warsmash.mpq

[Nthxz]

open suggestion to all who read this to take a note from the DOOM modding scene: drop-in-replacement assets (models, audio, HUD) of doom.wad were made. that became the freedoom1.wad and freedoom2.wad. released under a permissive license to get away from copyright obstacles with developing their mods. Freedoom these assets were made by DOOM modders and artists (one not necessarily both) and this could be a HIVE workshop monthly challenge for points, like "I made the warsmash.mpq grunt noises" is something to be proud of.

 

[Nthxz]

thanks to the tagging system here on HIVE i saw Killabong's thread from 2011 about public domain (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) and permissively licensed (GPL etc.) art resources for and from videogames:
here's a headstart for any programmer wanting textures. for example to create warsmash.mpq/TerrainArt/Village/Village_CobblePath.blp

Search Art

opengameart.org

there's already alot of Warcraft III dedicated resources here from other modders who care about not painting themselves into a corner by creating mods with copyrighted licenses for copyrighted games... like i worry if using anything from HIVE won't get me in legal trouble and i'm rooting all the way for warsmash as a permissively licensed Warcraft 3. here's a few buttons from 2010 for one example Painterly Spell Icons part 1

this is that thread Attention, artists: FOSS community needs you!

 

[Retera]

Sorry I didn't see this until now, I am on a long vacation. I guess by replying I will be subscribed to your forum post!

Did you have a look at warsmash april fools 2024 and how on that post, there is actually an MPQ with a runnable set of game art for Warsmash that I made entirely myself?

Obviously it looks extremely bad, but it's an example of being able to boot up Warsmash with no War3 install of any kind. A proof of concept, at least.

But if we imagine for a moment, let's say I took a sabbatical from my job and made more art for that project for the next several months, until we had full on techtrees for a versus mode RTS game, constructed with Warsmash as a basis.

Wouldn't the use of Warcraft III formats probably still create an avenue for Microsoft Activision to take down such a game from steam? It seems like a possibly unwise direction. From my standpoint, Warsmash showed me that I can make an RTS from scratch, and I can make it look like Warcraft III if I want to. The law is often decided by a "jury of peers," but no one else that I have found online has ever published a War3 open source remake, so in effect I have no peers in this space, at least none with the same bizarre cocktail of motivations. Because of that, we legally fall back on people's feelings which are unreliable and inconsistent. Some people might feel like Warsmash reminds them of Warcraft III, so they might randomly decide to screw me over in court. When we replace its hard, there's still a problem of similar functions. Jass2.java is gross. It's for War3-emulating. And yet that's built into Warsmash.

I made an RTS and I could do it again. And so if I wanted one that didn't look like War3, the smart thing would be for me to do it again, but that time not make it look like War3 inside its guts and mannerisms and technology styles.

When Activision can copyright how something feels, or the API of CreateUnit, eventually they can achieve anti-competitive monopoly over all RTS. Similar to if you were to play tag on the school yard, but then one kid might say he invented tag and cry to the teacher, if Activision is going to cry to the U.S. government that they own the premise of playing with computers and rendering little mini people, at some point, I just don't want to play with them anymore. They become those awkward people to exclude from the party.

 

[Nthxz]

Did you have a look at warsmash april fools 2024 and how on that post, there is actually an MPQ with a runnable set of game art for Warsmash that I made entirely myself?

Obviously it looks extremely bad, but it's an example of being able to boot up Warsmash with no War3 install of any kind. A proof of concept, at least.

i did take a look at that when you posted about it! very cool! immensely cool thing to do(!!!)
it's actually what opened my eyes to that this is actually doable.

on to the topic you raise with immense self-awareness: THANK YOU, yes. completely. what you'd be in your full right to do would be picking up something like OpenRTS (pure java, open licensing, has a world editor that looks like this already, is without authorial programmer in the main branch since half a decade back) meanwhile something like WarCraft III is the licensing equivalent of begging Scrooge for scraps at the dinner table.

all the power to you in making an $ANYTHING with a one-way lane from HiveWorkshop. like "here's how you convert the models you own into my RTS's format. just like how Adobe Flash conversions occur by authors from .swf (proprietary file format, proprietary language et al) to HTML5 (open file formats, open languages et al)

edit:
then i'm sure there'd be cultural and community overlap; in listening to interviews about my favourite flash games, notably Brad Borne discussing Fancy Pants, it's apparent that he'd have kept Flash around if only for the community. the neat thing is the ideas of Flash (the program for making .swf animations and games) are all open concepts and thus in all right done in, for one, Wick (FLOSS project) based on HTML5 instead of Flash. so i do wonder what Brad Borne would say if he knew about Wick. Flash is dead, long live Flash?

I can completely draw parallels between Flash to HTML5 and WarCraft III to $YOUR_RTS_SUITE in my mind.
if anything the existence of Flash and Wick games (by each person programmed with something equivalent to shoestring, ducktape and chewingum yet still as important and artistic as sketches are to paintings) my childhood self will all too strongly want to say merits the existence of WarCraft III and $YOUR_RTS_SUITE, if that makes sense. i realise i always get oddly passionate whenever WarCraft III is brought up so forgive me for coming on too strong here, but do let me know simultaneously. it's not for me to say anything about what you do with your time and ingenuity with the equivalent of a spreadsheet fileformat and rudimentary 3D models.

 

[Retera]

Sometimes recently I was looking at the Hive models section, and honestly there are quite a few nice models that are using their own texture assets rather than "in game" textures.

I wonder if I compiled a warsmash.mpq that was less of a cartoon parody like the April Fuels project, but instead just a bunch of models from Hive as the only models available in the game, if it would be enough for something playable....