Maps Freezing since last patch

Hi,

im Elbadruhel, the designer and maper of “Fall of Lordaeron”, a massive custom map for W3 based in warcraft and WoW lore. I have expended countless hours on the map, recreating the map of Azeroth pixel by pixel, designing factions, paths and units, calculating stats and costs with math programs, coding cool and new spells… It has been a hard work (and it still is since it is not finished yet) but i was happy of doing that hard work due to something: people was able to play it and they were loving the map.

It was new, unique, perfectly done, lore accurated and with a nice gameplay with unqiue features for everyone. Nearly everyone who played it, liked it. And i created a discord for those who would like to become betatesters and help me with the bugs, i have more than 80 guys and girls helping me with the map!

But last patch destroyed everything… You can play the game with no problem, but suddenly, after 10-40 mins, the game freezes. My map had 0 crashes till last patch and with this last blizzard release it always freezes. Is not a proper “crash” but a freeze, the game goes white and everyone is disconected. I cant do anything to solve it since it is a blizzard issue, and people is sad because we can no longer play… Warcraft is dying.

And im not so selfish and dumb to say “warcraft is dying” due to my map getting frozen. BUT, to nearly all cool custom maps being frozen. The admin of a massive discord community of warcraft 3, invited me as mapper to his discord because he wanted my map there so all of them (thousands of players) could enjoy my map. They have played mine and liked it, but they play countless maps every single day, different ones. And after nearly every game you can read always the same message: “it crashed, is sad, i was having fun”.

Most custom maps are freezing since last patch. It is making a lot of people to get frustrated or quit playing warcraft 3. I was working in my map for a year and since last patch bug i have nearly stoping doing anything because “why should i work on it if blizzard doesnt fix the freezing and it is unplayable?”. Is sad, i love this game, i have been playing it since its release, i have bought it 3 times in my life and i dont regret a single penny. It has been awesome for 20 years, but now is being killed, you cant destroy custom games, they kept the game alive all this time…

I have created this topic to tell blizzard: “Ey, you touched something and now custom maps freezes” because they might not know it. But i created it too because countless people is telling me it but they have no place to report it to Blizzard. So i encourage you all guys, to answer here, saying ALL the custom maps that have this freezing bug, in case that might help Blizzard to fix.

Thanks and welcome.

Maps affected:

  • Fall of Lordaeron.
  • Faction War.
  • Volsung’s map.
  • Impossible Bosses.
  • Robet’s Rebellion.
  • Northrend: The Conquest.
  • Lordaeron Tactics.
  • First War.
  • Siege of Lordaeron City.
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I am facing the same issue with my map.

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Dear Volsung,

Could you share, in your all knowing omnipotence, what’s the name of map you are working on is?
Since as far as i know, neither me, nor lads working in Blizzard’s QA or as this forum’s community managers, have been granted gift of mind reading or omnipotence

Sincerely,
That guy who barely ever posts

1 Like

Dear soldiersPL,

The name of my map is irrelevant, this is a custom map I recently started on 1.30 and is yet to complete.

There is only a few triggers, mainly oriented on spell creation and battle system. The map is almost empty. Still it freezes randomly for no reason.

Maps are not the problem, 1.31 is.

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Hi, Elbadruhel, I know you from zo_Om’s streams, I think.

The map looks interesting. But I have a few question.

  1. Where can the map be downloaded? You did not post a link either on Hive, or on Warhaven, or on epicwar. Incredibly unfortunate. Am I supposed to join Discord? Ugh, I hate it.
  2. How is an 8 faction Alliance supposed to be balanced against three other teams? It’s 8v4v4v2v2!
  3. How many units does a typical faction army field? Azeroth Wars, LTA/LTF/KTF and DAoW typically have 50+, up to 100. I heard the general sentiment that if LTA were remade this day, they would reduce it to manageable levels.
1 Like

Welcome,

I upload new versions of the map in my discord and sometimes in other discord where people gathers to play (the big one i was talking about) and i guess 1 time also in a forum… I dont want to upload it to hive or warhaven cause is not finished yet and im adding/fixing everything with every test game, if i upload something i want to to have quality (Blizzard do the same with your patches please).

The map is balanced using different features and maths, i have designed everything before starting coding so everything is studied and balanced. Bigger teams need more food used in economy to get the same gold as smaller teams, meaning that, in the end, they need to be more to fight properly, cooperate. On the other hand, bigger teams have more heroes and better micro. It also gives an inmersive feeling of the Alliance “being surrounded by enemies”.

Indeed, in most games, the Horde (2) defeates the Alliance (7 nowadays) cause they say “they are only 2 and weak, lets rush trolls and undeads”, leaving Dalaran alone with some dwarves, and they are overrun by orcs, when the rest of the Alliance wants to react, the Horde has released the interment camps already and it is too late.

It depends, i have calculated food costs and food provided by bases with some math programs to have balanced armies. But in general, factions in early game will have 80-100 food with 2 control groups, when some people has died, the map is expanded trough events and empires start to appear in late game, you can have more food and get 3 control groups, maybe 4 if massive.

Have in mind that is not the same for Horde (2 guys get all the food) than for Alliance (you must share among 7 factions). So the Horde will be an HORDE, with countless orcs, meanwhile Alliance will have smaller armies with better movility and more heroes and strategy, to attack different points at once, and only when they agree to assemble they will be enough to face the Horde.

Btw, the map is designed to be easy to understand, you can quickly know what kind of armour or weapon every unit has, i expent countless hours choosing them to fit balance in combat and be easily recognizable. And that also applies to “team power”, if Horde has 2 members, trolls 4 and alliance 8, one horde faction is even with 2 trolls and 4 alliances, easy (if they have same food ofc).

Greetings.

And dont forget to post what maps freeze please, if you see any of them in Zoom stream freezing, reply here so Blizzard can have an idea of why they all freeze.

Thanks!

3 Likes

i experienced a freeze in my map faction war as well.

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Nice, i add your “Faction War” to the list. Thanks for sharing.

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I believe it is time for the community to build a reference client for playing Warcraft III maps that provides detailed debug information any time that a crash occurs. That way, we can send debug logs to Blizzard when things go wrong.

Since it would be a remake it would not have exactly the same behaviors in all cases, or at least not at first. But I would love to have this reference client, honestly. Ghostwolf spent 7 years mining the MDX for us, and we can use what he has given us. For example, riv soft dot net has a map viewer using the Ghostwolf technology and you see the map and it looks pretty real. We can use the same render logic on the reference client, then we just need the game logic. If we code it in a language for beginners, like Java, it will be easier to debug than the more serious Blizzard client… and then we will finally be able to help Blizzard.

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The custom map “Impossible Bosses” also freezes on 4th Boss. Unfortunately , the map maker seems to be inactive.

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Active or not I don’t think he could do anything to resolve it.

It is not because of the map.

I have started creating a map which is mostly empty with only the different systems being made. My map is a turn-based RPG and the battle system is done. It used to work perfectly but since recent patches, for no reason, the game freezes randomly after 10-40min, even after being AFK with no acting.

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The problem is this “freezing issue” im reporting is not a crash, but a freezing. They broke something in the game with last patch that makes it freeze. We, the mapers, cant do anything to solve it because is a warcraft 3 issue, not a map issue. We cant track the crash log or debug the map cause the map is perfect. Is blizzard who needs to solve what they broke with last patch.

That is why i created this thread, so u all can answer and report bugs, so Blizzard notices they broke something and they can solve it, because if we “dont make noise” they wont know they ruined custom games, they wont solve the issue and custom games would be dead.

3 Likes

A hero appears!
I think I found the cause.

Triggers with a 0 second timeout periodic event will cause a freeze. Before they would only cause a freeze if left on. Some GUI trigger systems, for example some “stun system” I ran into, used such triggers to alter execution order. They would have the trigger turned off and turn it on for 1 iteration when required after which the trigger would turn itself off.

The bug now is that Warcraft III will freeze after ~15 minutes with any such event. Does not matter if the trigger is turned off, never turned on, never referenced or anything. As long as a single trigger anywhere in the map has a periodic time event with 0.00 period the map will freeze after around 15 minutes of play.

The only case I know of is with 0 second timeout periodic timed events. However it is possible other timeout will also generate this freeze. Avoid using a periodic timeout below 0.02 as that matches approximately with Warcraft III internal frames.

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Hi,

I am a bit skeptical, because I don’t use any “every 0 second” event.

But I do use one with “every 0.10 seconds” which is different from 0.01 second.

So… I am a bit confused.

i have gone over my map and changed 0.01 to 0.02. hope it stops my map from freezing but, only time will tell.

I will check my code. I made everything myself from scratch and i dont remember using such thing, i always tried to avoid “dangerous” stuff while triggering.

But if you are right, i will be really pleased and will share this new with all the mapping community.

Sadly, im not so sure about it being the reason of the freezing, cause my map froze once after 40 mins and other after 10, so is “not always around 15”…

Finally, if blizzard broke the periodic triggers and said nothing about it… What a shame.

Edit: after a fast check, i was right, im not using “every 0.01 seconds” at all. All the similar stuff that i use and could be conflictive is:

  • Every 1 seconds of game time.
  • Elapsed game time is 1 second.
  • Elapsed game time is 0 seconds.
  • Every 20 seconds of game time.

I guess the more dangerous could be the 0 seconds elpased… But it has been used always for launching stuff when the game starts so i doubt it might be the cause.

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Do you use any Wait for condition trigger with 0.01 check ?

As I mentioned, something is buggy with the timers. A reliable and reproduceable freeze at around 15 minutes is to have a trigger which is turned off with a periodic timed event with 0 timeout. This used to not cause any freeze but now does. Without knowing why it is freezing it is very well possible other more sensible values are also causing freezes at different times.

TriggerSleepAction, used by that action internally, operates completely differently so is almost certainly not related to this freeze.

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It only freezes if the trigger is off? Only with periodic timers? No time elapsed?

So far the only confirmed case I have is when a 0 period periodic timed event exists and the trigger is off. I also have tested and found that the trigger is not being run when the game freezes, which is what one would expect. As such one can guess this is some regression bug with how timers and timed events operate internally.

I tested the following and no freezes were observed over a half hour period…

  • Elapsed time of 0 event with trigger off.
  • Periodic timed event with 0.01 period with trigger off.
  • No triggers at all. This was a control.

Now just because the above did not show a freeze in the tests done does not mean they might not help cause a freeze. Without knowing why a turned off 0 period periodic timed event trigger causes the freeze in the first place there is a good chance that other less obvious or reproducible causes or configurations exist.

1 Like