Hi loquacious,
On August 17th, 2022 the new people (who replaced the Blizzard Classic Games folks who were fired in 2021) made their first new patch on Reforged. These folks are new to working on Reforged, and after their patch a bunch of stuff all over was crashing. They based their patch on an experimental work-in-progress version of Reforged that the previous team had worked in on 2020-2021, but they could not talk to those other people and didn’t know the exact extent of the changes.
Included in the changes that they pushed live on August 17th, 2022 were changes such as:
- World Editor would crash and lose any unsaved data whenever a user opened the “Gameplay Constants” menu, opened the Damage/armor values table, then closed the table popup
- Warcraft III Reforged itself would cache any file loaded from any filepath during play, so all of the game subsystems that change between maps and load different files with the same file paths would completely break and crash all sorts of things. In some cases, opening a file from World Editor, then saving the file, then opening the file again would load the previous version because all file loads were cached. Also, this would probably cause memory usage of the game and editor to gradually spin out of control and crash eventually if they were not periodically restarted, if I recall.
- Unit Data in custom maps (and other Object Editor data) is stored in a new format split into 2 parts, so that maybe sometimes some of the data is lost
- Animated texture surfaces in the classic graphics mode (such as water, like the Naga Building Birth models) fail to load because all 3D models in the game are in a new format
These changes were included in the unfinished version of the game that the new people pushed live in 2022 despite forum reports about the problems, because their job wasn’t to keep Reforged running. Their job was to publish some form of “Ladder” so that legally the Activision company could no longer be sued for false advertising of taking a game that previous worked and eliminating its ladder play and then claiming it would still have ranked or whatever. All these changes described above that break all sorts of things had to be included in the game because the new people or person in 2022 probably consisted of just one guy, and that guy didn’t have time to cherrypick out these problems. He had to push into production the unfinished code from the previous team because included in their code was the Ladder and he had to push a Ladder to production without having enough time and money to really go in and make totally sure that it worked flawlessly in all the cases. That’s why there were so many forum reports at the time of “wins count as losses” and other funny problems – this guy probably only wrote 50% of the ladder code anyway and was trying to just push live what the previous people made, even though he couldn’t talk to them about how it was made.
So, in a world where all that stuff was broken, this small team of one or more guys then in the spring of 2023 tried to fix the issues I described above after pushing them into production and ignoring bug reports from the PTR. With that in mind, it’s totally possible that they pushed into production something that broke the Variables function you are using, or maybe it was already broken by the previous folks in 2020. I don’t remember. But my point is that this is not really a time for fixing a problem like what you are having, when there is so much else going on.
Generally, money and resources have to be spend on Arclight Rumble Mobile instead, because profiting off of a mobile game is easier and so anyone working on it has more money and more ability to do things, so it is necessarily forced on any managers to defund or otherwise cut people who might be working on the Reforged because having those people work on the Reforged costs money, but doesn’t make the money in a relative sense.
So, nobody is going to fix your variables button, man. The people who want to care, will be forced not to care. You could consider using a Trigger Editor made by fans, because they don’t have the same financial pressure to stop working/stop caring. Better Triggers by LazZ looked good when I passed over it, although I have never personally used it.
EDIT: Also, wait, the array size isn’t actually used, is it? Just set values past the end of the array and the array will still work or whatever…
