Has anyone noticed that all heroes do not have inventory? It is impossible to get the Moon Key to advance to Lvl 2. Has anybody had the same problem as me? Thanks!
Are you playing WarChasers: Eternal Pride? That map file was created using the Reign of Chaos World Editor. On the Reign of Chaos game engine in the year 2002, any unit that was considered a Hero also had an inventory.
In the year 2003, a new expansion for Warcraft III was released. This was called Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. On the Expansion, any unit that was considered a Hero only had STR/AGI/INT stats, experience points, level, and the + skills ability. But they did not have inventory built in.
Instead, now inventory was an Ability using the Ability system. Every hero in the game was modified in a patch to have the Ability with the rawcode value AInv which is named Inventory (Hero).
However, this introduced a bug. On some maps, such as certain Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos campaign missions, and also the WarChasers: Eternal Pride sample custom map, there were some heroes with modified ability lists. In other words, the World Editor user who created the map double clicked on Abilities and changed the list. For example, MegatronX hero in the Eternal Pride map was modified to have AOE - Big Damage on Death or whatever for fun. Elsewhere, some of the heroes that were copied from Night Elf heroes were modified. Their original ability list – which was 1 item, the Shadow Meld – was emptied out so that they did not have the Shadow Meld for this mission.
Unfortunately, because the modified Abilities list is stored as an overwrite of the original value, and not a specification regarding which abilities were added or removed, now we have:
2002 Reign of Chaos game standard unit list: {Shadow Meld}
2002 Reign of Chaos custom hero with shadow meld removed: {}
2003 Frozen Throne game standard unit list: {Inventory (Hero), Shadow Meld}
How Frozen Throne interprets the custom map data made by Reign of Chaos: {}
What this means is that Frozen Throne sees the empty set, removing the Inventory (Hero) ability even though the map developer in 2002 did not intend to remove it.
At the time of 2003 the Blizzard Entertainment who actually cared about the game was aware of this technicality. So they made a patch to the game code which specifies that any map older than a certain version automatically adds Inventory (Hero) to any hero unit.
But this bug fix is missing in World Editor. So if you or your friends open up the WarChasers: Eternal Pride custom map on World Editor, then you touch nothing, then you save the map to a new file, now that file will be broken and all hero inventories will disappear for any hero with a changed ability list!! And this happens because nothing changes however the map no longer was “last modified” with an old enough game engine for the hotfix to run ingame!
This is also why in 2018-2020 in some of the ingame Campaign missions, where the new people at Activision tried to modify the Campaign Maps with the World Editor to update them, they caused the inventory of some heroes in some missions to disappear!
This bug comes back over and over, and it’s always because of the same technicality, because of how map editor works and how the 2002 game worked versus how the 2003 expansion worked. We could consider it a bug that World Editor does not automatically fix these old maps whenever we open them, but the 2020 Reforged team considered that and it was decided that they would not fix the issue, because fixing the issue would make the code of World Editor more complicated. Instead, they told me, once you touch the map in World Editor it is up to you, the user, to know this history and to fix your map.
OK? Does this fix your problem?
Or are you playing some of the Campaign Missions that the Activision folks broke [again?], and you still had this bug without even using World Editor? If so, can you list which campaign missions?
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