Warcraft III

Blog 795: This Wreckage Gold

Luckily This Wreckage is much better built than When the Freedom Slips Away, so it’s much less buggy on the scripting level. Unluckily, it contains a whole heap of custom models and data that Reforged doesn’t seem to like. Sigh. No rest for the wicked, huh?

This is a bit overdue because I was sort-of waiting for Reforged to stabilise a bit and… uh… well, since the dev team has apparently been dismantled, I guess this is as stable as it’s going to get! So behold: This Wreckage Gold with a load of fixes and small tweaks! … and a whole heap of unfixable “known issues”. Double sigh.

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Modding, Warcraft III

Blog 640: A World of 1D Arrays

It’s amazing what you can do with only global state and one-dimensional arrays, when you really put your mind to it. What was supposed to be a quick fart in the general direction of a Warcraft project has grown into something quite incredible.

Well, incredible on the technical side. The game itself is no more or no less than a streamlined version of my standard WC3 RPG formula. You may or may not want this.

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Modding, Warcraft III

Blog 638: Continuing to Make Sense of Cellular Automata

When it comes to modding, I have to admit to a masochistic streak. I could use the 3rd party pre-processor to get structs and pseudo-object-orientated syntax that would make this a whole heap easier, but no, I’ve got to use the bare metal to feel alive.

So, that procedurally generated Warcraft III side project I’ve been fiddling with during lunch hour is a whole barrel of laughs. This episode’s consternation surrounds creature spawning.

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Modding, Warcraft III

Blog 629: Making Sense of Cellular Automata

We’ve been through the cellular automata algorithm before. I said some things back then that were mostly theory — things I’ve now been able to test in the wild.

So how does one take a grid of noise and turn it into a functional RPG? Well, lucky for you, I’m getting close…

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Modding, Warcraft III

Blog 615: Post Mortem: This Wreckage

Considering I’m now making a real game for real, maybe now is a good time to go back to my roots and examine what went right… and what went wrong… with my previous development efforts: my Warcraft III maps.

Today: the big one, This Wreckage

You know, I actually managed to do this one without any spoilers. Maybe there are a couple in the screenshots.

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Nondescript

Blog 564: Planning the Elusive Third Book

Did I mention I was writing a novel? Surely. I always forget to clarify, though — it’s actually a trilogy. Go hard or go home, and all that; RDZ never does things by half measures.

Creating the new super-refined plot outlines for When the Freedom Slips Away and This Wreckage has been mostly straightforward. To be fair, I have written three or four drafts of each over the years, so there is a lot of base material to draw from.

The difference with the cdoncluding third book, Shattered By Light, is that there has never even been one draft. It has always had an ending, and it briefly had an awkward beginning — but no middle, nothing remotely approaching a complete narrative. This is an issue that I am finally going to remedy.

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