Hello War3 Team,
Warcraft III technology is plagued by too many use cases. Surely you may be reminded of this as you deal with Patch 1.33 bugs and problem reports – users report bugs with stuff that sometimes you don’t care about, but they obviously do care!
I think I have a possible solution. After almost 20 years spending time in World Editor, I was able to get Warcraft III style of gameplay implemented in a different game engine just based on the feel of it and the modding community’s modding tools:
In this video, a number of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos beta assets are loaded, as well as custom assets from the Hive Workshop. The 3D game world is being rendered by a combination of LibGDX and custom LWJGL shaders in those game engines. But since I do not own these assets – they are Blizzard Warcraft 3 assets – I would always call this a super advanced “Warcraft 3 mod” in name only even though it’s actually a game on a different engine.
Now, we get to why I am here. Although I was able to program this game to play a combat simulator based on the published equations for Warcraft 3 combat stats from an official Blizzard site, to my knowledge there is not a public website that lists the computer instructions to implement the Warcraft 3 spells and abilities. They would have to be re-invented individually on a per-ability basis in the alternative “mod engine” for this.
Do you think that your company could publish redacted portions of the source code of the oldest, most old version that you have of Frozen Throne or Reign of Chaos from the 2002-2003 years? What would help me are basically just the vast list of Ability classes, their hard-wired interactions, and the gameplay engine functions. It would be great and probably even easier if the published portions of this were not able to be compiled (although I doubt any of us today have licenses to VC++2002 or whatever it was anyway).
If you could publish an ancient version’s guts like that so that people who wanted to do deeper level Warcraft 3 modding could move their custom games to an open source emulator of the game, then you might be able to shed support for the Map Editor on Reforged which could save you a lot of time in your future endeavors to maintain Warcraft 3. At that point, you could say it was up to the Warcraft 3 modding community to fix their own obscure game engine bugs, and let those users who want to rely on complex, ancient code behaviors in the game engine to just launch their maps using a source port of the game.
As far as I understand it legally, a source port engine like this would NEVER be able to contain Warcraft 3 assets, so really anyone who wanted to run this would always need to first buy Warcraft 3 from Blizzard to obtain the 3D assets anyway . It is not my intention to reduce your corporate revenue or take anything away from Warcraft 3 as a brand – rather, I simply wish I could make Warcraft III game mods for fun that I would feel no need to ask you to support… since I get the impression, you are always quite busy and it may not be worth your time to support Warcraft 3 mods made by people like me.
I thank you for your time.
