On August 17th, 2022 there was a new patch released for Warcraft 3 with the new people -- after Activision fired the old people. The purpose of the new patch was to add a Ladder so that users would stop threatening to sue about removed features versus the original Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne game that Reforged deleted that had all of these features.
But the patch was like a folder on some guys computer, created by another guy who got fired. So it had a ton of code changes in there that had nothing to do with melee ladder. This included
a new format for all 3D models in the game, both HD and SD and also a new format for all Reforged Particles. The Reforged particles were made with a program Activision rented from another company and doesn't control, so that they could make pretty looking effects without learning how to fit them into the existing Warcraft 3 code system.
The general design of Warcraft 3 is that when you get a new patch, your old map still opens on that new patch. The general design of PopcornFX game making technology is that each new version of the format is no backwards compatible with the previous. So it's out of Activision's hands. Because they upgraded PopcornFX, all effects in the game had to upgrade for the August 17, 2022 patch
and also all user maps had to upgrade their contents or else crash. So, this is different than the usual backwards compatible philosophy of Warcraft 3 maps across patches. Classic does not use this kind of third party code outside the hands of Activision, so classic keeps working mostly across patches, although certain models like Naga models were broken on classic for 1 year after that patch released because of the Activision people who made a new model format then got fired, and the new people who published that folder into production without studying it.
When a bunch of people complained, the new guy(s) at Activision tried to hack together a fix to tell you to rebake your custom assets whenever world editor encounters an out of date particle. But he made two mistakes:
- world editor users dont know how to rebake assets -- they just download and import them from Hive and dont have the original source files
- his error message shows up for the particles inside the game itself for some reason, because he made some typo when he was programming the fix, and he never fixed it for the year(s) since then, so now World Editor always shows an error that you should rebake assets all the time in HD. There is nothing you can do about this error, and it shows incorrect for ingame models, even though they are the correct format and work ingame
The video that I made that
@deepstrasz was probably referring to does not help you with Reforged particle effects. Instead, it complained about the Warcraft 3 model file format change, which is a different problem. The video is here:
But the video is no longer relevant. In late 2023, about 1 year after the bad patch released, apparently the video
got enough attention and now the specific problem it describes was resolved on Reforged, or so I'm told. I kind of stopped using Reforged, because it's stupid to let people enforce their authority over how my computer works if they know less about how it works than I do.
But this video
says nothing about Particle Effects on Reforged so that is an entirely different issue, and because of Activision's bad choices, there is nothing you can do about it other than to recreate or "rebake" any custom particles, depending on how you got them.
My PKBlaster tool on hive was updated so it can PKBlast the new format as well, if you ever used that.
