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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.
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.
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.
This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games they released over 20 years ago.
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.
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.
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... 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…
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASS#Return_Bug_Security_Vulne...
[2]: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/accessing-memory-from-t...
[3]: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/1-28-x-era-versions-bre...
Oh I’d be thrilled to play WC3 Tower Defence again. Those were loads of fun.
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... 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games they released over 20 years 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.