Thread Tools, Lua Code and Forum Structure

[Eikonium]

Hey Ralle,

thank you for bringing Hive to the next level. Really feels good to see people like you keeping this old game and its community alive!

I personally enjoy the modding part of hive the most (and I definitely wouldn't be the person I am today without the World Editor Help Zone ), so I naturally care the most for quality of life changes in that section of the forum.

I've got the following suggestions:

World Editor Help Zone

• OP and mods could have the option to mark a thread as solved without having to press the edit button. That would encourage people to actually use the marking (as most people seem to forget about it) and thus simplify finding open threads for fellow modders, who are trying to help. Maybe have a "Mark as Solved" button for OP?
• OP and mods could have the option to mark a particular answer that solved OP's issue. That would help other readers to spot the most helpful answer.
• OP could even have the option to mark his thread as unsolved to show that he still requires help. I had a few threads fizzling out in the past, because it wasn't clear on first glance that it was still an open topic to me and people are not eager to read through a bunch of posts just to find out, if the thread is still open.

Enhancing Lua code support
As Lua is now an officially supported modding language in Wc3, I'd really like to see improved lua language support on the hive

• Please make CODE=Lua BB-Codes work again. They currently show grey code without any Syntax Highlighting, but were very colorful before Remoosed. The list of supported code languages currently neither includes Lua nor Typescript.
• Proper Lua Syntax Highlighting should also include support for Emmy annotation. Emmy annotation is a well suited tool to compensate for lua's missing type-safety and makes lua code easier to read and understand.
  
  
  
• The readability of Code boxes has decreased for me personally. I think, the font changed, font size got smaller and it's now white on black instead of black on white? Also, inlined code is much harder to distinguish from normal text than before. My voting would go towards restoring the old code formatting, especially returning to black on white
• Having Lua BB-tags would be cool. People somehow seem to have difficulties using code=lua (which doesn't work currently anyway ).
• Allow Lua prefix for the code submissions forum. We currently have to manually write the prefix in front of Titles. Also, the code submissions forum doesn't currently mention lua in its description.
• Allow for adding search Tags upon creating threads in the code submissions forum, just like the Lab and the World Editor Help Zone
• Have a moderator for Lua code submissions . All Lua code resources ever submitted are still waiting in the submissions forum, mixing up with other languages. That makes it rather hard to scan for good lua resources.
• Pending Code Submissions (i.e. everyting in this forum) don't show up in any users list of resources (i.e. the red button below his profile picture next to every post), although I have enabled showing pending resources in my profile settings. As a consequence of the previous bullet point, lua code submissions don't show up for any contributor, which I find rather sad.

Forum Structure

• Make it easier to find information on mapping: When I was learning Jass and Lua in the past to improve on my mapping skills, I found it rather hard to educate myself on most helpful systems, Jass/Lua best practices and general mapping know-how. On the one hand, information on this topic seemed rather scattered around the hive (e.g., the Code Resource subforum, the Lab, the comprehensive list of known Reforged Bugs, the list of known Wc3 crashes and the Reforged natives List are located at very different places). On the other hand, even after finding the Code Resource subforum, clicking through several pages of code submissions and not understanding most of their purposes just led to question marks on my face. This is surely not an easy thing to tackle and I don't even have a good solution in mind, but I just wanted to encourage the mods to have a second thought on the forum structure and the resulting user guidance Maybe, having an overview thread in the code resource forum would be a step towards telling people, which resource they might need for their projects.
• We all know that modding in Warcraft 3 can be a weird experience, as many API functions and abilities have some sort of custom behaviour (e.g., SetUnitScale(unit,x,y,z) completely ignores the y and z input, GroupEnumUnitsInRect(...) doesn't pick units with locust, using Unroot forces other players to auto-close their workers build-menus, GetLocationZ can lead to desyncs and adding & removing Raven Form allows us to change the flying height of ground units). It's incredibly hard for casual modders to find all that knowledge and to remember it, even when they know what to search for.
  Would it maybe an idea to add some sort of Wiki to the Hive, where every user can contribute information to? I imagine that we could build up a nice knowledge database together.

Again, all your work is much appreciated and the staff has already done a great job with moving to the new forum software!

Best regards,
Eikonium

 

[Ralle]

Make it easier to find information on mapping: When I was learning Jass and Lua in the past to improve on my mapping skills, I found it rather hard to educate myself on most helpful systems, Jass/Lua best practices and general mapping know-how. On the one hand, information on this topic seemed rather scattered around the hive (e.g., the Code Resource subforum, the Lab, the comprehensive list of known Reforged Bugs, the list of known Wc3 crashes and the Reforged natives List are located at very different places). On the other hand, even after finding the Code Resource subforum, clicking through several pages of code submissions and not understanding most of their purposes just led to question marks on my face. This is surely not an easy thing to tackle and I don't even have a good solution in mind, but I just wanted to encourage the mods to have a second thought on the forum structure and the resulting user guidance Maybe, having an overview thread in the code resource forum would be a step towards telling people, which resource they might need for their projects.

This is where the tutorials section should be of help.

We all know that modding in Warcraft 3 can be a weird experience, as many API functions and abilities have some sort of custom behaviour (e.g., [ljass]SetUnitScale(unit,x,y,z)[/ljass] completely ignores the y and z input, [ljass]GroupEnumUnitsInRect(...)[/ljass] doesn't pick units with locust, using Unroot forces other players to auto-close their workers build-menus, GetLocationZ can lead to desyncs and adding & removing Raven Form allows us to change the flying height of ground units). It's incredibly hard for casual modders to find all that knowledge and to remember it, even when they know what to search for.
Would it maybe an idea to add some sort of Wiki to the Hive, where every user can contribute information to? I imagine that we could build up a nice knowledge database together.

wiki.hiveworkshop.com but nobody seem to use it.

World Editor Help Zone

• OP and mods could have the option to mark a thread as solved without having to press the edit button. That would encourage people to actually use the marking (as most people seem to forget about it) and thus simplify finding open threads for fellow modders, who are trying to help. Maybe have a "Mark as Solved" button for OP?
• OP and mods could have the option to mark a particular answer that solved OP's issue. That would help other readers to spot the most helpful answer.
• OP could even have the option to mark his thread as unsolved to show that he still requires help. I had a few threads fizzling out in the past, because it wasn't clear on first glance that it was still an open topic to me and people are not eager to read through a bunch of posts just to find out, if the thread is still open.

this new forum system does have a Q&A sort of forum type, we have yet to try it though. WEHZ would definitely be a good place to use it. We will look into this as the site stabilizes.

Please make CODE=Lua BB-Codes work again. They currently show grey code without any Syntax Highlighting, but were very colorful before Remoosed. The list of supported code languages currently neither includes Lua nor Typescript.

Will add it soon.

The readability of Code boxes has decreased for me personally. I think, the font changed, font size got smaller and it's now white on black instead of black on white? Also, inlined code is much harder to distinguish from normal text than before. My voting would go towards restoring the old code formatting, especially returning to black on white

Black on white was never the intention. Who uses a white background code editor these days?

Have a moderator for Lua code submissions . All Lua code resources ever submitted are still waiting in the submissions forum, mixing up with other languages. That makes it rather hard to scan for good lua resources.

We really need someone to handhold the code forum. I think it might not be moderated these days.

 

[Eikonium]

This is where the tutorials section should be of help.

Hmmm, I really like the tutorial section, but it's a collection of very specific topics for the most part. Not easy for self-learners to scan for relevant information. At least I personally didn't have the ability to estimate relevance, when I was learning about Wc3 modding, and found a lot of helpful stuff later that I wished I had known before.
So my thought was rather to help people noticing relevant knowledge and to make it less scattered around hive. I know, that's easier said than done and I've not come up with any actual proposals.

wiki.hiveworkshop.com but nobody seem to use it.

Wow, I'm a long time hive user and didn't even know that site.
Good to see that you had that idea in the past.
One could try to advertise that wiki more, linking it on hive and start encouraging people to fill it with information? Maybe it's just a pipe dream of mine, but a comprehensive collection of knowledge about abilities and API functions would just be so helpful.

Unfortunately, it seems that there've been a lot of spam entries ("Synthetic Collagen Will Not Help Your Skin").

Black on white was never the intention. Who uses a white background code editor these days?

Admitted, I'm absolutely working white on black upon coding in any language . Black on white still has the advantage that it's easy to distinguish from other text in a post, so that's a point specifically for a forum like this. Also admitted, there might be better ways to improve the readability of code boxes. Sorry for not coming up with more specific suggestions

 

[Elprede]

• Make it easier to find information on mapping: When I was learning Jass and Lua in the past to improve on my mapping skills, I found it rather hard to educate myself on most helpful systems, Jass/Lua best practices and general mapping know-how. On the one hand, information on this topic seemed rather scattered around the hive (e.g., the Code Resource subforum, the Lab, the comprehensive list of known Reforged Bugs, the list of known Wc3 crashes and the Reforged natives List are located at very different places). On the other hand, even after finding the Code Resource subforum, clicking through several pages of code submissions and not understanding most of their purposes just led to question marks on my face. This is surely not an easy thing to tackle and I don't even have a good solution in mind, but I just wanted to encourage the mods to have a second thought on the forum structure and the resulting user guidance Maybe, having an overview thread in the code resource forum would be a step towards telling people, which resource they might need for their projects.

Then you may be interested in jassdoc.

 

[Eikonium]

Then you may be interested in jassdoc.

Really good stuff, thank you very much! A shame that it's not a web-wiki, but still super useful.

This is definitely one of the ressources that I wish I had known earlier and a perfect example for what I meant above (relevant knowledge scattered and we could greatly benefit from some kind of overview thread).