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You are doing great work. Just keep the possibility of the War3Mod.mpq directory for full modifications.
Besides, it would be nice to simplify game hosting in Battle.net of custom games and seeing how many players have joined a custom game.
Btw. other companies drop their games after so many years and won't release any patches.
Hi Kam, I really appreciate the update, I want to help! How can I help?
I have been a map maker for many years and 2 of my most popular maps: Lordaeron the Aftermath and Lordaeron the Foremath have been broken by this latest patch. They were hosted quite regularly and two of the most popular maps within the grand strategy genre.
They are huge maps which lots of triggers and massive amounts of custom map data, if you can fix these maps I think you would end up fixing ALOT of other maps in the process. They ahve multiple issues with many players crashing during map loading and others crashing ingame, it would be a real dream to have these maps become stable and fun to play again.
But this brings me ask what it is I can do, as a map maker, to help? I can PM you with unprotected versions of both these maps if that helps? Any crashes I get I always send to Blizzard.
I will download the latest PTR and test my maps on it.
YES PLEASE! Blizzard folks, listen to her!
If you test your patched and make them work on complicated and big maps, then smaller and simpler maps will be good too... I think.
I was hired coming up on nine months ago and I have read, to the best of my knowledge, every post made in these recent update threads.
An important point to remember is that much of our efforts are focused on back-end modernization. You correctly linked the sound bugs to the recent implementation of FMOD Ex.
I've seen many interpretations of our progress from the community. Some never expected as much as we've done, some like yourself are underwhelmed. We've added over 95 natives to date, but the list of requested natives is in the hundreds.
I'll be able to be more candid on what we are working towards in the future. I certainly understand how frustrating this process is as it wasn't too long ago I was a map maker looking in wondering what Blizzard was doing with the game I loved.
Thank you. I am sorry if I downplayed some of the achievements and hurdles that the Classic team had to overcome, it is just my frustration speaking.
It's nice to hear reassurement that we aren't being ignored.
Like I said, I genuinely hope that the future delivers, but I can't help but voice my concerns at times like these. Such is simply the nature of how I view things, hence why I ask to take my words with a grain of salt. (or a bag, if you fancy so)
I just want to be heard and know that the reports and the requests I'm making on these forums aren't an empty call, that's all.
Any chance that the limit of 12 selectable units could be expanded somehow? In this day and age such a restriction is pretty frustrating and unnecessary.
I don't get it...how is that more important than potential bugs and glitches that have been around this patch? Even so, having more than 12 selectable units is unnecessary since group control hotkeys exist.
Having Blizzard participating on Hive is a great subject of pride for me. It feels like a mission accomplished. Finally, Blizzard is listening to us. Finally, they acknowledge the existence of Hive. Please don't take that away from me, because you have the power to do exactly that.
Except not all people that play Wc3 have an acc on Hive, thus the Hive can't speak for all. While it might be good to listen to people who "use" Wc 3, what about the other half who play the game and are also customers? Don't they need acknowledgement of existence?
Players shouldn't have to become the testers of the game and report bugs everytime the developers update it, that's the developers' job, to test before releasing it, not to add stuff and hope it works fine and screw everyone else. And this isn't an angry comment, this is criticism whether you like it or not, if everything was okay then no one would post anything.
By the way, game hotkeys like ctrl + S and ctrl + M are affecting hotkeys from the command card, never happened before, wonder how that broke
YES PLEASE! Blizzard folks, listen to her!
If you test your patched and make them work on complicated and big maps, then smaller and simpler maps will be good too... I think.
Yeah and also for those maps that use tons of data I think blizzard must bring x64 support so they won't reach the limit of 2gb, also perhaps engine needs updates but I know it will be done with 'remaster'
I'm a bit late to the party. But I was wondering if Blizzard meant to do yaw/pitch/roll for special effects the way they implemented it or if they misassigned the axes.
In normal wc3 axes, we would consider (in this specific order):
yaw - rotation around the Z axis (i.e., the facing of a unit)
pitch - subsequent rotation around the NEW y axis (i.e., looking up or looking down)
roll - subsequent rotation around the NEW x axis (i.e., like a plane rolling)
However, blizzard implemented yaw/pitch/roll differently for special effects (in this specific order):
roll - rotation around the Z axis
pitch - rotation around the OLD Y axis
yaw - rotation around the OLD X axis
Now, this may not seem like a big deal, but it complicates pointing models towards somewhere a lot. The current situation makes sense for objects that are facing UP (for example, a torch). However, most models are facing to the RIGHT (i.e., positive X axis, all missiles). Right now, I think the quickest solution to orient right-facing models is by using quaternions. I've written the following method to rotate X facing models upwards before applying whatever the user actually wanted to do, but this requires a lot of computing power. If a model is supposed to change direction a lot (for instance with missiles), it would still be faster to use units with the dummy model, which I can't imagine was the point of introducing the Orientation natives for special effects.
JASS:
method setOrientation takes real yaw, real pitch, real roll returns nothing
// preset reals for a -pi/2 rotation around y
local real w2 = 0.707107
local real x2 = 0.0
local real y2 = 0.707107
local real z2 = 0.0
// get a quaternion from the user input
local real cy = Cos(yaw/2)
local real sy = Sin(yaw/2)
local real cp = Cos(pitch/2)
local real sp = Sin(pitch/2)
local real cr = Cos(roll/2)
local real sr = Sin(roll/2)
local real w1 = cy * cr * cp + sy * sr * sp
local real x1 = cy * sr * cp - sy * cr * sp
local real y1 = cy * cr * sp + sy * sr * cp
local real z1 = sy * cr * cp - cy * sr * sp
// multiply the quaternions to get a new rotation
local real w3 = -x1*x2 - y1*y2 - z1*z2 + w1*w2
local real x3 = x1*w2 + y1*z2 - z1*y2 + w1*x2
local real y3 = -x1*z2 + y1*w2 + z1*x2 + w1*y2
local real z3 = x1*y2 - y1*x2 + z1*w2 + w1*z2
// calculate the new yaw/pitch/roll
local real sinr = 2*(w3*x3+y3*z3)
local real cosr = 1 - 2 * (x3*x3+y3*y3)
local real sinp = 2 * (w3*y3 - z3*x3)
local real siny = 2 * (w3*z3 + x3*y3)
local real cosy = 1 - 2*(y3*y3 + z3*z3)
set roll = Atan2(sinr,cosr)
set yaw = Atan2(siny,cosy)
if sinp > 1 then
set pitch = 1.57079632
elseif sinp < -1 then
set pitch = -1.57079632
else
set pitch = Asin(sinp)
endif
call BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation(this.fx, yaw, pitch, roll)
endmethod
So I guess this is a bug report. Please fix the axes assignments for the special effects and the order to be consistent with the rest of the wc3 world Thanks for everything blizzies!
If I'm overlooking something painfully obvious, please let me know!
EDIT:
It seems that there is a simpler method for lookat. assuming a LookAt vector v:
JASS:
set yaw = Atan2(v.y, v.x)
set pitch = Atan2(v.z, SquareRoot(v.x*v.x + v.y*v.y))
call BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation(fx, Sin(yaw)*pitch,-Cos(yaw)*pitch,yaw)
Still, having the rotating frame makes more sense imo.
That is what happens already... Maps are MPQ and CASC only used for main game data. Like StarCraft 2 come to think of it! Oh StarCraft II practically never crashes, so yes CASC should not be a direct cause of any crashes.
I wonder if the ability to launch multiple instances of Warcraft III would be reconsidered a feature? If implemented correctly, this will greatly help us in testing out multiplayer issues that are not encountered in single-player, such as desyncs.
They never used that as far as I am aware. The incremental patch files were just a set of files to add/replace inside the patch.mpq or outside the patch.mpq.
Which Warcraft III never used... Also might not work well on the new "protected" executable files as those likely have some kind of randomization added to them to make cracking/cheating harder.
I wonder if the ability to launch multiple instances of Warcraft III would be reconsidered a feature? If implemented correctly, this will greatly help us in testing out multiplayer issues that are not encountered in single-player, such as desyncs.
Yeah you mean like they release wow expansions and patches without PLAYERS testing alfa/beta/PTR...? No one seems to complaint about that.
They use PTR on wc3 as well. Only thing you are right about is the fact that they added some other stuff that was not on the PTR, which apparently fucked it up a little bit.
My main point is: player testing is not a bad thing if they do it right.
If you had read the whole thread you would have seen actual complaints, and Wc3 is neither alfa or beta, it's a finished product.
Even if they created PTR and they did, relying only on player testers is the worst thing they could do.
Imagine you were creating a map, you do the terrain then go for custom units, abilities, items, etc, then go for triggers and done, you finished your map. You host it and play with friends. Just at the first moment the game started nothing works, the unit spawn doesn't work, the tooltips' hotkeys are wrong, wrong damage amount, mistypes, and a lot of bugs. Your friends would ask "Did you even test your map before hosting?" and you expected them for feedback about what wasn't working and what could be improved. Long story short, when making a map or updating the game, the developers should test that everything works properly before an actual release of a version of a map or a patch. Obviously there might be some errors and bugs and that's okay, but they are minor, not game-breaking glitches, and thats what player testing is for, report some casual bugs that developers forgot to deal with.
To make map hacking/cheating harder the Warcraft III executable has some form of code protection. I would not be surprised if addresses are semi randomized now.
Does running as administrator help? That error is a generic error thrown when anything breaks at startup.
To make map hacking/cheating harder the Warcraft III executable has some form of code protection. I would not be surprised if addresses are semi randomized now.
You need to create a new game shortcut that points to "Warcraft III.exe". The separate RoC/TFT executables were merged at patch 1.28, but if the updater had issues when updating, such as lacking admin rights (or a myriad of issues it had at the time), it may have failed to delete them, leading you to believe your shortcuts are still working properly.
The custom games scene has taken abit hit and I'm noticing less custom game players around now and many popular maps are just no longer hosted.
I know they can't do a patch rollback but they can at least put the sound provider back to the previous version as alot of the crashes are caused by sound based on my own testing.
From what I understand cheat engine modifies application code or state. Map hacks and other cheats work using a similar approach. Hence they were not specifically targeting cheat engine but rather all general approaches that could be used to manipulate the game application.
For example Warcraft III will also no longer directly load in most assembly based debuggers.
I know they can't do a patch rollback but they can at least put the sound provider back to the previous version as alot of the crashes are caused by sound based on my own testing.
Again this is counter productive. Blizzard moved Warcraft III to FMOD because all their games use FMOD, be it StarCraft II, Diablo III or Overwatch. Now this almost certainly has introduced bugs, however their effort is better spent fixing those bugs rather than regressing the changes they have made.
FMOD itself is very stable. Diablo III, StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm all use it and practically never crash. To put it in perspective Heroes of the Storm has never crashed for me outside of alpha/beta and the one crash bug that was quickly hotfixed, and I have played over 8,000 matches on it.
Again this is counter productive. Blizzard moved Warcraft III to FMOD because all their games use FMOD, be it StarCraft II, Diablo III or Overwatch. Now this almost certainly has introduced bugs, however their effort is better spent fixing those bugs rather than regressing the changes they have made.
Rolling it back temporarily doesn't stop them from fixing the bugs with it and then rereleasing later. It is not a hotfix when we have to wait 2+ weeks with most mods unplayable.
Depending on which version of FMOD Ex they use, then maybe they will want to revert to a different version of this library?
The 4.26 series was recommended for a long time due to issues with the newer reverb engine and changes to 3D positional sound handling, the Zdoom Wiki says.
Check last Kam's post in this thread, first there will be another PTR and then the patch, so expect 2-3 weeks in this state, then again the crash issue hasn't been acknowledged by Blizzard so, for the time being, never...?
Maybe a template could prove to be useful? Here is imho a good one:
"Announcement
We are aware of some new issues that came up with the release of the [insert patch version] patch. We will be releasing a [insert patch version] patch in the near future that addresses some of these issues, including:
[insert whatever is relevant here]
Regarding balance, we are currently assessing the state of balance of [insert patch version] based on user feedback, online testing, and the review of replays. Although we will make some number of balance changes in [insert patch version], these have yet to be determined.
We appreciate the community's patience and support in our endeavor to further tune the play balance, enhance the feature set, and increase the stability of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.
[...] The 4.26 series was recommended for a long time due to issues with the newer reverb engine and changes to 3D positional sound handling, the Zdoom Wiki says.
I'm a bit late to the party. But I was wondering if Blizzard meant to do yaw/pitch/roll for special effects the way they implemented it or if they misassigned the axes.
In normal wc3 axes, we would consider (in this specific order):
yaw - rotation around the Z axis (i.e., the facing of a unit)
pitch - subsequent rotation around the NEW y axis (i.e., looking up or looking down)
roll - subsequent rotation around the NEW x axis (i.e., like a plane rolling)
However, blizzard implemented yaw/pitch/roll differently for special effects (in this specific order):
roll - rotation around the Z axis
pitch - rotation around the OLD Y axis
yaw - rotation around the OLD X axis
Now, this may not seem like a big deal, but it complicates pointing models towards somewhere a lot. The current situation makes sense for objects that are facing UP (for example, a torch). However, most models are facing to the RIGHT (i.e., positive X axis, all missiles). Right now, I think the quickest solution to orient right-facing models is by using quaternions. I've written the following method to rotate X facing models upwards before applying whatever the user actually wanted to do, but this requires a lot of computing power. If a model is supposed to change direction a lot (for instance with missiles), it would still be faster to use units with the dummy model, which I can't imagine was the point of introducing the Orientation natives for special effects.
JASS:
method setOrientation takes real yaw, real pitch, real roll returns nothing
// preset reals for a -pi/2 rotation around y
local real w2 = 0.707107
local real x2 = 0.0
local real y2 = 0.707107
local real z2 = 0.0
// get a quaternion from the user input
local real cy = Cos(yaw/2)
local real sy = Sin(yaw/2)
local real cp = Cos(pitch/2)
local real sp = Sin(pitch/2)
local real cr = Cos(roll/2)
local real sr = Sin(roll/2)
local real w1 = cy * cr * cp + sy * sr * sp
local real x1 = cy * sr * cp - sy * cr * sp
local real y1 = cy * cr * sp + sy * sr * cp
local real z1 = sy * cr * cp - cy * sr * sp
// multiply the quaternions to get a new rotation
local real w3 = -x1*x2 - y1*y2 - z1*z2 + w1*w2
local real x3 = x1*w2 + y1*z2 - z1*y2 + w1*x2
local real y3 = -x1*z2 + y1*w2 + z1*x2 + w1*y2
local real z3 = x1*y2 - y1*x2 + z1*w2 + w1*z2
// calculate the new yaw/pitch/roll
local real sinr = 2*(w3*x3+y3*z3)
local real cosr = 1 - 2 * (x3*x3+y3*y3)
local real sinp = 2 * (w3*y3 - z3*x3)
local real siny = 2 * (w3*z3 + x3*y3)
local real cosy = 1 - 2*(y3*y3 + z3*z3)
set roll = Atan2(sinr,cosr)
set yaw = Atan2(siny,cosy)
if sinp > 1 then
set pitch = 1.57079632
elseif sinp < -1 then
set pitch = -1.57079632
else
set pitch = Asin(sinp)
endif
call BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation(this.fx, yaw, pitch, roll)
endmethod
So I guess this is a bug report. Please fix the axes assignments for the special effects and the order to be consistent with the rest of the wc3 world Thanks for everything blizzies!
If I'm overlooking something painfully obvious, please let me know!
EDIT:
It seems that there is a simpler method for lookat. assuming a LookAt vector v:
JASS:
set yaw = Atan2(v.y, v.x)
set pitch = Atan2(v.z, SquareRoot(v.x*v.x + v.y*v.y))
call BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation(fx, Sin(yaw)*pitch,-Cos(yaw)*pitch,yaw)
Still, having the rotating frame makes more sense imo.
I took your words and my understanding of the problem with BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation and I put a description of the problem into a video. Does this video seem consistent with your understanding?
I took your words and my understanding of the problem with BlzSetSpecialEffectOrientation and I put a description of the problem into a video. Does this video seem consistent with your understanding?
Good job on explaining. This is pretty much an issue when rotating stuff. I must also wonder why destructibles and doodads say "Pitch/Roll (degrees)" when they are actually using radians?
From experience, these are the kind of things someone writes down with some numbers switched in their mind, while noone else really bothers to look at it again. So it don't really need to be a copy/paste thing, just someone going auto-pilot and people with pretty much any amount of other meaningfull work. Which is in companies almost always a possibility, except you got a nitpicker who only gets paid for stuff like that (called QA)...
It's just surpising that the community, without access to the source code or any of the internal tooling and documentation, has been able to achieve so much more than Blizzard, the ones who have full authority over the game and access to the source code.
re: "dumb Blizzard expecting us to test for them that's their job we don't get paid"... Geez, you guys.
Fact #1: Programming & Updates require (Play)Testing to weed out bugs & errors
Fact #2: The efficacy of the (Play)Testing is directly proportional to the Number of (Play)Testers and the Amount of Time Spent (Play)Testing
Fact #3: Blizzard has a certain, set, limited amount of both (manpower & manhours) to assign to this task.
Fact #4: The Warcraft 3 fandom & modding community is full of people who would be (and indeed are) interested in (Play)Testing... Just Because. (And not just regular (Play)Testing, but (Play)Testing weird corner cases & obscure maps & 3rd-party tools & weird exploits & popular mods; all sorts of stuff that Blizzard probably doesn't have time for & may not even know about.)
Put all that together, and it's a pretty straightforward solution that benefits all involved parties; open up your Patches with a defined "mass open Beta (Play)Testing" cycle and let the community go wild. They aren't expecting us to "do their job for them". But if we didn't have the PTR, how long do you think it would take for the measly Classic Games Team over Warcraft 3 to do even half of what the community can do?
Done right it literally benefits everybody, not only making the process more efficient & more comprehensive but simultaneously makes it faster, too. No one is making you PTR, but you yourself should want to PTR; you can test out your map or your library or your weird hack & get a better Warcraft, faster.
Oh, I forgot:
Fact #5: You're awexome.
Keep it real folks. Blizzard isn't perfect but the Classic Games Team is a small, dedicated subset thereof & it's easier to understand & sympathize with them. And if you still can't, you should at least be able to sympathize with @Kam & @MindWorX ; they're one of us & can only possibly have the best for the game at heart.
Imported mp3 sound datas also don't work anymore. I have no idea how mp3 datas have to be changed (paths or importing them again), but as they were before the last patch they are not longer played now, not in the editor and not in the game. This is the map with the affected mp3 datas: Labyrinth of Nightmare (v7)
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