14 ms·

Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

256 points by axython 7y ago

mylons 7y ago
dota lives
- zormino 7y ago
  wintermaul lives!
  - djdjrjdjxajwn 7y ago
    Legion TD Mega lives!!
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  When I was tinkering with dota map, it used abysmal number of various hacks. I doubt that it'll work.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    Blizzard knows their audience. I fully expect that the DotA maps are among their test cases. :)
yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
Oh I’d be thrilled to play WC3 Tower Defence again. Those were loads of fun.
- unixhero 7y ago
  Never tried it. Link?
  - SXX 7y ago
    He talking about any TD like famous Green TD: https://www.epicwar.com/maps/159097/ https://www.epicwar.com/maps/159097/
    - unixhero 7y ago
      Thank you!
  - yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
    They came in many flavours, but Cube Defense is fairly representative. It's a bit like Tetris, in that the game proceeds in levels. Each level, a wave of enemies would run from their spawn point to the centre of the map. All you can do is build defense towers to kill them off as they run through your build area. Most waves are ground units, and you can arrange your towers in such a way that those units must spend more time walking through your area, which means each of your towers can fire more times. Every so often there would be an air unit round, and this maze approach doesn't work. Some towers have special attributes, like slowing an enemy unit with cold damage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeJ7IrE7aFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeJ7IrE7aFA
    - unixhero 7y ago
      Thanks a lot!
- BadassFractal 7y ago
  Came here to say this. That was my favorite part of all of WC3, trying out all of the wacky TD coop mods
- perseusmandate 7y ago
  Amazing how WC3 maps were responsible for both MOBAs and Tower Defence, two of the most popular genres of all time, both moreso than conventional RTSs at this point
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    Tower defense maps were a thing back in the Starcraft days too, but the game engine was a big limiting factor. WC3 opened things up a ton.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      Aeon of strife was moba games in sc1 too. Its interesting to watch game modes develop over decades.
  - based2 7y ago
    and LOL
    - setr 7y ago
      LoL is a moba.
  - koboll 7y ago
    Pretty much any genre you can imagine was emulated with WC3 custom maps. Proto-MOBAs and tower defense games were basically singlehandedly popularized by WC3, of course. Some of the WC3 TDs, like Wintermaul Wars, were way more complex than the mobile games you see today, though -- they involved strategies like building truly gigantic mazes to expose enemies to more tower fire and precisely angled walls that took advantage of quirks in the pathing AI to confuse enemies and keep them in the kill zone juuust long enough. Some of them were really unique, too. Battle Ships combined MOBA mechanics with the auto-firing of a tower defense game. Skibi's Castle TD had a ton of unique Mario-Party-style minigames that you'd play against the other players between waves. There was also a whole genre of reverse tower defense games, where you would buy and upgrade tons of units that would automatically march into the middle to battle enemy units, until one pushed far enough to take out the enemy's bases. Or until there were so many units on the map that the game crashed. But what a spectacle it was. There were games that were sort of a mashup of RTSes and Betrayl/Secret Hitler, in that every player built villages but one was secretly a "werewolf" whose goal was to convert all the other players. There was a game called Darwin's Island and other similar ones in an "evolution" genre, which were basically prototypes of Spore. There were games similar to Civ/Risk played on a map of the world. RPGs based on popular books and movies were super common, and some were as as good as or better than missions in the WC3 standard RPG campaign. Some the multiplayer ones incorporated a system where you could serialize your stats as a code that you could copy and paste into the next game you played to start were you left off. There was a CTF-style game called Tree Tag where one player was an infernal who had to tag the other players (treants), who could build defenses and countermeasures as they hid. Then if they got tagged, they'd be sent to jail, where other players could rescue them. Board games like chess and checkers were common too. There were platformers like Run Kitty Run. Even micro-MMOs like Life in the City where you basically just hung out, got a "job", and played some resource gathering minigame. Some of them were crazy complicated, several-megabyte maps with some players playing as institutions and others as citizens. Of course there were fantasy and sci fi themed ones as well. The best part was that there was zero quality control, because anyone could edit anyone's map, so you constantly encountered variations and remixes of popular maps. Apart from a handful of very popular main maps, you often had no idea what you were going to get.
- i_am_nomad 7y ago
  “Probability of success: zero.” “An elf would have thought of something better.”
brink 7y ago
Unfortunately I doubt it will still have LAN. A sorely missed feature that makes a game really feel like it's yours after purchase rather than just on lease until the servers shut down. I'd be happily corrected about this though.
- dangrossman 7y ago
  This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games they released over 20 years ago.
  - jrimbault 7y ago
    What about when Blizzard doesn't exists anymore ? This summer with a group of friends we wanted to play Battlefied 2 (2005), official support for that game ended years ago, and even with the unofficial patches, we couldn't play in a fully offline LAN, the game needs to ping a specific server to enable, even local, multiplayer.
    - 15155 7y ago
      An interested group will reverse engineer and reimplement the server-side components.
      - rebuilder 7y ago
        Where's the reverse-engineered server for bf2?
        klingonopera 7y ago
        AFAIK, vanilla BF2 has more or less been abandoned by the BF2 community for this. I'm not sure how they reworked the entire thing, so I'm guessing you might find the source-code/reverse-engineered stuff somewhere. "Project Reality: Battlefield 2 is a free-to-download single and multiplayer game modification for the Battlefield 2 (BF2) retail Microsoft Windows PC game. Project Reality installs alongside your existing Battlefield 2 game installation, allowing both the original game and Project Reality to be played separately without conflict." https://www.realitymod.com/about https://www.realitymod.com/about
jimbob45 7y ago
This really doesn't belong on HN and... I'm pretty sure this is false on some level. I played through the campaign on the original this last year and every new patch released broke my save files irreparably. Are they claiming that WC3R will work with every version ever put out of WC3? They couldn't even make that happen on the original.
- elif 7y ago
  A little refresh on actual HN guidelines: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. "
jsnell 7y ago
The story of making the Starcraft 1 custom maps work on the remaster is pretty amazing: http://0xeb.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emulator.pdf http://0xeb.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emu... Basically a lot of the maps were using a buffer overflow in the scripting to read and write all kinds of internal data structures in the game engine. If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to this extent? A single data structure's layout or a single variable's location changing will break everything. I wonder whether there are any similar landmines in Warcraft 3?
- lep 7y ago
  No. We mostly played by the rules in wc3. Back in the day we used the so called return bug which years later was shown to be able to be used for arbitrary code execution. This was quickly fixed but we got new natives to account for this loss. [1] Not as long ago there was another bug found which could be abused to run arbitrary bytecode [2] but that again was fixed a patch or two later and nowadays i don't know of any way to run any non-jass/non-lua code. We mostly get changes in the natives provided by wc3 in newer patches which sometimes break backwards compability. [3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASS#Return_Bug_Security_Vulnerability_and_Patch_1.24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASS#Return_Bug_Security_Vulne... [2]: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/accessing-memory-from-the-script-its-time-of-the-revolution.279262/ https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/accessing-memory-from-t... [3]: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/1-28-x-era-versions-break-back-compat-with-convertattacktype-7-and-getunitarmortype.301249/ https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/1-28-x-era-versions-bre...
- taneq 7y ago
  > If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to this extent? Well you have the original source so you can derive the memory map and then just create an artificial "buffer overflow area" where the maps can write to that you then copy into the actual game data.
  - comex 7y ago
taurath 7y ago
Interesting - will they only work with the latest patch (1.12 I think?) as custom maps did? There were some breaking changes that meant you couldn’t use older versions of maps. I’m very excited for this - so much creativity flowed out of that map maker - it created (or rather, popularized) multi billion dollar genres in MOBAs and tower defense. Hope wintermaul wars gets popular - that was one of my favorites.
- foobaw 7y ago
  Island Troll Tribes was one of my favorites. I wonder if this will also create a DotA 1 scene (though IceFrog will not work on it).
  - taurath 7y ago
    we used to bot the hell out of battle net so we could do private leagues or private lobbies with ban lists for people who left early or trolled or were abusive. It was a better random player experience than they currently have in dota2 and league of legends
  - Moopy 7y ago
    Hi! I am the original author of Island Troll Tribes and I’m glad you like my map! Fun fact: I started making that map in 9th grade and eventually handed it over to another dev during my freshman year of college. Now I’m a lead software engineer; its amazing how time flies. Maybe I will pick it back up again, who knows :)
mashlol 7y ago
I recently pre-ordered and got access to the original wc3 which they've since patched with updates. I started working on a new custom map, which now has support for Lua and all kinds of new natives like UI natives that allow you to completely customize the UI. Unfortunately, the debugging tools are abysmal. There is currently a player desync happening in multiplayer in my map (somehow different players disagree with their local emulation), but I am given absolutely zero information about it. No stack traces, there's no way to add breakpoints or logs, prints slow things down to a crawl and so aren't really reasonable to try to debug with either. I've done manual tests slowly by removing parts of code, but due to the random nature of the desync, it's really challenging to solve anything this way. Even if I remove some modules and can't get a desync anymore, doesn't mean it's fixed - it's possible I just never hit the specific circumstance that causes it. Whenever errors occur during load, I just get an error dialog with an empty box. Whenever errors occur during runtime, it just stifles the error and continues without logging or warning or anything. Lua has `debug.traceback()` but it seems Blizzard has prevented calling it. It's like trying to code without a compiler, without stack traces and without a debugger. Very challenging. I'm extremely excited for reforged, but I really hope there are better debugging tools added for Lua (perhaps for JASS as well, although I'm not as familiar with the need there). If anyone from Blizzard is reading this, I'd say that's my number one concern right now.
- thefounder 7y ago
  How did you get access to the original w3? I mean where did you get the keys?
  - mashlol 7y ago
    Once you pre-order, you can log in via your battle.net account to get access. You can download the game from here: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/download/ https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/download/
    - thefounder 7y ago
      The issue is that it doesn't show in my Battle.net launcher. After I downloaded the game I was asked to enter the Key. Anyway I've purchased a key from a 3rd party seller/marketplace(g2a).
egfx 7y ago
I was the QA Lead for Grapics on WarCraft3. This was Blizzards first 3D game and the early engine was very error prone but with the meticulous attention to detail and the sheer amount of time we spent polishing. This game turned out flawless for its time. Early on there were many models that would glitch and there was a massive artifact issue that would happen in multiplayer games. I’m sure the developers found it very frustrating but we fixed it! The solution was hand crafted per model every time. There were ~800 bugs in graphics.
- eljimmy 7y ago
  I suppose the QA teams always have a very acute awareness of the flaws compared to the users. From the perspective of someone who played the game, I thought it was amazing. Props on the game - it is one of my all time favourites.
  - egfx 7y ago
    Yep. Very true. I have a hard time enjoying WarCraft3 and WoW. Those were work projects. But I shared this feeling playing WarCraft2.
- ajkjk 7y ago
  Any other stories from that time? I think a lot of people here would love to hear them.
  - egfx 7y ago
    Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.
    - K0SM0S 7y ago
      Wow, Descent, man that one just took me way back. I remember one thing: PC struggled as much as I did to go through the game, haha. I can't believe that engine eventually made it to WC3, such a small (and wonderful) world. Thank you so much for the memories, and for sharing!
kevinwang 7y ago
Where on the page does it say that it will work with old custom maps?
cpeterso 7y ago
A similar story about Blizzard adapting WoW's original art assets and game data to a modern game engine for WoW Classic: "Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic Panel Recap" https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-history-creating-wow-classic-panel-recap https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-hi...
Havoc 7y ago
Learning that there will be a C&C remaster and a WC3 remaster made my day
AaronMT 7y ago
Release date?
grawprog 7y ago
I Still have all my original copies of all my blizzard games with CD keys from the original Warcraft and diablo up to Warcraft 3. I enjoyed Warcraft 3 but I always liked 2 and its exapansions better. I wasn't a big fan of the the expanded RPG elements and to be honest i never really liked the way the story went. I also never got into WoW so I was kind of sad to see the franchise change so drastically after and still hope, fruitlessly I feel, there'll be a Warcraft 4 with a return to the solid RTS roots of the first 2 games. Warcraft was the first RTS I ever played and the first game I remember going to a computer store to buy. I remember seeing the box and that was the game I wanted. I read through the manual, eagerly awaited the never released Warcraft adventures and played Warcraft over and over. When the second one came out it blew my mind. It made everything about the first one better and expanded the story pretty well. It introduced other races, increased unit speed drastically, added aerial and naval combat, got rid of the ridiculous road system and just felt like such an awesome improvement. It was the first game I played over lan. I remember playing with my cousins and my brother when we got a newer computer and had the old one hooked up still. It was amazing to me. I never felt the same way about Warcraft 3. The 3d graphics were cool, though I didn't really like how cartoonish it all became, I enjoyed the additional races, but it didn't really feel the same. It felt like they took those really annoying maps from the first Warcraft where you had a hero and had to go through those dungeon cave things and made an entire game around it. I played through it all and the expansions, but I don't remember it as fondly. It may have just been that point in my life where I was becoming more disenchanted with video games overall, but the series is still one of those special ones to me. Even if I probably spent far more time with StarCraft and diablo 2. I was addicted to diablo 2 for a while, I can't play games like that any more.
- Pxtl 7y ago
  I think you're SOL, it seems like StarCraft is their "pure" RTS brand and Warcraft is their hero-driven brand.
- specialist 7y ago
  Replying here because you mentioned WarCraft 2. For whatever reason, while I love watching others play 3D MMORPG, I personally prefer to play 2D or 2.5D (Diablo 2, Dungeon Keeper, old school FF Tactics).
VonGuard 7y ago
One thing I don't see mentioned here is how important for history it is to be compatible with those old mad. WC3 was where the tower defense game was invented, where DOTA was invented, and where a dozen other smaller sub-genres of games were invented. Being able to play those again will be incredibly important for future generations.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Insanity 7y ago
  Not sure if it'll be important but it'd be fun for sure! Think I'll have no luck on Linux though.. blizzard does not give Linux any love :(
  - VonGuard 7y ago
    The original works great in Wine!
- kayaeb 7y ago
  I think tower defense was originally a SC custom map? I might be wrong. It got huge with... WC3s Wintermaul?'s version? I think... I'm disappointed most modern versions are pre-pathed instead of build-a-pathed. Build-a-path adds a whole new element to your strat depending on your faction. Zerg-like factions thrive on building ultra-long linear paths, protoss-like factions are good building wrapping paths leading the enemy past expensive cannons multiple times. In desperate times you can block the path and take enemy assault to the towers instead of letting them walk. So much more depth than pre-pathed nonsense
cm2012 7y ago
This is incredible news. So many genres of games came from these.
diimdeep 7y ago
Visuals looks awful compared to what Valve achieved with source2 and dota2, but not sure if this fair comparison.
AngryData 7y ago
Sweet, hopefully we can get some footies games going, I always thought it was far more enjoyable than dota.
K0SM0S 7y ago
I feel torn in so many dimensions. On the one hand, one of the greatest games of all time gets remade. And I feel humbled that we're able to make giants over decades — Star Trek, Cobol, Warcraft have my respect. But on the other hand, it also speaks of a dire lack of creativity as we speak, or boldness, maybe both. The general trend of remakes is also about fixing problems we too often created for ourselves in the first place.. — cough DRM — cough solo/LAN requiring online servers cough — Ahh, why can't it simply be WC4, all new and shiny and yet with better mechanics and player/customer freedom than any previous installment? I'm a simple man, I just ask for evolution. Still confused whether I should be thrilled or disheartened or just 'meh'.
- NostraDavid 7y ago
  I guess they're jumping on the nostalgia train that's been chugging along for the last few years (so many remakes!). Perhaps they're testing the waters for a Warcraft 4? It's been since 2004 when Warcraft stopped being an RTS, yet Classic WoW made a lot of people return. I'm slightly hopeful.
- keerthiko 7y ago
  I'm in the exact same boat. I feel like the game industry has made this really distasteful shift, of the big AAA companies just adding shoe-shine on existing projects -- whether that's servicing a SaaS like League of Legends or World of WarCraft, or doing remake after remake of Age of Empires, Homeworld, StarCraft, Final Fantasy, etc, while leaving all the innovation and creativity to be explored at the expense of indies, mod creators or mapmakers. DOTA2, LoL, and the entire MOBA craze was spawned because of the success of a custom WC3 map, and since then AAA have 100% adopted this as an R&D strategy. DayZ/H1Z1 from the mod community spawning battle royale, DOTA Auto Chess custom map spawning DOTA Underlords, TFT, and Epic Games' Auto Chess (the newer big trend). Once in a half decade we get a AAA game with a novel concept or a new IP (Overwatch, Fortnite maybe?), but even sequels are starting to just feel like polishing phases or DLCs on a tested IP and gameplay formula. The indies used to look to the AAA for inspiration and something to aspire to, but the tables have turned in a way exemplifying the capitalism and diluting the art of the medium.
matthewvincent 7y ago
While a new story and characters ie Warcraft 4 would be awesome I actually really like this idea. WC3 is a perfect game, refreshing graphics is the only thing I really want and maybe this will get some younger people to try a game they might have written off otherwise.
- kayaeb 7y ago
  I don't care about the graphics, I just want support returned. I quit when they dropped support because ladder just became a maphack infested hot mess
krzyk 7y ago
Blizzard is now doing only remasters? Starcraft, World of Warcraft and now Warcraft 3.
Felz 7y ago
Bit of a mixed bag here. The editor updates are nice, but they break all of the superior community created tooling. And a custom map I made a decade or so ago now seems to crash regularly, along with having a few minor but important pieces of it broken.
galipgokalp 7y ago
why?
Tiktaalik 7y ago
Very very cool, though I remain a bit sad about the lack of love from Bliz to Warcraft 2. :( Previously they said they weren't interested in any remasters because they didn't think anyone would play it. It's a nice simple RTS game. We wouldn't be where we're at now in the genre without it!
iser 7y ago
Hope to find some Dota Classic 3.76b games!
macawfish 7y ago
Ugh this looks so addicting
vntx 7y ago
This is great, but I assume we now have to deal with Blizzard’s always-online DRM shenanigans. I would like to be able to play games on LAN and not be required to connect to the web all the time.
orinezt 7y ago
Yeah, good points you get there! I guess I’ll be going on with my map and wait for more information.
Metalforce53 7y ago
I love WoW so much..
accounn 7y ago
Activision & Blizzard is scam & spy business. You are the product for the shareholders & CEOs.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I am looking forward to this release. I really like some of the older strategy games (Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Warcraft) but they don't "age well" relative to newer games and it is nice to be able to re-create that feeling of amazement but now on a 2K or 4K screen rather than on a 1280x800 screen.
std_throwaway 7y ago
Does anyone remember "Tides of Blood"?
ussrlongbow 7y ago
Would be nice to get a Warcraft 2 remastered. Like we have for Homeworld

256 points by axython 7y ago

mylons 7y ago

dota lives

zormino 7y ago
wintermaul lives!
- djdjrjdjxajwn 7y ago
  Legion TD Mega lives!!
vbezhenar 7y ago
When I was tinkering with dota map, it used abysmal number of various hacks. I doubt that it'll work.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  Blizzard knows their audience. I fully expect that the DotA maps are among their test cases. :)

yakshaving_jgt 7y ago

Oh I’d be thrilled to play WC3 Tower Defence again. Those were loads of fun.

unixhero 7y ago
Never tried it. Link?
- SXX 7y ago
  He talking about any TD like famous Green TD: https://www.epicwar.com/maps/159097/ https://www.epicwar.com/maps/159097/
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Thank you!
- yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  They came in many flavours, but Cube Defense is fairly representative. It's a bit like Tetris, in that the game proceeds in levels. Each level, a wave of enemies would run from their spawn point to the centre of the map. All you can do is build defense towers to kill them off as they run through your build area. Most waves are ground units, and you can arrange your towers in such a way that those units must spend more time walking through your area, which means each of your towers can fire more times. Every so often there would be an air unit round, and this maze approach doesn't work. Some towers have special attributes, like slowing an enemy unit with cold damage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeJ7IrE7aFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeJ7IrE7aFA
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Thanks a lot!
BadassFractal 7y ago
Came here to say this. That was my favorite part of all of WC3, trying out all of the wacky TD coop mods
perseusmandate 7y ago
Amazing how WC3 maps were responsible for both MOBAs and Tower Defence, two of the most popular genres of all time, both moreso than conventional RTSs at this point
- duskwuff 7y ago
  Tower defense maps were a thing back in the Starcraft days too, but the game engine was a big limiting factor. WC3 opened things up a ton.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Aeon of strife was moba games in sc1 too. Its interesting to watch game modes develop over decades.
- based2 7y ago
  and LOL
  - setr 7y ago
    LoL is a moba.
- koboll 7y ago
  Pretty much any genre you can imagine was emulated with WC3 custom maps. Proto-MOBAs and tower defense games were basically singlehandedly popularized by WC3, of course. Some of the WC3 TDs, like Wintermaul Wars, were way more complex than the mobile games you see today, though -- they involved strategies like building truly gigantic mazes to expose enemies to more tower fire and precisely angled walls that took advantage of quirks in the pathing AI to confuse enemies and keep them in the kill zone juuust long enough. Some of them were really unique, too. Battle Ships combined MOBA mechanics with the auto-firing of a tower defense game. Skibi's Castle TD had a ton of unique Mario-Party-style minigames that you'd play against the other players between waves. There was also a whole genre of reverse tower defense games, where you would buy and upgrade tons of units that would automatically march into the middle to battle enemy units, until one pushed far enough to take out the enemy's bases. Or until there were so many units on the map that the game crashed. But what a spectacle it was. There were games that were sort of a mashup of RTSes and Betrayl/Secret Hitler, in that every player built villages but one was secretly a "werewolf" whose goal was to convert all the other players. There was a game called Darwin's Island and other similar ones in an "evolution" genre, which were basically prototypes of Spore. There were games similar to Civ/Risk played on a map of the world. RPGs based on popular books and movies were super common, and some were as as good as or better than missions in the WC3 standard RPG campaign. Some the multiplayer ones incorporated a system where you could serialize your stats as a code that you could copy and paste into the next game you played to start were you left off. There was a CTF-style game called Tree Tag where one player was an infernal who had to tag the other players (treants), who could build defenses and countermeasures as they hid. Then if they got tagged, they'd be sent to jail, where other players could rescue them. Board games like chess and checkers were common too. There were platformers like Run Kitty Run. Even micro-MMOs like Life in the City where you basically just hung out, got a "job", and played some resource gathering minigame. Some of them were crazy complicated, several-megabyte maps with some players playing as institutions and others as citizens. Of course there were fantasy and sci fi themed ones as well. The best part was that there was zero quality control, because anyone could edit anyone's map, so you constantly encountered variations and remixes of popular maps. Apart from a handful of very popular main maps, you often had no idea what you were going to get.
i_am_nomad 7y ago
“Probability of success: zero.” “An elf would have thought of something better.”

brink 7y ago

Unfortunately I doubt it will still have LAN. A sorely missed feature that makes a game really feel like it's yours after purchase rather than just on lease until the servers shut down. I'd be happily corrected about this though.

dangrossman 7y ago
This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games they released over 20 years ago.
- jrimbault 7y ago
  What about when Blizzard doesn't exists anymore ? This summer with a group of friends we wanted to play Battlefied 2 (2005), official support for that game ended years ago, and even with the unofficial patches, we couldn't play in a fully offline LAN, the game needs to ping a specific server to enable, even local, multiplayer.
  - 15155 7y ago
    An interested group will reverse engineer and reimplement the server-side components.
    - rebuilder 7y ago
      Where's the reverse-engineered server for bf2?
      - klingonopera 7y ago
        AFAIK, vanilla BF2 has more or less been abandoned by the BF2 community for this. I'm not sure how they reworked the entire thing, so I'm guessing you might find the source-code/reverse-engineered stuff somewhere. "Project Reality: Battlefield 2 is a free-to-download single and multiplayer game modification for the Battlefield 2 (BF2) retail Microsoft Windows PC game. Project Reality installs alongside your existing Battlefield 2 game installation, allowing both the original game and Project Reality to be played separately without conflict." https://www.realitymod.com/about https://www.realitymod.com/about

jimbob45 7y ago

This really doesn't belong on HN and... I'm pretty sure this is false on some level. I played through the campaign on the original this last year and every new patch released broke my save files irreparably. Are they claiming that WC3R will work with every version ever put out of WC3? They couldn't even make that happen on the original.

elif 7y ago
A little refresh on actual HN guidelines: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. "

jsnell 7y ago

The story of making the Starcraft 1 custom maps work on the remaster is pretty amazing: http://0xeb.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emulator.pdf http://0xeb.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emu... Basically a lot of the maps were using a buffer overflow in the scripting to read and write all kinds of internal data structures in the game engine. If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to this extent? A single data structure's layout or a single variable's location changing will break everything. I wonder whether there are any similar landmines in Warcraft 3?

lep 7y ago
No. We mostly played by the rules in wc3. Back in the day we used the so called return bug which years later was shown to be able to be used for arbitrary code execution. This was quickly fixed but we got new natives to account for this loss. [1] Not as long ago there was another bug found which could be abused to run arbitrary bytecode [2] but that again was fixed a patch or two later and nowadays i don't know of any way to run any non-jass/non-lua code. We mostly get changes in the natives provided by wc3 in newer patches which sometimes break backwards compability. [3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASS#Return_Bug_Security_Vulnerability_and_Patch_1.24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASS#Return_Bug_Security_Vulne... [2]: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/accessing-memory-from-the-script-its-time-of-the-revolution.279262/ https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/accessing-memory-from-t... [3]: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/1-28-x-era-versions-break-back-compat-with-convertattacktype-7-and-getunitarmortype.301249/ https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/1-28-x-era-versions-bre...
taneq 7y ago
> If you're rewriting a game from scratch, how can you possibly make the new engine bug-compatible with the original to this extent? Well you have the original source so you can derive the memory map and then just create an artificial "buffer overflow area" where the maps can write to that you then copy into the actual game data.
- comex 7y ago

taurath 7y ago

Interesting - will they only work with the latest patch (1.12 I think?) as custom maps did? There were some breaking changes that meant you couldn’t use older versions of maps. I’m very excited for this - so much creativity flowed out of that map maker - it created (or rather, popularized) multi billion dollar genres in MOBAs and tower defense. Hope wintermaul wars gets popular - that was one of my favorites.

foobaw 7y ago
Island Troll Tribes was one of my favorites. I wonder if this will also create a DotA 1 scene (though IceFrog will not work on it).
- taurath 7y ago
  we used to bot the hell out of battle net so we could do private leagues or private lobbies with ban lists for people who left early or trolled or were abusive. It was a better random player experience than they currently have in dota2 and league of legends
- Moopy 7y ago
  Hi! I am the original author of Island Troll Tribes and I’m glad you like my map! Fun fact: I started making that map in 9th grade and eventually handed it over to another dev during my freshman year of college. Now I’m a lead software engineer; its amazing how time flies. Maybe I will pick it back up again, who knows :)

mashlol 7y ago

I recently pre-ordered and got access to the original wc3 which they've since patched with updates. I started working on a new custom map, which now has support for Lua and all kinds of new natives like UI natives that allow you to completely customize the UI. Unfortunately, the debugging tools are abysmal. There is currently a player desync happening in multiplayer in my map (somehow different players disagree with their local emulation), but I am given absolutely zero information about it. No stack traces, there's no way to add breakpoints or logs, prints slow things down to a crawl and so aren't really reasonable to try to debug with either. I've done manual tests slowly by removing parts of code, but due to the random nature of the desync, it's really challenging to solve anything this way. Even if I remove some modules and can't get a desync anymore, doesn't mean it's fixed - it's possible I just never hit the specific circumstance that causes it. Whenever errors occur during load, I just get an error dialog with an empty box. Whenever errors occur during runtime, it just stifles the error and continues without logging or warning or anything. Lua has `debug.traceback()` but it seems Blizzard has prevented calling it. It's like trying to code without a compiler, without stack traces and without a debugger. Very challenging. I'm extremely excited for reforged, but I really hope there are better debugging tools added for Lua (perhaps for JASS as well, although I'm not as familiar with the need there). If anyone from Blizzard is reading this, I'd say that's my number one concern right now.

thefounder 7y ago
How did you get access to the original w3? I mean where did you get the keys?
- mashlol 7y ago
  Once you pre-order, you can log in via your battle.net account to get access. You can download the game from here: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/download/ https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/download/
  - thefounder 7y ago
    The issue is that it doesn't show in my Battle.net launcher. After I downloaded the game I was asked to enter the Key. Anyway I've purchased a key from a 3rd party seller/marketplace(g2a).

egfx 7y ago

I was the QA Lead for Grapics on WarCraft3. This was Blizzards first 3D game and the early engine was very error prone but with the meticulous attention to detail and the sheer amount of time we spent polishing. This game turned out flawless for its time. Early on there were many models that would glitch and there was a massive artifact issue that would happen in multiplayer games. I’m sure the developers found it very frustrating but we fixed it! The solution was hand crafted per model every time. There were ~800 bugs in graphics.

eljimmy 7y ago
I suppose the QA teams always have a very acute awareness of the flaws compared to the users. From the perspective of someone who played the game, I thought it was amazing. Props on the game - it is one of my all time favourites.
- egfx 7y ago
  Yep. Very true. I have a hard time enjoying WarCraft3 and WoW. Those were work projects. But I shared this feeling playing WarCraft2.
ajkjk 7y ago
Any other stories from that time? I think a lot of people here would love to hear them.
- egfx 7y ago
  Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    Wow, Descent, man that one just took me way back. I remember one thing: PC struggled as much as I did to go through the game, haha. I can't believe that engine eventually made it to WC3, such a small (and wonderful) world. Thank you so much for the memories, and for sharing!

kevinwang 7y ago

Where on the page does it say that it will work with old custom maps?

cpeterso 7y ago

A similar story about Blizzard adapting WoW's original art assets and game data to a modern game engine for WoW Classic: "Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic Panel Recap" https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-history-creating-wow-classic-panel-recap https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-hi...

Havoc 7y ago

Learning that there will be a C&C remaster and a WC3 remaster made my day

AaronMT 7y ago

Release date?

grawprog 7y ago

I Still have all my original copies of all my blizzard games with CD keys from the original Warcraft and diablo up to Warcraft 3. I enjoyed Warcraft 3 but I always liked 2 and its exapansions better. I wasn't a big fan of the the expanded RPG elements and to be honest i never really liked the way the story went. I also never got into WoW so I was kind of sad to see the franchise change so drastically after and still hope, fruitlessly I feel, there'll be a Warcraft 4 with a return to the solid RTS roots of the first 2 games. Warcraft was the first RTS I ever played and the first game I remember going to a computer store to buy. I remember seeing the box and that was the game I wanted. I read through the manual, eagerly awaited the never released Warcraft adventures and played Warcraft over and over. When the second one came out it blew my mind. It made everything about the first one better and expanded the story pretty well. It introduced other races, increased unit speed drastically, added aerial and naval combat, got rid of the ridiculous road system and just felt like such an awesome improvement. It was the first game I played over lan. I remember playing with my cousins and my brother when we got a newer computer and had the old one hooked up still. It was amazing to me. I never felt the same way about Warcraft 3. The 3d graphics were cool, though I didn't really like how cartoonish it all became, I enjoyed the additional races, but it didn't really feel the same. It felt like they took those really annoying maps from the first Warcraft where you had a hero and had to go through those dungeon cave things and made an entire game around it. I played through it all and the expansions, but I don't remember it as fondly. It may have just been that point in my life where I was becoming more disenchanted with video games overall, but the series is still one of those special ones to me. Even if I probably spent far more time with StarCraft and diablo 2. I was addicted to diablo 2 for a while, I can't play games like that any more.

Pxtl 7y ago
I think you're SOL, it seems like StarCraft is their "pure" RTS brand and Warcraft is their hero-driven brand.
specialist 7y ago
Replying here because you mentioned WarCraft 2. For whatever reason, while I love watching others play 3D MMORPG, I personally prefer to play 2D or 2.5D (Diablo 2, Dungeon Keeper, old school FF Tactics).

VonGuard 7y ago

One thing I don't see mentioned here is how important for history it is to be compatible with those old mad. WC3 was where the tower defense game was invented, where DOTA was invented, and where a dozen other smaller sub-genres of games were invented. Being able to play those again will be incredibly important for future generations.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Insanity 7y ago
Not sure if it'll be important but it'd be fun for sure! Think I'll have no luck on Linux though.. blizzard does not give Linux any love :(
- VonGuard 7y ago
  The original works great in Wine!
kayaeb 7y ago
I think tower defense was originally a SC custom map? I might be wrong. It got huge with... WC3s Wintermaul?'s version? I think... I'm disappointed most modern versions are pre-pathed instead of build-a-pathed. Build-a-path adds a whole new element to your strat depending on your faction. Zerg-like factions thrive on building ultra-long linear paths, protoss-like factions are good building wrapping paths leading the enemy past expensive cannons multiple times. In desperate times you can block the path and take enemy assault to the towers instead of letting them walk. So much more depth than pre-pathed nonsense

cm2012 7y ago

This is incredible news. So many genres of games came from these.

diimdeep 7y ago

Visuals looks awful compared to what Valve achieved with source2 and dota2, but not sure if this fair comparison.

AngryData 7y ago

Sweet, hopefully we can get some footies games going, I always thought it was far more enjoyable than dota.

K0SM0S 7y ago

I feel torn in so many dimensions. On the one hand, one of the greatest games of all time gets remade. And I feel humbled that we're able to make giants over decades — Star Trek, Cobol, Warcraft have my respect. But on the other hand, it also speaks of a dire lack of creativity as we speak, or boldness, maybe both. The general trend of remakes is also about fixing problems we too often created for ourselves in the first place.. — cough DRM — cough solo/LAN requiring online servers cough — Ahh, why can't it simply be WC4, all new and shiny and yet with better mechanics and player/customer freedom than any previous installment? I'm a simple man, I just ask for evolution. Still confused whether I should be thrilled or disheartened or just 'meh'.

NostraDavid 7y ago
I guess they're jumping on the nostalgia train that's been chugging along for the last few years (so many remakes!). Perhaps they're testing the waters for a Warcraft 4? It's been since 2004 when Warcraft stopped being an RTS, yet Classic WoW made a lot of people return. I'm slightly hopeful.
keerthiko 7y ago
I'm in the exact same boat. I feel like the game industry has made this really distasteful shift, of the big AAA companies just adding shoe-shine on existing projects -- whether that's servicing a SaaS like League of Legends or World of WarCraft, or doing remake after remake of Age of Empires, Homeworld, StarCraft, Final Fantasy, etc, while leaving all the innovation and creativity to be explored at the expense of indies, mod creators or mapmakers. DOTA2, LoL, and the entire MOBA craze was spawned because of the success of a custom WC3 map, and since then AAA have 100% adopted this as an R&D strategy. DayZ/H1Z1 from the mod community spawning battle royale, DOTA Auto Chess custom map spawning DOTA Underlords, TFT, and Epic Games' Auto Chess (the newer big trend). Once in a half decade we get a AAA game with a novel concept or a new IP (Overwatch, Fortnite maybe?), but even sequels are starting to just feel like polishing phases or DLCs on a tested IP and gameplay formula. The indies used to look to the AAA for inspiration and something to aspire to, but the tables have turned in a way exemplifying the capitalism and diluting the art of the medium.

matthewvincent 7y ago

While a new story and characters ie Warcraft 4 would be awesome I actually really like this idea. WC3 is a perfect game, refreshing graphics is the only thing I really want and maybe this will get some younger people to try a game they might have written off otherwise.

kayaeb 7y ago
I don't care about the graphics, I just want support returned. I quit when they dropped support because ladder just became a maphack infested hot mess

krzyk 7y ago

Blizzard is now doing only remasters? Starcraft, World of Warcraft and now Warcraft 3.

Felz 7y ago

Bit of a mixed bag here. The editor updates are nice, but they break all of the superior community created tooling. And a custom map I made a decade or so ago now seems to crash regularly, along with having a few minor but important pieces of it broken.

galipgokalp 7y ago

why?

Tiktaalik 7y ago

Very very cool, though I remain a bit sad about the lack of love from Bliz to Warcraft 2. :( Previously they said they weren't interested in any remasters because they didn't think anyone would play it. It's a nice simple RTS game. We wouldn't be where we're at now in the genre without it!

iser 7y ago

Hope to find some Dota Classic 3.76b games!

macawfish 7y ago

Ugh this looks so addicting

vntx 7y ago

This is great, but I assume we now have to deal with Blizzard’s always-online DRM shenanigans. I would like to be able to play games on LAN and not be required to connect to the web all the time.

orinezt 7y ago

Yeah, good points you get there! I guess I’ll be going on with my map and wait for more information.

Metalforce53 7y ago

I love WoW so much..

accounn 7y ago

Activision & Blizzard is scam & spy business. You are the product for the shareholders & CEOs.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I am looking forward to this release. I really like some of the older strategy games (Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Warcraft) but they don't "age well" relative to newer games and it is nice to be able to re-create that feeling of amazement but now on a 2K or 4K screen rather than on a 1280x800 screen.

std_throwaway 7y ago

Does anyone remember "Tides of Blood"?

ussrlongbow 7y ago

Would be nice to get a Warcraft 2 remastered. Like we have for Homeworld