Hosted Project: WME
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2008
- Messages
- 2,181
Hey guys, I am making a Warcraft 3 clone game project. I intend to open source it when I am finished, but because it is truly targeting being a War3 clone with support for some existing Warcraft 3 legacy maps and systems, as this project comes together it will always require a Warcraft 3 installation. In this sense, I think it is better to think of it legally as a Warcraft 3 mod, perhaps.
At the moment the War3 installation used for assets has to be Patch 1.29 or below because I am only supporting MPQ and BLP and the old MDX format and other historical Warcraft 3 modding technologies. The game is able to play when using 1.31 assets extracted by CascView into a folder, but my code isn't at all finished yet so supporting doing that in the long-term is still probably in question. Whether to support Reforged high quality models is not a choice for my project, but is simply out of the question because this is a one-man hobby project written in the Java programming language to improve moddability like Minecraft right now. And, I don't have the manpower nor interest to upgrade the shader code to PBR (Reforging is likely a lot of work!).
So I'm working on this game system, and obviously by talking about it right now I'm a bit like a conman since it's not finished yet. You can't actually "play" it. I am thinking that I might add multiplayer in the year 2021 if the game system is playable at that time.
So this brings us to my request. Some day, maybe in 2021 or maybe later, if I publish a playable build of what I am doing, it's going to have one of the same problems that Reforged has. I got in a discord call with some of the brightest Warcraft 3 custom faction designers we still have around in @Spellbound 's Factioneers server the other day and yet when we had assembled three or four Warcraft 3 fans and exhausted one guy's current map project, nobody knew what else to play. Then they suggested we play WarChasers. And that's the amazing and dangerous power of what is included by default in the game, or the lack thereof. It's heartbreaking: how can we mod this game for so long yet be so oblivious to the opportunities for fun that are present in existing custom maps?
Obviously I have decades of custom MDX and W3X files that I collected over the years that I might decide to try to include with my mod. But whatever I decide, I have begun to think that although this system that I am making could never have its own MPQs nor standalone installation for legal reasons, I would much prefer that this mod system include some default maps, campaigns, and possibly additional unit editor units if I ever get there. Because it is completely crazy to me that in 2020 we would all become brain dead and only think to play WarChasers given the inherent versatility in the Reforged engine and the fact that it was built with the explicit intention of supporting 20 years of custom maps.
I would hope, too, that the versatility and support offered by my engine would be superior to that of Reforged, but again this is absolutely no small feat. At the time of writing if you play Booty Bay on Reforged you will have a nice working game, but if you play it on my engine you will not have any units because the Jass environment is not running Blizzard.j
So I am wondering if people could offer or provide -- perhaps with a bit of imagination -- what would an idyllic Warcraft 3 expanded set of default maps and default campaigns include? Assume we can add custom campaigns to the Play Campaign thing on the Single Player menu.
(Note on menus: my game has work-in-progress FDF support, not HTML, so eventually when it has a menu screen it is going to be the old historical Reign of Chaos/Frozen Throne menu screens, and this is just by nature of not polluting my code with additional complexity such as HTML support because it's currently a one-man project)
My goal here is that I know how much I don't know. Think about if you were going to configure a legacy Warcraft 3 installation for a friend with all your favorite maps from the Hive. What would you include? Assume that similar to Warcraft III.exe and Frozen Throne.exe, we can have any number of those by defining additional mods by simply listing a set of MPQs to load per mod. It seems reasonable to me that my old Heaven's Fall race mod with 6 playable races would for example by a possible game mode. So we might also have Frozen Fire's Naga race addon or these kinds of things included with just small menu edits to add the custom races to the melee race dropdown. But also actually changing some of that old content to have the fifth dropdown, content-side, starts to risk a big time cost. So a better focus is on what custom maps and campaigns to include. What would we put in the Scenario folder?
I know this is really open ended but it's going to take me a long time to get to the point where I can use your suggestions or bundles anyway so I think it is fine and reasonable to give open ended or brainstorm-y answers.
If we assume loosely up to 30 GB of content (which Reforged boldly declares is a good acceptable value) but using only legacy MDX models that would be capable of loading on my engine, we could quite possibly have thousands of maps or tens of thousands of Hive models included with this thing. So, I really think the sky's the limit, in some sense. What would you put in a bundle to showcase all the best [historical] Warcraft 3 modding?
At the moment the War3 installation used for assets has to be Patch 1.29 or below because I am only supporting MPQ and BLP and the old MDX format and other historical Warcraft 3 modding technologies. The game is able to play when using 1.31 assets extracted by CascView into a folder, but my code isn't at all finished yet so supporting doing that in the long-term is still probably in question. Whether to support Reforged high quality models is not a choice for my project, but is simply out of the question because this is a one-man hobby project written in the Java programming language to improve moddability like Minecraft right now. And, I don't have the manpower nor interest to upgrade the shader code to PBR (Reforging is likely a lot of work!).
So I'm working on this game system, and obviously by talking about it right now I'm a bit like a conman since it's not finished yet. You can't actually "play" it. I am thinking that I might add multiplayer in the year 2021 if the game system is playable at that time.
So this brings us to my request. Some day, maybe in 2021 or maybe later, if I publish a playable build of what I am doing, it's going to have one of the same problems that Reforged has. I got in a discord call with some of the brightest Warcraft 3 custom faction designers we still have around in @Spellbound 's Factioneers server the other day and yet when we had assembled three or four Warcraft 3 fans and exhausted one guy's current map project, nobody knew what else to play. Then they suggested we play WarChasers. And that's the amazing and dangerous power of what is included by default in the game, or the lack thereof. It's heartbreaking: how can we mod this game for so long yet be so oblivious to the opportunities for fun that are present in existing custom maps?
Obviously I have decades of custom MDX and W3X files that I collected over the years that I might decide to try to include with my mod. But whatever I decide, I have begun to think that although this system that I am making could never have its own MPQs nor standalone installation for legal reasons, I would much prefer that this mod system include some default maps, campaigns, and possibly additional unit editor units if I ever get there. Because it is completely crazy to me that in 2020 we would all become brain dead and only think to play WarChasers given the inherent versatility in the Reforged engine and the fact that it was built with the explicit intention of supporting 20 years of custom maps.
I would hope, too, that the versatility and support offered by my engine would be superior to that of Reforged, but again this is absolutely no small feat. At the time of writing if you play Booty Bay on Reforged you will have a nice working game, but if you play it on my engine you will not have any units because the Jass environment is not running Blizzard.j
So I am wondering if people could offer or provide -- perhaps with a bit of imagination -- what would an idyllic Warcraft 3 expanded set of default maps and default campaigns include? Assume we can add custom campaigns to the Play Campaign thing on the Single Player menu.
(Note on menus: my game has work-in-progress FDF support, not HTML, so eventually when it has a menu screen it is going to be the old historical Reign of Chaos/Frozen Throne menu screens, and this is just by nature of not polluting my code with additional complexity such as HTML support because it's currently a one-man project)
My goal here is that I know how much I don't know. Think about if you were going to configure a legacy Warcraft 3 installation for a friend with all your favorite maps from the Hive. What would you include? Assume that similar to Warcraft III.exe and Frozen Throne.exe, we can have any number of those by defining additional mods by simply listing a set of MPQs to load per mod. It seems reasonable to me that my old Heaven's Fall race mod with 6 playable races would for example by a possible game mode. So we might also have Frozen Fire's Naga race addon or these kinds of things included with just small menu edits to add the custom races to the melee race dropdown. But also actually changing some of that old content to have the fifth dropdown, content-side, starts to risk a big time cost. So a better focus is on what custom maps and campaigns to include. What would we put in the Scenario folder?
I know this is really open ended but it's going to take me a long time to get to the point where I can use your suggestions or bundles anyway so I think it is fine and reasonable to give open ended or brainstorm-y answers.
If we assume loosely up to 30 GB of content (which Reforged boldly declares is a good acceptable value) but using only legacy MDX models that would be capable of loading on my engine, we could quite possibly have thousands of maps or tens of thousands of Hive models included with this thing. So, I really think the sky's the limit, in some sense. What would you put in a bundle to showcase all the best [historical] Warcraft 3 modding?
Last edited:
