Blizzard would be perfectly fine regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit. The problems are coming from it eating itself during all of this.
wow thats amazing. you even have the animations run at smooth framerates. better than blizzard could manage. is this project alive and serious?
This is 2022. Money is everything. A former Blizzard employee suggested to me that what I was doing would only be shut down if it made money, which it does not, so that means I should be in the clear. Another former Blizzard employee simply said, âBeware the eye of Activision.â
What I can tell you is that I really did build the code side of what was in my video, although not the 3D assets and unit stats. This was made using the OpenGL library and several wrappers on top of it to make programming easier. I call to glDrawElements and such to display the 3d data into the world. I based it all on the Hive Workshop âView in 3Dâ open source program used to preview Warcraft III models for download on their website, and then I expanded that viewing technology to display maps and a game experience as best as I could manage as a weekend hobby project.
But money is everything. I was able to spend my weekends building this thing for fun because of the good graces of my employer who I worked hard for 5 days a week for years.
Now my employment has been terminated for the new year. I make no guarantee to you that I would continue my weekend hobby project in any way. I might if I get another job where I work hard enough at the day job to support this kind of weekend leisure, or I might not.
But if you read the history on it, as far as I understand Warcraft III was hacked together in 3 months using an existing 3d render system for a prior scrapped project. So the hard part is getting a fitting 3d engine â and I just copied mine from Hive Workshop model download project (mdx-m3-viewer on github).
So thats why if you have a good 3d engine, you can program something that plays kind of like Warcraft 3 in some weekends. For the combat data, I used Mojo Stormstoutâs guide to Warcraft III which is a public web page that includes the equation for the armor and damage on each attack swing. I donât know if itâs actually totally correct but it feels pretty OK when I play it.
I recommend not relying on me for your hopes and dreams. But if you wanted to follow the project in that video, you can go to Hive Workshop and click on Tools and from there click on the âWarsmash Mod Engineâ which is listed as a âHosted Projectâ at the top. It has its own forum, which although Iâve been working on the project for almost 2 years really only has only two posts by two other users in the entire forum. There is not a social media that would draw people to that, I guess. Again because of money, people who have the technical kind of skill to make a Warcraft III clone are not going out of their way to work with me. The tech prototype in that video you see has no business plan. It has no way to recover funds to support people who contribute. The only guiding principle is basically this one guy, me on a different account, who wants to mod Warcraft III for fun and not for any financial gain. And so in our society thereâs not really any reason someone already skilled in knowing how would contribute to what I was trying to make. Or if they did, there are 2000 ways to make a lightbulb. So there are probably 2000000 ways to make an RTS. I think that if some of the really skilled people read through my code they would be really upset because they prefer to write the code in a different âbetterâ way that they believe is more Right. A former Blizzard employee kind of suggested to me that Reforged programmers were the same with the Reforged and rewrote parts the code over and over in different ways because so much of what Warcraft III is was hacked together in 3 months back in 2002.
So I donât really know how to motivate anyone else to help me is what Iâm saying. In fact, maybe I donât even want to because I donât know how to trust them to work towards the same vision for the project. I had really smart people (who I liked modding Warcraft III with!) tell me that I needed to support dynamic shadows and Reforged HD assets and a bigger command card and selecting more than 12 units and all this other stuff. And what I find the closer I get to hacking together a Warcraft 3 clone type of game is that a lot of these limits exist for technical reasons. Itâs not that they canât be surpassed â obviously they can â but it takes longer and more time to do so. And thatâs when I start to realize that if I want a moddable Warcraft III where I can do source code mods basically, then I would rather have a moddable one but with the 2002 gameâs limitations than to have not finished because I spent so much longer trying to build some perfect ideal that in the end was never even like the game I wanted to begin with.
And I look at all the hate for the Warcraft III Reforged and realize this is our society now. This hatred is who we are as a people. Even if I accomplished my vision, the hatred would simply become aimed at me. All I can do with this hobby is to entertain myself, since I donât know how to rely on anybody else to want what I want.
So itâs hard. I canât promise future content to you. Happy new year.
Here is a new years video of WarChasers multiplayer with a connection to a server 750 miles away. Get inspired and make what you want, donât rely on me:
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ive been working for a couple of mod teams over the period of 8 years, one mod team consisting of over 20 active developers - so i know the issues around this kind of stuff - but also that there are very dedicated very talented people around.
look at what the half life remake âblack mesaâ got together. they started out as a rather small project, now they got support from valve and can sell their remake on steam to recoup some of the development costs. of course, in this case, activision is ashoe and valve is a saint, so counting on anything except a lawsuit from activision is a terrible bet.
if this is to gain any traction outside of a small weekend experiment, this has to leave the warcraft universe. the rough base gameplay of wc3 cannot be copyright protected, the art, however, needs to be redone completely for it to not be killed. this is a pretty big project, but feasable with enough dedicated people with enough time to spend. today kickstarter, patreon can offer some financial help for a startup. i see the biggest issue in the coding part of the game, to ship a functional community map editor and custom games - this is probably what the project needs to lift off.
it might also turn out as a colossal waste of time and money. but thats the fun in it.
Frankly I believe you should apply for a job at Frost Giant, your work is super impressive and I think youâd be able to do a brilliant job at that place.
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That would require people working seriously on the game. I would not be surprised if it was fixed in some internal build that never was, or even might be, released.
A line of code does not change itself. It still needs someone to make that change.
Why did they bother adding ladder to begin with then? It is pretty much about restoring what was there, not necessarily making it better.
Most people would not care if the 3D background was replaced with a static image and the UI might look like a 3 year old scribbled it. They do care that they cannot play custom campaigns at all at the moment.
Firefox is notorious for being the most resource hungry browser.
Edge used to be the fastest browser engine. But Microsoft gave up and uses Chrome. As such Chrome inherited that title.
This has nothing to do with it using a browser engine. That has to do with a lack of pollish/effort.
It could use the fanciest custom graphic engine with top range AI scaling and ray tracing and still have the gears go around in a non-meshing way.
The old screens look really dated on modern displays due to how low resolution they are. That was kind of the entire point of Reforged, just it was not done quite right.
Browsers work offline perfectly fine. Nothing with them inherently requires an internet connection.
Iron man made his suit in a cave with a bunch of scraps.
StarCraft II did it eventually (well only 1-2 years after release). It is not difficult but does require effort. If the development team were allowed to keep at it for an additional 2 years I am sure the result would impress. Just they did not have that much time and it likely does not make sense financially for them to have had either.
That is what Blizzard thought with Heroes of the Storm. Turned out DotA Players are just DotA players and will never stop playing DotA 2. No matter how good a RTS game they make is, Age of Empries will still keep a large share of the RTS player base. The RTS player base is very small so it is unlikely any modern AAA budget games can exist in such space. Even Age of Empires IV seems to have had a limited/smaller budget compared with the top FPS best sellers.
Most of the interest is generated by a vocal minority. This has proved the case time and time again.
For example bring any big title game to Linux and it sounds like you will get a huge player base. Turns out although Linux players generated over 80% of the comments on a game, they account for less than 0.1% of the player base and also generate 90% of the crash reports. They are no indicator how well a game will sell.
I do not think they can stop you sourcing the artwork from a legit WC3 install you own and using it. This is what OpenTTD did for the original transport tycoon.
However to reach the next level at some stage an entirely new set of assets would need to be made that is not tied to the original assets so even people without Warcraft III could still play. From then on the sky is the limit as nothing stops the asset set being extended far beyond what was in Warcraft III.
when you start thinking strictly about melee maps with one race as a starting point, the amount of assets you need to have a functional game is actually quite manageable, that is, if you like mirrors 
you need the faction with its units, some creeps, the map tileset and the prop models for the map.
the extreme clutter in wc3 comes with the different tile sets with the huge variety of tileset specific models / creeps / props and campaign models.
Well considering how starved of proper support we are i would rather them fix things that are more irreplaceable then not, if you get what i mean.
I think youâre sorely mistaken, the problem is that the Custom Campaigns providing people the option to load in a 3D animated background as a model or to reskin such creations which they have been done on pre 1.32 patches, or with the scorescreen UI are lost features, not some random cosmatic. it helps with the immersion of the product.
I will very well be far more vocal about the scorescreen however as it directly also damages what i wanted to do with my map. which is centered around actually trying to make a custom faction based on different factions a reasonably balanced multiplayer experience. thing is, i can no longer create those scorescreen icons specifically fine tuned for my brand new faction logos/representations anymore, iâm actively robbed of trying to do something i could previously that wouldâve given my map a greater feeling of quality. and something i would have enjoyed doing greatly.
So no, dear DSG, they do it, they do it properly.
Well i wouldnât get into technicals with this matter considering you probably know far more then me, but i made the switch long ago from Giggle when i realized having more then 8 tabs pinned slow down my browser far more then it should, and maybe Google updated their game since then, but i was continusly kept in by the features and functions of FireFox. if i wanted it to consume less resources i would adjust it so through the settings.
Yes yes i heard this many times before, you orcs will never learn
Jokes aside, insisting a âperfectlyâ executed version of a gold standard webUI menu based game is exactly what out of all the games in the world, what a remaster for Warcraft III needed of all the things it needed. now you didnât insist this, but if i failed to explain to you before, it wasnât why i was opposed to a WebUI browser in the first place. everything can work with enough money and effort, right ? really shame that a decision to cut costs for a UI that would have been cheaper then a proper UI ended up having a worse outcome. :^)
I primarily oppose this webui because of what game is it being remastered for, if my guess is correct, the menus before were part of the main game, and hence they can contact eachother far more, and the og uiâs did this to a great extent. Why did they have to completely redesign and split apart a part of the game, from the game, only to find themselves exporting something with less quality. and less features.
If i had to wager anything it would be their initial ideas to implement functions and mechanics for ingame purchases of skins, and otherwise future planned many many versions of such skins and other cosmatics, that never came to pass in the first place. thankfully so, but at what cost.
Technical reasons could also nod to the original main menus requiring some form of updates and texture/modeling work to increase resolution and figure out the width and hight of the situation, but for anyone that is even a rookie kitebash artist this is a no brainer issue, it can also be a lack of experience ⌠and i canât believe iâm about to say this, but a lack of experience from Blizzard, to work on their own models. i connect this pattern because with the release of the Classic variants of some of the premium skin content its laughably obvious Blizzard had hardly any idea how to create GOOD classic models. as opposed to following a hollow track for HD ones.
So they basically chose to tare apart the main UI of the game from the game and make something entirely new because their visual overhaul ambitions (which were not fit for the game) and because they wanted to sell cosmatics. 
Well done.
Poor indie company Blizzard needed some chunkâocheese to supply their expensive AAA game, that must have been why they actively decided to create a more expensive set of models and damage everyone, oh they love us so much. oh wait.
Artisically they look far better then the Reforged ones, resolution ones, ITS A PIECE OF FKIN IMAGE STOP TRYING TO JUSTIFY SOMEONE BEING PHYSICALLY DISABLED TO REWORK THEM TO HIGHER RESOLUTIONS. its starting to get embarrassing considering even iâm reaching the level of Photoshop mastery to use it, and a combination of other tools + very specific AI upscaling to be able to fully recreate precise versions of art work based on existing ones that are higher resolution.
If the entire point of Reforged was to look high ress while giving people depression for anyone whoâs staring at their GOD AWFUL UI for more then 5 minutes, job well done.
Scorescreens of the original game had also a lost function on the top left that, if you had played the match under certain team color functions, and didnât remember who was who by the end of the match, you could switch the scorescreen team colours to adjust accordingly.
Furthermore like i stated before, icons of factions or otherwise being customizeable through the map and having them appear on the scorescreen, brilliant, scorescreen artwork that is faction specific⌠brilliant.
No, if they wanted to do this, they would have to provide a fair chance to both classic, and Reforged through the settings when people switched, because forcing one visuals was not done ingame, and it wouldnât have been done in the menus, they just had no bloody care to do it and decided to force a one size fits all asthetic. hell, these ladders and player profiles you keep insisting it being worth to re add also need a properly higher resolution version of all the player profile icons not only for Reforged but for Classic aswell, which is exactly why those 256x256 icons of 5 classic icons were mined out long time ago. but alas âsomething something hurr durr old menus look outdatedâ
Well the entire point of a browser is to⌠but you know, iâm not going to go there.
it does not change the fact that it runs worse in offline mode, and not in online mode.
You can see how a person would draw a conclusion like that. however if youâre saying that it could have been made to work equally good across the board online and offline, alright, i dont have much to say to that.
Maybe, iâm not exactly sure if i agree with the developers original mindset of 2018, something that i have been developing as a theory in me as this whole notion of âthe 2018 vision would have been done only if we had moneyâ ⌠for what ? i mean lets go extreme, possibly fully rendering Reforged HD models on display in the menus ? absolutely insane idea. (not in a good way)
Ye for sure, though Age4 provides alot of quality on display ⌠i mean what do we compare it to Call of Duty Vanguard ? i guess ? it probably had a higher budget, or Battle Field 5 or whatever the new ones is, gotta tell you though man, some of these audience⌠they surprise me to say the least.
The notion you put forth that what the Hots people and Blizzard did wouldâve stood up to those other Mobas is mistaken in a part because, they were late to the party, too prideful of themselves that they rejected IceFrog to develop Dota for them and paid the price.
Hots is still quite a âmasterpieceâ even though i havenât played it, in terms of production and quality. which leads back to your correct assessment of audience just doing what they do best.
But War3 is not a sequel, and it was not late to the party, the remaster for this legendary title had people who actively spoke against pre orders fail to the trap, it was heavily anticipated. and in terms of RTS âproductsâ it was ahead of the curve. the problem is, both by original developer vision and higher management lack of faith to provide budget, it was overambitious and didnât stick with its best guns, aka trying to do things best fit to help their custom games makers. all the while feeling safe that they also had their hardcore melee audience.
War3 if it had not been dealt a massive blow like this would have outlasted all those other RTSâs for sure. with ⌠almost a ludicrously insane level of player support as of now in terms of very specific individuals working their Booty Bays off to output content, now it only struggles to keep its head above the water.
Even marketting wise we werenât really done justice as the only thing casual people saw from War3 was âoh kool culling, many cutscenes, such zoom, very detail.â instead of âOH LOOK, INFINITE AMOUNT OF CUSTOM CONTENTâ a weird comparison but isnât war3 a perfect balance between minecraft and Skyrim ? in terms of ease to access moddable long term survivable game.
But let me point something out as an off the road interesting critique would be their decision to switch from BLP to DDS and PopcornSFX and not BLP2 and possibly even wowâs model format.
Gotta tell you this, i dont care if one is propritery and or not, and if one is open source âindustry common standardâ or not. doesnât matter at all to me, i asked any map maker i had this conversation with, would they rather have BLP2 which would in return provide an extreme majority of World of Warcrafts unlimited amount of content to backport, or DDS that shrinks models better because RF HD models had unnecessary amounts of polygons and details dumped on them like badly maked up can of paint, myself and the others always sided with preferring to have the insane moddibility potential gained from having a less troublesome access to now 15+ years of raw content from a billion dollar mmo.
Holy~Wow. we wouldnât even need to learn PopcornSFX (which we still didnât because it defeats the point of an easy to mod game that is war3) because we would have a near infinite amount of special effects models and textures that we could use with ease.
Iâm just saying man, the genre had a recent good surge. if you want to compare everything to the success rates of Call of Duty, youâre a stinky comparison man. if such a title even exists. >:(
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You know a lot of modern games use DDS right? StarCraft II used it a decade ago already. You can even export directly to DDS in many applications straight out of the box. GIMP being one of them. It took until a few years ago for the original WC3 BLP format to be fully reverse engineered. Until then people were relying on guess work and writing buggy third party tools to interface with BLP.
The oddity is why they have not ported all assets of World of Warcraft to DDS. The modern BLP2 layers are practically the same as a DDS file using similar real time compression techniques.
PopcornSFX is for special effects. It has nothing at all in common with DDS or BLP. It is closer to some of the features that were built into MDX/MDL, but more advanced.
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Ye they probably do, i dont mind that, i was just telling from a modding perspective for Warcraft 3 specifically, i would much rather that we got the BLP2 to work with then the specific type of DDS chosen for RF which wasnât even the best option because it negatively impacted classic models.
Quite a lot of moddibility and technology could have been backported to war3. but that was a key thing for me personally, just imagine people having near instant access to WoWâs model base because of shared image formats⌠Dear Lord.
Though in terms of community efforts you could argue it would make Hive more âlazyâ and there is merit to that, but iâm just dreaming.
wow⌠those memoriesâŚ
There is no âfutureâ of Blizzard RTS. Itâs very likely that they will NEVER make another RTS. I heard some gossip that Blizzard âpitchedâ a new RTS to Activision and they declined. Notice that these days they have to âpitchâ projects to Bobby Kotick. Itâs the end of Blizzard as we know it. There will be Overwatch 2, but there will be no Warcraft 4.
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One day⌠in 10 years⌠when all this will be forgottenâŚ
How did it negatively impact them? It traded JPEG artefacts for DXTC artefacts and better compression rations for less video memory usage. It also traded hacky tools for well made commonly used ones.
They already do. Use some WoW third party tool to export it to PNG or some common image format, and then use GIMP to export it as DDS. Making an image into a compatible DDS is not a problem, unlike BLP where even to this day most tools still do not format them correctly.
It was a bad trade, and its obvious, TGA or TIF to BLP works well for classic textures while the same to the type of DDS chosen variant for Reforged works bad for classic textures.
This is why there is more weird artifacting and messy situation created for spell effects, hero glows, and many textures, its apparent for a sharp eye even after they âfixedâ things.
Conversion for classic textures from a lossless to DDS is worse then loseless to blp.
Da but you need to jump through more hoops then if we just had BLP2 in the first place.
Your excessive OCD on blp format is becoming visibly paranoid at this point. well for many too, its gotten to the point that you just want to see some random open source image format without pre testing to see which of its variants would have worked best for both Classic and HD textures, just to boot blp out.
While BLP2 was most likely very specifically tuned version of DDS to make sure it works well with the signature Warcraft style of model making which persisted in WoW from War3.
And please dont downplay the host of tools we have available that convert image formats to blp or vice versa by dumping the word hacky in there. try to add ImperialBLP the feature to drag and drop images to save instead of going around tossing the word hacky hack for the 8th billion time.
Weâre a player created content community, outputing quality content by mixing together and using a verity of tools that arenât exactly perfect ~ its literally a part of our DNA.
Examples? From a purely image point of view (not in game as that had API/shader changes that messed up some stuff).
BLP used by Warcraft III was a flawed format for many reasons.
- Supported palleted colour compression with bitmap alpha. I do not think this was natively supported by 3D GPUs of the time and likely requires shader emulation to support currently. Most likely converted to uncompressed textures so had all those disadvantages.
- Used linear BGRA channel JPEG. JPEG compression was not designed for this.
- BLP was loaded as linear RGB texture. This was a limitation of the time. Modern textures should be sRGB for better dynamic range.
BLP2 was just an extension of BLP1 used by Warcraft III. Eventually they added support for similar formats as used by DDS since everyone uses them due to the real time advantages of reducing GPU memory bandwidth and improving cache performance.
Does not make them correct by all means. For example BLPLab lacks support for 1 and 4 bit alpha with palleted textures. ImpreialBLP was a proof of concept. The fact BLPLab struggles to even open high resolution JPEG is amazing as that would mean some internal performance issues with JPEG decoding.
Of course I would fix BLPLab, should it have been open sourceâŚ
is there BLP in Gimp? thereâs DDS at least
Best example of poor conversion result is the Hero glow images. its not just about the messed up shaders, dear DSG, the way in which it warps things especially special effects textures actually degrades their quality in a way that you start to see different results.
People might shrug it off, but almost every single texture in Reforged right now is at the very least a 10% more artifacted version of the same textures on the blp ones.
Terrain tilesets are also hit with this, missile projectiles are hit with this, the effect of it on models is not instantly noticeable for people, but its there. i looked on some textures, the weird artifacting sometimes effects a part of the texture that wasnât used. weird to point this out but i had to.
W3Champions actually imports a hoast of BLP Hero glows on local files that fixes the issue for people. interestingly enough.
This is all about pin point tweaking that they simply had no time to do, in order to find the best solution, and in part, could not do even if they wanted to because of ⌠the weird insistence that classic models must also convert from blp to dds. there was also a theory on whether or not the textures were directly converted from lossy to another lossy. but i personally dont know, and so far i was indeed able to identify more artifacting of classic textures from source to dds then to blp even if BLP does not enjoy the same advantages as DDS does.
I didnât dispute the flaws, but your response missed my point.
Ye, doesnât change the fact that it works better for models and textures of that style. aka, a reliance that the handpainted texture would do the heavy lifting. you said its a different version of DDS before, if so then its most likely performing far better for classic and similar textures then the version of DDS used in Reforged.
I said BLP 2 would be infinitely a better choice for the community. less hoops, more rewards, but in a scenario that WoW never existed, my argument would just turn into me researching to see which variant of DDS worked better, and then coming here and suggesting that this is what should have been used.
Yeah i know they are flawed in their own right, iâm not sure how much will and faith you have for the community but an update to imperial blp would be nice. :^)
IIRC there might be an extension that adds blp support to gimp but i dont work with it alot, i just work with Photoshop most of the times and my images are just pngâs converted to either BLP or DDS.
curiosity: which is the lossless compression algorithm for DDS?
Both DDS and BLP are a lossy image format to my knowledge.
PNG, TGA, BMP, or even photoshops PSD are lossless image formats.
A lossy format means if you save from a PNG to DDS or BLP for example, you lose a small bit of quality, and not alot of tools can do this other one iâm about to say, though it probably exists but its a bit more rare, but lossy to lossy save is far more harmful.
There was a speculation Blizzard converted BLP textures of the og game straight to DDS which is just bad.
Anyway, for your information also, take into account that DDS has many variants.
A one time save from a lossless to lossy is usually okay if you first confirm the type of image youâre doing it with and whatâs best for it, DDS for example doesnât handle images that have more repetetive or similar things going on in it, the worst thing you can give to DDS to convert is a pitch black image for example.
BLP is fine on that front but it doesnât have DDSâs feature that it can load straight into your GPU.