Greetings from terrainer community. We do love working on custom environment within Warcraft 3 engine. We’re hella grateful for 64 tile per map support. It works, it’s great, it’s in fact a small gamechanger in form of almost lifting limitation that was annoying for the last 2 decades. What we have now is more then enough.
If you guys from Classic Games Team are onto modder things, I came specifically to request one more feature that will change the mapmaking forever.
Unlimited/More Terrain Tile Slots
For over 2 decades, mapmakers implement new tiles into custom maps by replacing vanilla tiles from existing tilesets. I don’t need to mention that it’s burdened by countless limitations, including fixed buildable/unbuildable tiles, allocated cliff tiles, fixed number of tiles per tileset, fixed number of tilesets and on. If I remember correctly, the game supports 161 tiles [+ Blight tiles] in all tilesets and while it may sound high, it’s really not. Many project leaders want to use both vanilla tiles and new ones, so replacing is sometimes a difficult tradeoff. Current system is also very not intuitive, requires messing with file paths, does not allow to alter name of the tile [Grass, DirtGrass and on] and lacks anykind of QoL.
TLDR: This system sucks.
So what do I propose?
Option 1: Free the Terrain.slk.
Implement full support for custom Terrain.slk imported into map or campaign file. Implement reading it ingame as part of map or a campaign and implement reading it in WE via localfiles.
This far, we can change if a given tile is buildable and things like that, but it’ still difficult to work with, so enable full control of tile properties. Still, the most important things are: Give mapmakers an option to add/remove tilesets, define amount of tiles per tileset, add new tiles entries to existing tilesets, define custom file path and tile name.
Option 2: The Dummy Tilesets
Add 10-20 new dummy tilesets, each one with 15 or so slots, specify fixed dirt/cliff tiles, add blank textures for them ingame that we can replace the old way. This option is obviously worse, but will work and mapmakers are used to working like that.
Option 3: Whatever you guys can figure out.
I’m just a humble fan and modder. I do not know how to work with the engine directly and I have no idea what limitations you guys face working with the engine, so I presume the terrainer community would welcome any working option you can implement.
I don’t know if you guys lurk around fan communities, but if you do, you’re definitely more then aware that Warcraft 3 gathered many terrain artists of spectacular skills :]. We want to keep making custom environments, express our creativity and deliver the best-looking maps to the players as we possibly can. I’m sure a feature like I described would be an excellent followup for the 64-tiles per map change from the last major patch. Unlimited control over terrain tiles would open many possibilities and enable mapmakers to accomplish great things.