Dota LoD Bugs

Custom Games
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Dear Blizzard, Activision, and custom game creators,

This letter is intended for those who can patch and or update Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (Classic and Reforged), or else those who can update custom games, and so, if I have reached the wrong recipients, I would be grateful to be pointed in the right direction. First, on behalf of the relatively small Warcraft III community, and even smaller DOTA community, we thank you for creating and upkeeping Warcraft III. I write to you today on behalf of the DOTA and DOTA LOD (Legends of Dota) communities in regards to a patch and or update we have all been hoping for since Reforged came out.

We hope this request is well received, for at one point in time the custom game known as DOTA was the pride and joy of Warcraft III, almost as popular as the game itself. We have established a small DOTA LOD channel/group titled “Dota LoD” which harbors the majority of the remaining Dota LoD players in the world who use battle.net. There are currently 77 of us in this group, so we understand if this request is not a main priority of Blizzard/Activision, however, this group does not contain regular Dota players for which this request could also benefit. The main maps used by this group are: DoTA v6.85I LoD, DoTA v6.85N LoD, and DoTA v6.85N3 LoD, all of which are nearly identical.

Ever since Reforged came out, there have been a few errors affecting Dota LoD and regular Dota, although the games are still playable. To summarize the issues at hand, a few hero icons are bugged such that the icons show incorrect heroes; and almost all skill icons are bugged such that they have a missing tool tip and icon image. For example, Bloodseeker has the icon of Medusa, and many skills have the icon of either a Caucasian man or an Asian girl with a missing tooltip. We could theoretically name to you all such icons, however there are so many to name I thought it counterproductive to do so in such a letter, and I was hoping there could be a quick catchall programming fix as opposed to many individual fixes for these errors.

Additionally, ever since Warcraft III Reforged came out, many spells do not have animations in Dota LoD and presumably also regular Dota. The spells themselves still work in terms of damage and other effects, however, nobody sees the animations. These are spells such as Lion’s Finger of Death and Tinker’s Laser, and a few others I will not list, for once again, I am hoping there is a catchall fix to this issue.

So, as you can tell from this description, Dota and Dota LoD are still playable, but there are a few errors ever since Warcraft III Reforged came out which effect gameplay and make it difficult for some individuals to play. For example, imagine in LoD if someone selects several active spells, all of which have missing icons and tooltips such that you have to remember or else guess which spells are off cooldown and which you are casting/clicking on, especially if some have overlapping hotkeys.

Our community would be grateful if Blizzard/Activision or a game creator could create a patch/update which remedies these issues. If you need us to isolate the exact icons and animations which are bugged, we should be able to oblige. Thank you for your time.

All the best,

ThePoet

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Yet was also one of the most hated maps for the same reason. Most players were there to play DotA Allstars and not any of the other brilliant work that map makers made.

If the icons are user created assets then they will need to be reconverted, preferentially as .dds. The third party tools used to convert them to BLP1 were likely buggy which has translated into the icon no longer working after code quality improvements were made to the BLP parser. The reason for this was that no one bothered to understand how BLP1 worked properly until I did a couple of years ago, and even to this day they still use the buggy tools as the long gone authors of the tools provided no source code to fix them.

Missing tooltips can be due to changes in how the text is parsed, possibly for better unicode support or to fix other bugs.

Contact the map author to fix. Missing icons are usually repaired by using BLP lab to export the icon image from the BLP back into an uncompressed standard file format and then using GIMP (GNU, free and open source) to export it as .dds. Due to DDS being a standard file format the resulting file is a lot more compatible than the BLPs created by most fan made exporters.

If they used custom models it could be due to missing textures, or malformed MDX files. Again both of these would be due to errors with third party converter tools and can usually be fixed by re-exporting the textures and/or models.

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Well, if I had to guess, the problem is that all your unit data is stored in SLK format instead of w3a ability format. And Reforged changed the format a little bit.

You probably just need to add unitskins.txt or something similar like abilityskins.txt, whatever it is that Reforged uses now, to define the ability spell art and ability icon definitions that were previously in Profile TXT format (these read like INI files). Reforged reads this data from different places now that every unit has 2 unit IDs and every ability has 2 rawcode IDs. The second ID, the new one, is the skin value. So without the skin ID specified, most likely all of these abilities and units have no definition for how to look even though they function the same as before.

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Thank you,

For taking the time to reply to this post. From your reply, I gathered all the issues can be fixed by updating the map itself, and that you are not interested in personally doing this or else do not have the permissions to do so. We are grateful for your response and can pass this information along to the map creator or someone who can update the map. If you are interested in helping further to implement these solutions or have other possible solutions, don’t hesitate to let me know.

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Do not help this community. They are not willing to teach nor accept new players. This community basically wants to only play within their own group with no goal of growing or helping others learn the game. Pretends to care about the community but really only cares for their closed-off games.