
Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps - axython
https://playwarcraft3.com/en-gb/
======
egfx
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.

~~~
qwerty456127
I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed
flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the
multiplayer mode.

Cool thing was it played nicely on my Pentium-II with a Matrox G550 video card
which is famous for being great at 2D an very bad at 3D graphics.

~~~
egfx
Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with
me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was
no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD.
The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.

~~~
dualboot
I disagree.. There were quite a few gaming-focused graphics cards released
during the development of Warcraft 3. \- 1996 : 3DFX Voodoo(1) \- 1997 :
Nvidia Riva 128, ATI Rage Pro, 3DFX Voodoo Rush \- 1998 : Nvidia Riva TNT,
3DFX Voodoo2, Banshee, S3 Savage 3D,Matrox G100/200/300, Intel i740, ATI Rage
128, Rage 128 Pro, Rage Fury Maxx \- 1999 : Nvidia Riva TNT2/Pro/Ultra, S3
Savage 4/Pro/2000, Power VR, 3DFX Voodoo 3, Nvidia Geforce 256, Matrox G400 \-
2000 : 3DFX Voodoo4, Voodoo4, Matrox G450, Nvidia GeForce2/MX/GTS/Ultra, ATI
Radeon, etc

~~~
egfx
Believe me I know, I also loved my monster voodoo card but Nvidia changed the
game with GeForce 1 and the record breaking scores in 3Dmark. Nothing really
was able to deliver spectacular graphics a̶p̶p̶r̶e̶c̶i̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶i̶n̶g̶
̶p̶e̶r̶f̶o̶r̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ particularly the frustratingly popular rage and
embedded intel cards.

~~~
qwerty456127
That's such a pity people mean spectacular 3D graphics under "appreciable
gaming performance". IMHO that's very far from the most important part of a
game.

------
jsnell
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_Emu...](http://0xeb.net/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/StarCraft_EUD_Emulator.pdf)

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?

~~~
taneq
> 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.

~~~
jsnell
According to the slides that plan fails already at step 1 :)

> Unfortunately, we did not have private or public symbols for StarCraft
> 1.16.1.

And then there are all kinds of complications that make the naive approach
insufficient. Ok, you have a static memory map. But that's not really enough
when the buffer overflows are being used to poke at dynamically allocated data
structures (e.g. linked lists and GUI elements).

So you need to basically emulate the full original game and constantly sync
the state (in both directions) between the emulation and the real game.

------
K0SM0S
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'.

~~~
keerthiko
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.

~~~
ufo
Overwatch is a riff on the class-based FPS genre, which was pioneered by Team
Fortress, a game that started its life as a Counter Strike mod.

~~~
enra
Team Fortress started as Quake1 mod, which then Valve made to a Half-Life mod
TFC, and later as the TF2 [1]. Also Counter-Strike was a mod as well which
again Valve made official versions of.

I started with the Quake TF and now still pay TF2 sometimes. Basically been
playing the same game for ~20 years.

1:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Origins_and_ea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Origins_and_early_development)

~~~
Insanity
Some games are just good so you can play them for a long time. As long as
there is a community. I occasionally fire up HL deathwatch and have people
playing. Plus CS:S is almost 15 years old and that is quite active (surf
communities anyway)

------
mashlol
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
How did you get access to the original w3? I mean where did you get the keys?

~~~
mashlol
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
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).

------
grawprog
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.

~~~
specialist
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).

~~~
kayaeb
FFT is one of the greatest games of all time. It has a little community of
people making custom mechanics / storylines / etc.:
[http://ffhacktics.com/](http://ffhacktics.com/)

~~~
specialist
Thanks. That's very encouraging.

I love the UI, mechanics of Polytopia on iOS. I'm eagerly awaiting a Final
Fantasy Tactics with a similar touch-centric UI.

------
brink
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
This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games
they released over 20 years ago.

~~~
jrimbault
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
An interested group will reverse engineer and reimplement the server-side
components.

~~~
jrimbault
Even if, like for BF2, you can patch (cough hack intellectual property) the
game to change what server it has to ping to enable "online" play, it will
still needs a, as you say, third party benevolent group and we still won't be
able to do what _I_ was trying to do, which is a basic, _fully offline_ LAN
gameplay.

My friends and I often play BF2 remotely on a vLAN through a VPN, so we are
quite used to BF2 networks tricks, and I thought we could trick the game, no
luck.

~~~
klingonopera
If you can get your hands on the very first, unpatched version, it should
work. I got that to run in an offline LAN setting.

EDIT: I remember now what the problem was, running a co-op local game. They'd
allow you to do a LAN game, but not with bots. A friend of mine played it
locally in single-player, and I'd use my online account to connect with IP, a
button which was only unlocked if you used an online account. You may be able
to work around it by specifying the IP address to connect to in the windows
shortcut for launching the game.

EDIT2: I may or may have not been using a crack at the time, not sure if that
has anything to do with requiring an online connection...

------
VonGuard
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.

~~~
Insanity
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
The original works great in Wine!

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

~~~
perseusmandate
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

~~~
koboll
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.

~~~
JonathanFly
>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.

Absolutely the best part. It was so easy to modify maps and just try stuff.
You could play a brand new game every night. So much creative flourishing,
constantly inventing multiple genres. You might even give it credit for
AutoChess since the Dota mod was inspired by a similar Pokemon WC3 map.

It looks like the most comprehensive map archive site went down and never came
back up -- all those maps will be lost in time.

~~~
verit
>It looks like the most comprehensive map archive site went down and never
came back up -- all those maps will be lost in time.

epicwar.com's first map was uploaded in Feb 2005. And now there's wc3maps.com,
which automatically archives ~all hosted maps.

------
taurath
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
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).

~~~
Moopy
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 :)

------
cpeterso
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-
hi...](https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-history-
creating-wow-classic-panel-recap)

------
matthewvincent
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
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

------
cm2012
This is incredible news. So many genres of games came from these.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

------
Tiktaalik
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!

------
Felz
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.

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

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

------
vntx
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.

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

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

------
accounn
Activision & Blizzard is scam & spy business.

You are the product for the shareholders & CEOs.

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

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

------
std_throwaway
Does anyone remember "Tides of Blood"?

------
iser
Hope to find some Dota Classic 3.76b games!

------
AaronMT
Release date?

------
macawfish
Ugh this looks so addicting

------
mylons
dota lives

~~~
vbezhenar
When I was tinkering with dota map, it used abysmal number of various hacks. I
doubt that it'll work.

~~~
duskwuff
Blizzard knows their audience. I fully expect that the DotA maps are among
their test cases. :)

------
galipgokalp
why?

