I have no experience in programming but i am sure it will take me much less time to learn than it will take you guys to solve the problems by yourselves. I would solve all your problems for free just because this game is my passion.
Gamedevs please contact me as soon as possible.
Yo man, there are people with C++ experience who feel same way. I am writing C++ daily for my job.
If I could do weekend contributions to the code of this game as a hobby for free, I would too.
I think you are underestimating the difficulty of programming, and especially maintaining old products.
A lot of the Warcraft III community would.
you better start learning today then, because you will spend a couple of years getting down the basics coming from zero.
Speaking of which, I’m having a bit of trouble with your Model Studio.
When opening the Application, I get “Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.”
But I can open the executable jar file.
However, when I try to export textures. I get “No file type was specified”. And when I manually add “.png” in the end - I get “Unknown error occurred:
java.lang.NullPointerException” and a bunch of lines after that, such as:
“at com.matrixeater.src.MainPanel.actionPerformed(MainPanel.java:4253)”
and more than 30 others similar to this one.
EDIT: Note that this happens only when I use the File → Export Textures.
I can do it normally when I go to Tools - > Edit Textures and Export them one by one.
It’s not maintaining old products that is the problem.
All that is needed is to rip out the bloated and slow Electron menu system that has ruined trying to start a game.
The new code is the problem, not the old product.
You have my permission. Now get to it!
You don’t realize that they are learning to program from 0 too… ^^
It’s up to you to maintain that now. What good is a model editor if it doesn’t have a game to edit models for?
I have to write a game now. Listen to Elon Musk explain why at the link below, while watching my game that I wrote:
(Source code for the game played in the above video available here: https://github.com/Retera/WarsmashModEngine)
Most players do not have issue with it… As far as I can tell the only people having issues with it are those who have multiple GPUs available and for some reason the thing is either choosing the wrong one (integrated GPU), or defaulting to software render (very slow).
For example there are no noticeable performance issues with the menu on my system using a Ryzen 3900X and Nvidia GTX 760. Yes it is a 12 core CPU but most of the cores are idle on the menu and even the ones that are not are not being loaded that much.
Many of the people who worked on Reforged had significant programming experience, including completing degrees on the subject. Even the people taking over will have significant experience.
So they added Lua, the ability to customize UIs, an entire HD model set, a D3D11 and Metal render, e.t.c. back in 2011? I highly doubt that…
“Significant programming experience” is very relative. Seen the results, the highest skilled were most probably the ones who had to follow the orders of totally clueless people.
Then, comparing to the old school Blizzard standards they were far below that level.
If they did reforged 20 years ago, they wouldn’t use a poor optimized browser, they would have made their own and set a new standard for the market (think about diablo or sc1).
10 years ago they used the same browser for Starcraft2. It works.
So, there must be a point where they lost it.
I guess he’s talking about the game breaking ones^^
The missing reconnect feature has been a game breaking problem since the beginning.
As pointed out somewhere else, before people had the choice to wait in case someone was just lagging behind and had to re-synchronize with the game. In case of reboot or change of ip, you were out of the game.
Now the situation is a lot worse. You don’t even have the choice, because some dude with “significant experience” in networking decided that you must just disappear from the game all of a sudden because the blizzard server said so.
The overall quality of the product is abysmal low.
I doubt that they even know what was really needed for the game…
The browser is not poorly optimised. I believe it is the same underlying browser engine as used by Chrome. It is more likely that something is set incorrectly causing it to perform poorly under some conditions such as multiple GPUs or IGPUs.
That usually happens if you lose connection with the Blizzard server. The Blizzard servers will not drop you randomly or without reason.
Neither Warcraft III or StarCraft II have ever officially supported reconnect. Although they did used to have a waiting for player window that gave up to 60 seconds for the player to re-establish connection.
The main problem is the multiple browser instances pretending to deal with overlying transparencies. Add the really poorly optimized models and the fact that the gpu configuration is missing.
That is partially true. In custom games you could disconnect from battlenet and still be connected to the host. You were even in game chat but not in the main one. (you couldn’t whisper outside game).
The 60 seconds windows could be indefinitely extended if people waited and the player with network problems was keeping his ip address.
Having a disconnection chance of 10% from blizzard servers compared to like 0.1% with the old normal player hosting is pathetic anyway…
Even if reconnect was not supported, that is the first thing you expect when 20 years later they pretend to “reforge” the game. They completely destroyed the networking, but they never thought about a simple reconnection button.
The multiple browser instances is just due to how modern browsers work. For security reasons everything is run as its own application so that the code running in the browser cannot have access to memory outside itself. If these were part of the same application instance then code running in the browser would have permission to access other application data not related to the browser, allowing another attack vector if an arbitrary memory read/write exploit is found.
This can also happen in StarCraft II, as long as you remain connected to the host server. However usually if you lose connection with BattleNet you also lose connection with the host server. Similarly you could lose connection with the host server and not with BattleNet in the past with Warcraft III, which is where the “waiting for host” dialog showed up.
It could be, but seldom was.
The servers should be nowhere near that high. For example in the over ten thousand HotS games I have played, only one of them did I lose connection with the Blizzard servers and that was due to maintenance. On the other hand I used to get diconnected from hosts in Warcraft III fairly regularly, at least 1 in 20 games and this usually was the host disconnecting from everyone.
I fairly doubt this is the reason they are using more than one instance of the browser. The “security reason” is mostly used these days to justify flawed code. A process of 120mb for a static images sliding window is not justifiable with “security reasons”.^^
The security discussion is a bit more complex than the “if this… or if that…” and the solution they have adopted may not be the optimal or even the right one.
The different process for each window is something dating back to the age of ff4 I guess and it was mainly due to the fact that if 1 window had problems then all the others were going down with that one. That makes sense. It remains the fact that of all the games using blizzard browser only WC3 has this problem.
You are right, I should have specified “new WC3 servers”, since I have almost never had problems with SC, Diablo or even the old WC3 ones. Last time I have played this game, there was at least 1 disconnection in 8-9 games out of 10, not specifically me, but anyone in the game may get disconnected. Not counting other people with the 200 ping issue. (~200 strangely being a recurrent value for people with different connection and from different countries). They were known players, so no random leavers and they were all more or less from the same region.
When one day I was luckily in the middle of a good game without disconnections and instead the game crashed (which rarely happens anyway), then I decided to leave for good and wait for a revert to the original battlenet as the only hope.
" As far as I can tell the only people having issues with it are those who have multiple GPUs available and for some reason the thing is either choosing the wrong one (integrated GPU), or defaulting to software render (very slow.)"
Asus X102BA laptop here, AMD A4 processor with integraded Radeom HD8180, which is both the performance and the power-saving rendering choice. And more than capable of playing the game, if you ever get through the menu system.
I can believe that maybe the menu system is defaulting to very slow software rendering, but, given that this is to start a game that requires a GPU of some description (and not a powerful GPU), why would software rendering of the menu system even be an available choice?
Are Blizzard’s programmers really that bad?
The slow-as-molasses menu system is BRAND NEW in Reforged.
Is there an app on iTunes where I can learn how to code C++?
What about Python? Is that any good?
There probably is, but there are also a lot of free videos and guides online teaching C++ as it is a common language in the industry and frequently taught by higher educational institutes.
There are a lot of open source C++ projects you can look and poke at to improve your understanding. For example Simutrans, which is a transport tycoon style game. There is also 0 A.D. which is an open source Age of Empires style RTS clone.
Although Python has its advantages, it generally is not recommended for the core of a game engine due to its high level nature abstracting it away from the possibility of many low level optimisations. People do still write games with Python, but they are usually quite simple. Python programming is quite similar to Lua in many respects so the knowledge can help with scripting Warcraft III custom maps.
You’re joking right? I know many people that learned how to program in 6 months and immediately found jobs programming…you know how I know them? Because they took the same 6 month program from my college that I did…