What do I tell this guy? ~Greater Cliche Warcraft Mod

[Retera]

So I did a thing in honor of Classic WoW where I installed Reign of Chaos Patch 1.00 (the earliest that I ever had) from a disk, and then I heavily modded that specific version of the game for fun. You can see it in my modding video from a while back when I did this. Everything is simple and elegant, and there is only 1 copy of the unit data SLKs that are in the "Units\" folder. Many of the SLKs have Microsoft Excel Comments placed by the original developers giving -- in some cases -- more advanced tips and information about what fields do than the systems added in the Frozen Throne such as for custom abilities. For example, the Chance to Miss stat on Evasion included a comment talking about within what range the value would function. These comments don't appear in the Frozen Throne's Ability Editor.

So I did this for an hour or two thinking that similar to the counter-cultural WoW Classic folk I had discovered purist Warcraft III Classic that would be ideal for modding, and I went about my business with a camera turned on for about 3 hours. Honestly I was loving it, but I hit a critical design bug with how ability and research upgrades work that was removed in The Frozen Throne which means effectively that custom abilities added in this system cannot require upgrades, or if they do the standard ability from which they were made must lose its upgrade. Basically there's a 1:1 relationship between C++ ability and upgrade, rather than between *ability rawcode* and required upgrade. This really killed the feeling for me and made me think about J Allen Brack's comment:

No. And, and by the way, you don't want to do that, either. You think you do, but you don't... You don't wanna do that. Remember that one bug that really p**sed you off that we fixed like two years ago? Still there in the past.

Yet, nevertheless, as a joke I uploaded a short video of myself actually playing my creation, and now someone has commented asking me desperately for a copy of this game mod:

Unfortunately, this mod literally doesn't exist. If you were to run the same SLKs on The Frozen Throne, I am 95% certain that it would just crash the game immediately. Not only are there not 4 copies of the SLKs, but data columns have different names, like Data11 for ability data instead of DataA1.
You can see what I'm talking about in the comment section of this video.

What should I tell this guy who was asking me for a copy of the playable game -- seeing as a sharable copy of it simply doesn't exist, and it requires the Reign of Chaos CD in order to play?

 

[Dr Super Good]

You could send him the modified files and a note on how to use it. If he can use it or not is not your problem.

 

[Kyrbi0]

I'd say remake of it wasn't a waste of time. Either way.

 

[deepstrasz]

If it can't be ported to TFT, especially the newest patch versions of it, then explain to him (as you already did in the YT comment) the requirements and have a link for download in case anyone else might get interested.

 

[pyf]

There are two fellows, actually.

The first comment reads "Pleas when you downliad this mod and hiw to take to the game ?". So prepare for *a lot* of extra tech support with this guy imho.

The second comment reads "[...] can you upload this mod, I really want to play that mod, plz upload I will be the first person to download your mod, I hope you reply to me." The way it is written, his request feels a bit childish to me. Likewise, prepare imho for extra tech support with this other guy. His main motivation seems to be "first!" to download and play it, possibly regardless of any game version requirements you had previously mentioned. I bet his next question would be "so ok I downloaded it, now how do I use it?", which is the kind of thing I read on ModDB a bit too often in the comments...


If the whole idea of your mod for Reign of Chaos is to be counter-cultural, then it should be kept that way. Porting it to any other version of the game to please others should not be your problem in the first place. And remember: the more accessible to download you will make your files, the more lamers only eager to "play free games" it will attract. And the more it will be downloaded, the more spoon-feeding you will have to do afterwards with such lamers. Again, some of those comments on ModDB *cough!*...


Personally, I like the idea of a "Purist Warcraft III classic Gaming experience"(tm). Especially since Blizzard has decided that RoC was not a thing anymore.

 

[Feng Shui]

As it happens, I have a gif that can sum up this entire situation.