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- Apr 19, 2008
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Warsmash Mod Engine
Last year's holiday break included an opportunity for me to use a map created by the author @Warcraft Sandbox loaded into the Warsmash context to then pretend to be playing World of Warcraft and Warcraft III at the same time, which was a very fun experience pushing the limits with Warcraft III and creating another Winter Veil light show ingame, this time on Warsmash instead of Reforged. This year I decided to investigate what it would take to continue the Warsmash fork so that we could get the YouTube commenter "Gordo6908" to a point where he could load the map of the Eastern Kingdoms onto the Warsmash client. Not because it was a good idea -- perhaps Warsmash never was - but for the fun of proving it was possible. It is unlikely anyone ever did that with Warcraft III.
This winter I will probably pursue the project further and polish how these systems interplay when loading content from a different game (World of Warcraft) like that, with a focus on the ancient 2003-2004 versions of World of Warcraft that shared the same asset graphics format before it spun off into its own M2 format (so that code changes needed for Warsmash continue to be minimal).
In parallel to this, the GitHub contributor Glasir has done some excellent work progressing the effort to emulate a larger number of Frozen Throne abilities on Warsmash.
As you can see in this screenshot, we are rendering a context pulling art from several games:
- Ancient Protector pulled from a Warcraft III 1.26 installation
- HD "Sentry" unit pulled from Reforged (complete with custom shader code based on the code of Retera Model Studio (and the works of Ghostwolf))
- A World of Warcraft MDX (not M2) model loaded directly into the engine (not ported) with a hairstyle setting, baked NPC texture loaded from the Darnassus Bow Vendor "Landria," and an attached weapon loaded by the engine and not from a combined model file. (pulled from 0.5.3)
- A jlua binding in Java attempting to directly load the World of Warcraft user interface, but with the Warcraft III abilities of current unit provided as the Hero's action bar.
This winter I will probably pursue the project further and polish how these systems interplay when loading content from a different game (World of Warcraft) like that, with a focus on the ancient 2003-2004 versions of World of Warcraft that shared the same asset graphics format before it spun off into its own M2 format (so that code changes needed for Warsmash continue to be minimal).
In parallel to this, the GitHub contributor Glasir has done some excellent work progressing the effort to emulate a larger number of Frozen Throne abilities on Warsmash.
As you can see in this screenshot, we are rendering a context pulling art from several games:
- Ancient Protector pulled from a Warcraft III 1.26 installation
- HD "Sentry" unit pulled from Reforged (complete with custom shader code based on the code of Retera Model Studio (and the works of Ghostwolf))
- A World of Warcraft MDX (not M2) model loaded directly into the engine (not ported) with a hairstyle setting, baked NPC texture loaded from the Darnassus Bow Vendor "Landria," and an attached weapon loaded by the engine and not from a combined model file. (pulled from 0.5.3)
- A jlua binding in Java attempting to directly load the World of Warcraft user interface, but with the Warcraft III abilities of current unit provided as the Hero's action bar.
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