Hi Microsoft Activision and friends,
When I played Warcraft 3 back in the olden days it would play fine and smoothly on the old-timer computers from 2002. I was recently looking at my raspberry pi for fun. People online said that if they use adaptive technology to emulate x86 on ARM they were able to get 10-20 fps on Frozen Throne when playing it on the little raspberry pi (obviously using pre-reforged version so probably optimized for mini computers). I didn’t try downloading their stuff yet because I didn’t go through and evaluate all the dependencies for computer security yet, but when I tried making a Java game on LibGDX engine that uses war3 graphics and pretends to play and look like war3, it was seeing about 5 or 6 fps. That’s probably because I wrote it in Java and I leak memory on every frame.
Do you guys ever think about dusting off the old pre-Reforged code (the one with all the optimizations that could run on the modern equivalent of a potato or toaster) and compiling it for 64 bit arm architecture? I’d be curious if using compiler optimization flags might be able to push performance above 10-20 fps into the range where it would be really nice. That way, if I travel around or go on long vacations, I could travel around with little gaming computers that fit in the palm of my hand but can play Warcraft 3 and hopefully also map editor. I think this would be really fun and it’s not really a new technology or feature request like all the people asking for Naga campaigns on Reforged – I’m basically just curious if we could have like the thing that already exists, but for a different platform. Also, raspberry pi’s cost like 80 dollars so if you wanted to test this in the office it would be probably super easy. The idea of an 80 dollar gaming pc that plays this game seems fun, and possible. I really think it’s my own fault that all that Java code is getting 5 fps. If I lower the resolution down and play at 800x600 instead of 4k, it was great and played fine on the Java rewrite. How would it be on the original game targeting this hardware? Maybe 60 fps, maybe perfect, at 800x600. The game looked fine at that resolution when I was a kid anyway.
Anyway, I think it would be cool to try something like this. Obviously if you guys are going to wait until the next evolution of DeepseekR1 learns to decompile code and figures out how to make all closed source programs open source so that people could just recompile them on micro computers themselves, I would imagine that’s coming but probably still a few years away. So if you can’t hold the line financially at the Activision subsidiary without pretending that’s never going to happen and continuing to pretend like proprietary code makes sense, I get it, but I was just curious if you had anybody who already took a look at this. I, uh… kinda miss having World Editor on my little micro PC, and I’m pretty sure it’s more powerful than the big towers of 2002 when I learned to use World Editor.
Best,
-Retera
Edit:
PS: As a sort of similar problem, I’ve been playing with a lot of USBC to Mouse/Keyboard/Monitor adapters the last few years, and I think the situation with my phone is quite similar to the Raspberry pi situation. Generally I don’t use the phone for this because it seems like people tend to only build software for taking advantage of the user, so it would be much more difficult to run World Editor on the phone even though the phone is more powerful, because of artificial constraints in what the device can and cannot do rather than technology constraints. Thus we’d all sooner trust a windows PC – or a raspberry pi – than our phone to play a game. But it might be an interesting thought to consider that the “docked phone” universe has similar issues to micro PC linux universe. All of these would be spaces where a straightforward and optimized version of World Editor and the game would be very nice.