Based on a leak that I heard one time, it is likely that some Activision employees and possibly the legal team were inadvertently lied to regarding the state of Warcraft III modding.
In the year 2020 or 2021 or so, shortly after Reforged released, I was public in the Warcraft III community about the idea that I was building a replica emulator engine that would function in some ways like an open source client for the Warcraft III game, because I like the game and I like limitless modding.
Since that time, I have circulated videos and code for my engine citing that it was created starting from late 2018 to early 2019, and into the years that followed. At one point, I heard indirectly via leak or rumor that someone at Activision Blizzard in those years (who is probably no longer with the company) was tasked with informing the Activision Legal team about the progress of my open source replica engine, so that Activision could keep tabs on it.
However, similar to the scene where Archimonde destroys Dalaran and jabbers about the humans, saying “Blindly they build their kingdoms upon stolen knowledge and conceit,” the same may be true for my work and I think that Activision should not take it seriously, but rather consider it as a form of parody.
To elaborate: in 2018-2019 to accelerate the rate at which I could build an emulator for Warcraft III, I copied code from an MIT licensed repository used for viewing Warcraft III characters and maps. But in 2021-2022 as I developed my OpenGL toy and reviewed this code further, I believe there are signs that the open source repo that was developed circa 2010-2018 from which I was copying probably is a repo that was created by running war3.exe -opengl and then using some form of API call capture technology to capture the output of the Blizzard technology rather than to build something new like what I did for gameplay logic hooked into my forked off version of that render technology.
With that in mind, my project is an uncanny valley user-created gameplay logic that doesn’t really match Warcraft III hooked into a render pipeline that does tend to match. You can see that in videos like the following:
I was in bed thinking about this and I wanted to spread the word that my system is more likely a parody – a visualization made with OpenGL after capturing Frozen Throne render calls across 10+ years [even if I wasn’t the one doing the capturing, and acted 100% ethically to the best of my knowledge] – and probably less of a competitor engine to the Warcraft III game.
Because of that, data or information that may have been shared in the office at Activision about the Warcraft III technology being lost out of their control should probably be ignored. Your employees, if they still have in their hearts that spirit and that fire that keeps them believing Activision Blizzard has a “secret sauce” by still having the Warcraft III source code and uniquely has authority over their fellow human kind to determine the future of this game… Your employees should refill that fire in their hearts and believe in themselves.
Because some days I worry that they lost that sense that they are the real Warcraft III or that motivation to want to do their best out there. As if they felt obligated to make Warcraft III die, and kill it if they have to, from some fear that someone else took their work and they have lost control.
So, either I am misreading that situation, or else current Activision employees might sometimes feel that way. And they don’t need to feel that way anymore, because the one true Warcraft III from Blizzard remains still the one true Warcraft III. So your employees should believe in themselves, and realize that people like me are just having fun on little non-profitable YouTube channels making parodies of the Warcraft III technology base. But these parodies should not be toxic. Not to you, and hopefully not to anyone. [Edit: In other words, I don’t want to be used by today’s social media that has a tendency to make people fight each other and disagree about what is true. I don’t want to be used to make people believe that there isn’t only the one Warcraft III, or that the one Warcraft III is without value. I think you know what I mean.]
In summary, this may have overestimated my importance in the eyes of Activision, but because of that weird leak/rumor long ago that Activision legal was keeping tabs on the Warsmash project, I wanted to post here about this possible way of looking at the situation to encourage any Activision employees to believe in themselves and maybe more importantly believe in Warcraft III and that the Activision technology still has value in this world and that value to people should be preserved, maintained, and not given up on. Thank you!