Yeah Yeah

That is a perfect explanation.

 

[GeEom]

a solution?

the scum editor is very little talked of officialy, my guess there is alot it will be wanting...
wc3 world edit also has massive flaws, notably leaks and all the issues below (in the thread)

if we could petition blizzard to release the world edit code, and the scum code, we could create a double editor, cabable of all the options presented by world ed. and scum,
through this we could recreate Gui script to:

A: produce flawless jass, include alot more preset variables such as x/y mouse colision with terrain, alowing perfect wc3 game creation

B: have Gui - *scum code* creator, alowing games to run on both instances

C: have jass- *scum code* conversion, (possible starcraft will run jass?)

the apeal of this is ofcourse that it benifits all partys:

blizzard get the apeal of the knowlage that wc3 custom maps, with their massive fanbases, will practicly all get converted, drawing alot of wc3 crowd to buy SC2, for the improved battle.net and also because new elements can be added to the starcraft maps previously impossible

blizzard dont have to update b.net atall, infact we encourage them not to make the effort, for every uncontent player will have to buy SC2, any other players will either quit, uncontent to play their 'classic' games, with onlythe 'classic' crowd, and so reduce amount of power b.net needs (not that blizzard gives a blackend bloodstained shit what with WoW shoveling cash into anyone clever enough to choose stock options) or they willfollow the crowd, as the people with reason to stay were sheep in the begining, they will mostly do this

we get everything of SC, SC2 etc, and wc3 to play with in our maps, balls to stodgey importsof sc2,

we get all our issues sorted, its simple, they have to, they want tosell their sodding game right? then it better not leak, and it better have larger file sizes, and it better alow for us to code maps that include everything we failed at first time
i extensively tried to break the wc3 system, and each time it looked like it was going to work, i created *joss* (read other posts, my term for the compiled .wc3 map format code) implants to alow multiple host transphers (details below) and streaming team lobbying (dito)

multiple host transphers was my big continuation theme, ever played island troll tribes? belive it or leave it, i made that game up toversion 2.06, whereupon wankers, several of them, with more time than me, nicked it, unable to produce maps as fast, thier updates suddenly became 'official' and the fact i still used a dead acounts name in the maps left me unable to prove, or out pace, my theives
anyway, island trolls(ITT) suffered from severel problems, version 1, after the ice trolls thing, which ended upo as an extensive beta, was so laggy that everyone was dropped by about 10 mins, my obsession with varible triming to make every thing smoooothe and nice, combined with self taught GUI skill, ignorant that jass existed, was leaky as hell,
by the later games, with a large fanbase, i tried to reduce actual change, and just hone the game by fixing bad points, and a bigissue arose:
upon game start, infalibly (bar clan / aranged games)20-30% thought, wow,not my style, and left.
still with sizeable leak issues etc, every game got fucked by leavers, 'pro' players managing to survive in 1s or 2s, games all ended the same way, one (of three) teams gone by 10 mins in, one team left short, 1 pro trying keep inplay, and teach, a noob or 2, while the third team brased for fun
the pro team then gets told its won, at random, usualy due to noob fuckery onthe other team, disuading new players who loose, and disuading pros, as theyd never get a full game.
my solution was this: by some how re-servering the game, as a smaller contained map file upon a solo player requesting more players, or a team death, with new teams given basics to be up to speed, the game could be fully open.
of course my ideas didnt work, extensive joss edits and file discuising proving too big to useon b.net

however if a joss editor is provided, and maps can be made suitable for player streaming, i.e. new players arent atuo-fuckedby the old ones, truely open games can be held

possibly only on B.net 2, more sales for blizzard

was gonnna write about host transphers, but samepicture, alows multiple hosts, (big file sizes ok, big player counts ok) and if one leaves, more are replaced by other players, stops the ITT fuckery caused when you kill a team ith the host in, and the game ends

damn, going to bed, someone should oficialise my shit so any1 (0.002% of you lot) who cares will actualy come across it.

yay
play ITT, old versions,
i mean, i like some aspects of wats been done, but alot is just fucked, and its cheat ridden
however i never could eradicate map hackers (no jass recall?) and they have
whant my prizedmap back

seriosuly, as you might of guessed i get carried away, ive maybe 20 maps containing like, 1 system, that took months and butfucks any rivals, but island trolls is all i oficialy finnished

----
Edit
----

oh yeah, if we suck enough blood... sorry: players out of b.net, another petition or two might get it released as a sub.net we can adapt, alowing a free space for developers to mingle,
we could even edit it to alow in game corrections, compile proper bug reports, an end to digging for days to find an error thats some how in the completely wrong place: a maker read out feature alowing you to view and edit jass within a map related to a unit, to pause the game and view active variables etc.
a editable server for our games could also lead to better generalised bug fixes, which we could send blizz to use in SC2 updates
maybe even you needy twonks dieing for a shot in the game industry might stoll into talent scouts,not nessiserily for your maps but the theorys and inspiration behind them (dont tell any1 , but if this happens,ill have my fingers crossed, who wants to be an actuary, ffs)

 

[Nestharus]

Actually, in response to Herman's statement, that is something that I do intend to do some day, and I feel that many other modders want to do something like this too. However, I do say some day because to create a project like this would be more about employing large amounts of libraries and situating them into a dynamic system (so people don't have to rummage through all of them) that auto applied them to maps and what not (along with manual overrides). The reason I say this is because to really create an *efficient* game without wasted space and so on, you can't have a bunch of crap all over the place. I've started building a very generic library that could be used in any game, and as you might imagine, it really only has 2 true data types, these being sprites and windows, and these objects store only the most rudimentary data that any sprite or any window would use. From here it goes into different categories of sprites (3D and 2D), and then it goes on down. This is what I was talking about.

And really, who would want to program all of this? I mean, when you get this broad, you might as well just get a game engine, tweak it a bit, and so on and make ur game, or just make ur own game engine from scratch. Really, C++ (or other low level languages) are about as broad as you can get. The instant you start limiting things you take away from the power, meaning someone might not be able to do something specific, and if you try to make it as dynamic as I said, then what ends up happening is your game runs slow because of all that wasted memory and loading.

The best thing to do, as I said, is just have a library of formats that work in an object orientated database design, and you just go down and select everything you want to make it up. You should also be given the option to make your own layouts by either building upon other layouts or building your own. Inheritance is key here..

Well, atleast this was my take on how such a program would come to be, but if people spend so much time on this program, then what ends up happening is the program gets ridiculously expensive and nobody would end up buying it. This is why it won't be done for atleast a very long time ><.

Now, what would be nice is to have an online library where people could just post up layouts.. -.-

Another thing that might be nice is a hub where you can put games up and host them and have a game directory list (Xbox live does this, but it's eh).

Currently, the closest thing to that broad power with networking and sharing and so on is XNA with Xbox Live.. ><. But as I said, every single XNA game I've seen has been crap :\.

 

[Herman]

Hmmm, I'm not nearly as technically savy as I'd say you are, but 'object-oriented database' caught my eye. The WE's system of handles works pretty nicely, ultimately the most significant piece of object-oriented data being the unit variable. (Combining that with UnitData or 'PointValue', you can assign pretty much any amount of data to a unit)

Again, I don't know anything about real-world gaming, but I do know the amount of power given to the JASS programmer through the unit variable to do just about anything they want with a unit, is probably the only reason I am still interested in Warcraft III.

My main gripes with the WE is that there are a number of problems related to the unit variables that are just plain annoying. I won't go into detail, but basically I crave complete control of a 3-Dimensional environment.

 

[Nestharus]

Units work off of an excel spreadsheet and an internal "relational" database.

I don't think you firmly grasp the difference between a relational database and an object orientated database =).

 

[GeEom]

wc3 handles 3d so well

i have made a sufficient number of games in flash and 1 in C++ with a python system for data storage and manipulation and a java player interface
the big point is this, 2D games are very easy to controll, eg, everything behaves a whole lot better, and is so much easyer,
infact 2D manipulation is so SO SO much easyer than 3D that old proffesional games in every genre created massive sprite librarys of rotations etc, instead of trying to cope with an actual 3D engine concept
(see the old command and conquer games, every single one was 100% 2D untill red alert 2, which used 3D unit engines for smooth turning etc, on a 2D plane)
(a great way to tell if a game is partialy or entirely 3D is this: if a unit turning has completly smooth turn, that reveals unseen pixels of the units structure, the game has 3D units (small exeptions from the 3D engine turning point, typicly this is 3D). if you can rotate the terrain in any way, (the first 3d engines introduced the typicly useless rotate left/right view system, if just to show of their 3D-ness) then the whole game is 3D )

the point is, 3D manipulation is realy sodding hard, wc3 lets us use 3D extremely easily, its like a 2D creation interface, and once you break the extremely hard point of importing 3d models, and alowing 3d viewpoints, things realy get hard


if we could work with 3D as we do in wc3 online, most of us would. wc3 is a select audiance, its buggy, and we cant sell what amounts to extremely good work.
but good luck making 3D easy
another aspect of getting world edit released with code would be a secret mod that could export to .exe, but dont tell blizzard, or anyone else...

-----
Edit
-----

oh yeah, and obj-orientated databases anoy me, is better to have a untethered database like the trigger & jass (tho jass isnt a great example) systems, that can interface freely with different objects

often achived by having a spectral object database and a player interface database, whereupon PI data is visible via sprites or models, and interfaces with the player, but flexibility and multiple PI systems via single functions are still possible

-sub note- only with an untethered database you usualy have to specify far more variables

-sub sub note- but then all the variables in an object orientated database are still THERE, just not so much effort goes into them, on the other hand, having to lay out the creation and manipulation of all the variables, although lengthly, avoids collosal errors with concealed variables like the leaks in wc3

 

[Herman]

Units work off of an excel spreadsheet and an internal "relational" database.

I don't think you firmly grasp the difference between a relational database and an object orientated database =).

Well, I haven't taken any college courses in databases, so I am unfamiliar with terminology. But, simply enough, the unit variable gets all of its information from the object editor. At the same time, it reacts with the 3D environment with 'method' type calls in JASS like SetUnitX/Y and SetUnitFlyHeight()

If you'd care to give a simple explanation on the difference between an OOP database and a relational one, I would appreciate it.

 

[GeEom]

wc3 dose so much for us

dose anyone else get that the wc3 engines *set flight height* thing is incredibly friendly, in that flying units are actualy given relitive and very smooth Z cordinates: note flight height rise and fall (change is vulgar for a process so wonderfully done for us) as a unit goes over trees etc?

another problem with going around wc3 is skipping features like this

however then we could set flight colision (ever get tired of flight unit clipping?, its like the 2D arangement engines from C&C 1 again)

-sub note- i quote command and conquer alot, forgive me and dont corner me as some addict, its merely that the game has textbook examples of every single stage of development within strategy gaming




---edit

i take it you all dont read this, as no one makes referance
i must be being too long winded
i think alot of its quite clever and insightful
maybe ill write it down somewhere else
a book on gaming philosophy prehaps
i could get a job advising ccompanys on how to handle their fanbase
or i could get a job burning funny objects and small children and getting zillions of webhits, thereby pleasing my advertisers...
and petrols so much easyer to get a hold of than systematic populus response analysis
hmmmmmm fire

 

[JakeCake]

Off topic
Is there any chance at all that this project or anyone else, will make "Writing to .Xml files" avaible - I meen, is this posible? That could open great opputuneties for WCIII.Rpg


I guess this is the wrong place to post, but I just saw this project, and supposed that you are the right people to do this!

Thx

 

[SFilip]

There will be a good, gamecache-like method for saving data eventually. XML is not really a good option because everybody can edit it with ease and it's hard to make an easy-to-use API for Jass. The main config file for RtC is, however, an XML file.