Hey there. I was watching a video of myself play a game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpYcHygKKtM
And while I was watching, I was reminded how the water elemental attack does not look correct on Reforged because your engineer put a typo in the shaders. The video above is a game that I played myself on a separate program. It’s like a pixar movie rendering of a game of Warcraft 3 and not the real game, in a way. The scene is created with glDrawElements(...) using some OpenGL and not with DirectX like you guys usually do. Rather than some disassembler or whatever, I tried to think about playing the game and write it down how I remembered it. So, that’s why we get funnies! In the video I have some funnies, like how “Call to Arms” cannot cancel for all the Peasants at one time (Unique case mode, oops!) or how the Peasant who tranforms to Militia and back loses the ability to right-click a tree to chop wood and he attacks the tree instead, and then is later left standing after he destroys the tree and wastes the lumber.
So, in my video, we have all these funnies, but on a serious note your engineers messed up in 2020. I think it was right in the turn of 2019 to 2020. In the original Frozen Throne game, there was a formatting issue on the BLP texture. The member of the modding community who built the BLP parser used in my video above explained it to me as a problem with sRGB color space. Essentially, the Warcraft III specific BLP files in the old days were created using a non-sRGB color space set of data stored with flags that indicate that it is sRGB even though it is not, or something very strange like this.
As an engine builder just trying to load the graphics and call glDrawElements(...) to make a nice video of a pretend world like we see above, in my case how the sRGB issue manifests itself is that if my reference client reads from Reforged DDS data then I have to read directly (sane case, newer stuff) but if my reference client reads from Classic BLP data then I have to apply this sRGB fix that they gave me, which essentially greatly darkens the visual image compared to its original form.
In early versions of my reference client when I was trying to make changes parallel to your engineers in 2019-2020, I accidental ran the sRGB color space fix on the DDS textures too which made them appear very weirdly dark compared to how they should be.
I think I am not the only one who makes this mistake. Back then, in the early Reforged beta, the particle effects on every Classic Graphics model were too dark. And I don’t have your code, so I don’t know why they were dark, but it is easy to guess that you guys probably applied this color space fix to the image data and kept applying it even on the new Reforged DDS texture format.
Anyway, at the time in all the panic, your engineer guy fixed the bug where all particles rendered super dark, so that most of the Classic Graphics started to look half decent again. But he did not make a parallel corresponding fix for the MDLKEY_RIBB chunks (“Ribbon Emitter”) and then in all the fuss with the release of Reforged obviously at some point it became old hat that people just universally accept that every single classic graphics with a ribbon on it is going to render incorrectly, I guess.
So, tonight I was sitting back and I was watching the video of myself playing my reference client that I made to be a rebel against you. And I was looking at the Water Elemental thinking how it looked very nice and cool, and then I remembered that in my reference client his attack looks how the original artists intended in the Reign of Chaos / Frozen Throne game even though unlike my reference client you guys at the office were not able to maintain the “Classic Graphics” in the panic in 2020 to retain the original visual intention likewise.
So I thought I would mention it to you, in case that inspires you to go and see for yourself that all your ribbons are unusually dark with a dark tint that is not applied for example to MDLKEY_PRE2 (“ParticleEmitter2”) nodes. And if you use Git Blame or whatever, you will see that in late 2019 or maybe right at the start of 2020, your guy in the office applied this code change to avoid making these “Particle Emitter2” nodes so dark – which was great and fixed them! – but then he forgot to make the same change to the ribbons.
I know that in your heart, you know that I know that you are a customer support employee who can’t do anything and only I can do something because my rebellion makes me more powerful than your corporation – so my Water Elemental attack looks pretty and yours does not – but I wanted to mention it in case it ever inspires you to maybe look your boss in the eye so that later he looks his boss in the eye, until they look the boss’s boss in the eye and decide to try to preserve “Classic Graphics” for the same reason people go to museums even though it does diddly squat for increasing the bottom line financially.
Thanks guys, happy gaming.