I played a little bit of single player Starcraft Pandora (on my Reforged client, not sure which version that thing was built for) and comparing that versus my gameplay video of Project Revolution linked above, I think I see the obvious outcome of this discussion. I'm not sure I would go so far as to call the gameplay systems of Pandora "a joke," but rather I did not observe any scripts/triggers of any great degree to be on that project so it seems more likely that "Starcraft Pandora" is the work of one guy and "Project Revolution" is the work of a team of people back in the early 2000s who were exceedingly inspired for playing "Starcraft in 3D" when Starcraft 2 did not exist, whereas "Starcraft Pandora" easily looks like it might be the work of 1 guy who did not use any triggers/scripts or used a very minimal amount.
So now we have a problem; I have been traveling a lot recently and will not be at the location of my playable Project Revolution backup for at least another week. Then, even if I try to share it
it's not going to work on Reforged or any Warcraft III version that you have probably whereas Planet Pandora or that kind of thing might be unit data that could be dumped directly into a new map you were making.
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By zooming in on this credits graphic from my video above, we can see that this credits page lists attribution to at least 6 programmers and 12 artists as well as a project leader. And the problem is that in order to do all of this, these guys were overriding files in the Warcraft III install that sometimes are loaded by the Warcraft III game before it loads a map, so then putting them in a map is not functional. So it is
possible that you might get 70% functionality from the stuff in my video for example if you offload the contents of the Project Revolution MPQ into your map and try to play the Terran, but several designs and overrides are probably game-wide and wouldn't actually work in a custom map on Reforged. When I said in the video that I wanted Project Revolution to work on Reforged later that year after Reforged would inevitably release, if you listen to my voice inflection you can tell this is sarcasm.
Some people talk about "protected maps" but I think that this would be the next level beyond that. I seem to recall their mod MPQ not having a listfile so to drain its assets out into some external thing that you could add to a map would probably kill time just for that step alone. The Project Revolution install that was on my old computer has an associated map editor that is modified from the Warcraft III editor, and has its own tilesets and races and such that are not compatible with Warcraft 3 directly but merely using its engine and the w3x/w3m format loaded against a different set of tileset and race data.
I'm not sure if there's really anyone who got as far as that old team of Project Revolution developers got on this topic because it would be the inevitable fate -- for anyone who attempts this -- to be demotivated by the realization of how much stuff on Warcraft 3 was hardcoded, for every project. It turns out: Warcraft 3 is not Starcraft. If you want a low-input, high-reward project that lets you have some fun you can do something like Project Pandora. But if you want a high-input, perfect-reward project then (speaking as someone who has not done much Starcraft 2 modding) it is probably better for you to build a Starcraft 2 mod. Conceptually, if we graphed the time input versus project quality for a custom mod, I'm guessing we would see this graph:
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So then if you want the most highest quality project, what you should do is use Starcraft 2. But if you want to have an optimized higher amount of fun with a shorter amount of time input, you should use Warcraft III. This is kind of how I see it, and also why I have not personally ever motivated myself to do the Starcraft 2 modding. This is also why Reforged's improvements to modding are (in my opinion) stupid, because they disregard this trade off and usually tried to "make the impossible possible
somehow" in modding which would mean if we added a third line for Reforged to this graph maybe it would be somewhere between Warcraft III and Starcraft 2 or something, but probably trending towards the higher time input of Starcraft 2 while also not reaching the higher quality end result of Starcraft 2.
I'm bringing this up because if you're looking for something with that edge of "being perfect" like maybe the Starcraft 2 peak at the end of the graph when it exceeds Warcraft III, unfortunately to do that on Warcraft III is likely going to be impossible.
For example, on the Project Revolution video that I showed above, the Liftoff function of buildings is using a series of Hero Inventory Items w/ Build Tiny to produce the mouse indicators for where to place Add-Ons to buildings, and I have had games of Project Revolution where I "dropped the items" by realizing this oddity, in which case I would break or crash the Project Revolution mod systems. So what I mean by that is that even achieving this delicate
facade of a Starcraft 1 lookalike on Warcraft III is actually a brittle mountain of hacks that falls apart as soon as you see through the illusion. The green/red unit life status visualization is
constructed on the screen with a mosaic of icons on an invisible multiboard and it is also possible to
hide the multiboard by clicking in the correct location in the corner of the screen, and again break Project Revolution and its mod systems.
Most likely, I would assume you're not going to have any of that
crap on Starcraft 2. If you wanted it to emulate Starcraft 1, it would just do it. But setting it up and configuring it might need the number of people on Project Revolution because of all the work involved. It's just that you would get a better result over there on Starcraft 2. So why would anyone, ever, have finished a project like that on Warcraft III in all our years?
We want Warcraft III to be moddable, but at its core it isn't. We were just using it in a way that wasn't intended and enjoying it in a way that came from "us" (the modding people), and not the original programmers of Warcraft III, in many cases.
Edit: As a brainstorm, maybe here are how I see other possible opportunities as well:
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