special symbols in rawcodes

[anufis]

Which special characters are safe to use in rawcodes? I know, that !@{|}~ should be fine.

 

[HappyTauren]

Just use alphanumeric characters, no need to mess with anything else, it is not like rawcodes are in short supply.

 

[Tal'Rarity]

Special characters will crash some programs.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Pretty much anything that is not a control character on the ASCII sheet (7 bits) should be safe. Anything using the most significant bit is not safe as that will be encoding dependant.

I am guessing the game internally treats them as a 32bit integer for performance reasons. As such technically any 8 bit sequence for any of the characters should be valid. However parts of the game might try to convert them into a string, and decoding anything that is not 7bit ASCII or is a control character might break such decoding.

 

[HappyTauren]

Regardless of anything, just use alphanumeric characters and be done with it. There's just no reason to use anything else, you iwll get at most 10 more usable characters, and it is not like rawcodes are in short supply.

 

[Dr Super Good]

and it is not like rawcodes are in short supply

Exactly. If you get to the case where they are in short supply your map likely has other problems to worry about.

 

[anufis]

I am making "hero-builder" rpg with a lot of skills. All of my skills are Channel-based and I create 12 copies of eash skill for all slots on actionpanel, so players can freely choose skill layout for themselves. So I needed 12*skillcount free ids and I also like to take everything to extremes so I decided I need 3000+ ids in a row to be safe (who knows what crazy things I might think of in the future). Anyway I am generating skills in wurst so it's a question of changing 2-3 symbols and recompling.
For now I decided to use '!000-!ZZZ' range for my needs but thanks for help. Initially I planned to use 0-9,A-Z,a-z but found out that Widgetizer treats A-Z and a-z symbols as same when creating CampaignAbilityFunc.txt and CampaignAbilityStrings.txt so I wanted to try special symbols (I need Widgetizer since without it map can take ages to load or not load at all). I could just use 'E000-EZZZ' range or something similar but don't know I they are used for some hidden things like tilesets or lightning-ids.

 

[HappyTauren]

Why are you managing this yourself?

Just use this, here's no point in them being "in the row" or anything of the sort, this package exists to make it abstract so you don't need to care about it at all.

Also you can create your own IdGenerator if you want specific offset.

 

[anufis]

I am using this, I was talking about offset (starting value). Sorry, wasn't too clear.

 

[Dr Super Good]

I would be slightly concerned with the potential load times and file sizes of a map containing 3,000 abilities. Warcraft III was certainly not designed for it.

 

[Tal'Rarity]

Shouldn't be too bad as long as you know how to make this properly.

 

[anufis]

I would be slightly concerned with the potential load times and file sizes of a map containing 3,000 abilities. Warcraft III was certainly not designed for it.

I did some tests with generating 36k channel abilities and widgetizing map. Without Widgetizer map crashes in game and editor, but after Widgetizing it loads in 5-10 seconds.
Also I think I will never reach those numbers because it would require lots of dedication and work over several years.

 

[WaterKnight]

I did some tests with generating 36k channel abilities and widgetizing map. Without Widgetizer map crashes in game and editor, but after Widgetizing it loads in 5-10 seconds.
Also I think I will never reach those numbers because it would require lots of dedication and work over several years.

Was there not an 8k limit? Widgetizer converts them to slk as much as possible, so probably there were not much objMod leftovers. And as OP hinted, there are use cases to auto-generate them like in BonusMod, for instance, thus it's quite easy to reach thousands of objects. If you require Cartesian products of attributes, like freely setting the mana cost of an ability from 1 to 100 and cooldown from 1 to 10 independently and in steps of 1 each, that's already 100*10 combinations. Further attributes add more factors.

@topic: A friend of mine kept using arithmetics/arranged ids in patterns. I was not a friend of this as it kills static analysis (and lacked documentation) but I guess it can be pretty efficient performance-wise. Else you have to save them in variables or have the compiler make a translation function. Only mean to say if you have for example the aforementioned combinationatorial layout, then you may want to have a mapping mana x cooldown -> ability and modeling this as a 2/higher dimensional array by using arithmetics might be a more direct approach.

 

[Dr Super Good]

but after Widgetizing it loads in 5-10 seconds.

Widigitizer has other problems though...

Better from a gameplay and map development point of view to well define abilities to single slots.

 

[Tal'Rarity]

The u9 optimizer and other tools provide quite the methods to work far past wc3 limits.