When Gonna Fix Map Preview in Custom Games?

??? Too Hard For Blizzard??? Devs dont know how to develop game???

When possible, be technical.

For some background – to any skillful developer who sees this note:

Historically from around whenever Warcraft 3 originally released in 2002, and then for 18 years until 2020, it was the case that Warcraft III maps would allow the user to import an image file named “war3mapPreview” and then the map chooser UI (outside of game) would show this image instead of the map’s minimap.

When the Reforged team reprogrammed the game’s menu as a WebUI, they forgot to implement this feature and so it has been missing since 2020. The WebUI only loads “war3mapMap” image. It does not have the intelligent programming of its predecessor that would load “war3mapPreview” if present – ONLY on the preview screens – and then fallback to “war3mapMap” if there was no preview file.

So, now the same image file “war3mapMap” is always used both in the preview screen and in the ingame minimap for custom games on Reforged. There’s no longer a convenient solution to use 2 different images, and existing maps with 2 images are not properly supported! There’s a really hacky workaround some people have used since 2020 but I wouldn’t worry about that.

For any map made in the first 18 years of the game’s lifetime, the bug here is that the “war3mapPreview” image file is ignored and so the map presents itself to the user in a less flashy way (only the minimap).

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There is the BlzChangeMinimapTerrainTex native now, which allows you to change the minimap background texture ingame. But if you wanted to use the normal terrain-based background the editor generates, you will have to export and re-import it, since you will overwrite war3mapMap for the preview. And of course, this still breaks existing maps.

Thanks WaterKnight. In my mind I thought I addressed this when I said:

But you are absolutely correct. We have a workaround for this loss of functionality that Reforged caused in 2020 that Rem was reporting on when he created this thread.

For some other issues that Activision only recently broke on Reforged in the last few months, things are more pressing and we do not have a workaround. So even though Rem’s issue is pretty valid, and it is pretty stupid that this part of the game engine does not work how we would have wanted ever since when Reforged was made in 2020, it is true that this issue on this thread is less pressing than stuff that Activision broke in the last few months. The new things breaking in the past few months – unlike the topic of this thread – without much feature gain to replace them, almost feel like active sabotage even though surely it is just Activision apathy because Reforged is not a company priority for them.

Hopefully they will get things working again that were working a few months ago before they worry about getting things working that worked three years ago (such as this topic).