• Large post incoming! Please bear with me, lol ^^’ Hopefully this is the proper place to post all of this.
• Nooby question! From my understanding, the Warcraft II Combat Edition was an old project from 2006 that was initially developed to both support online play and cut the game’s file size down as a means to become more portable. This leads me to ponder on something, however...In this modern day in age, file sizes are not as problematic anymore since both hard drives and USB flash drives hold much, much more space than they used to hold in the past.
• With that in mind, IMHO, it is unfortunate that the most recent version of Combat Edition still opts to cut down the game's file size as much as possible by removing both the game's music and the audio during the campaign’s dialogue sequences. Thankfully, at least with the 2015 release of Combat Edition, the campaign was finally added back in as well as the extra, funny unit voices. Yet still, while it’s cool that the campaign was brought back, IMHO, it seems kind of pointless to me since it lacks the iconic music and audio from the pre-mission dialogue sequences. I may as well just hunt down the original Battle Net edition of the game to play the campaign. Doing that, however, means that I have to have 2 different Warcraft II programs installed on my computer, and that is just inconvenient and missed potential...
• I don't mean to sound pessimistic. I absolutely LOVE what the devs have brought to us through all of their work toward creating and updating the combat edition throughout the years. This issue has only just become especially prevalent to me recently since only a few months ago Blizzard released StarCraft: Brood War for free with an awesome patch that allows the game to run better on modern computers. All while running from one program, the convenience of being able to play the campaign in Brood War while also being able to login to Blizzard’s multiplayer server is wonderful!
• Is there a definitive version of Warcraft II that contains the full game as well as the war2, online, multiplayer server? Perhaps I could have simply not seen such a build floating around the internet?
• I have heard from somebody recently that the Warcraft II Combat Edition is no longer being updated sadly. Further updates could potentially fix the issues that I stated above as well as make more progress in fixing the graphical errors that are brought forth by the newer versions of Windows. This is unfortunate, IMHO, since Brood War has released for free with a patch that makes it the best version of the game to play to date. I feel like Brood War has been rising in popularity recently because of this. This popularity could potentially transfer over into the Warcraft II community! Thus, again, it's a shame that there are no more updates for the Warcraft II Combat Edition because it would be super beneficial if a version of the game would release that included all of the game's original assets, the custom War2 server, community patches, and had full compatibility with windows 7-10. If all of this was available in a one package download, I feel like that would be a really good thing for the Warcraft II community!
• Because a one package download does not exist, I have been trying to search around for a way to get the music working in the Combat Edition myself. I actually read somewhere else on a forum and also on the Warcraft II Server discord that I just need to copy the install.exe file over from the battlenet edition to the war2combat file directory...However, when I do this, I can no longer get War2Combat to run at all as I receive an error message when I attempt to boot it claiming that I must have the Warcraft II CD in the drive :/ This is pretty strange considering that I can run Battlenet Edition fine WITHOUT a CD, so, I don't really understand why that copying its install file over to the Combat Edition makes Combat Edition suddenly require a CD. Very strange…
• I tried 2 different computers and came up with the same result, the same no CD in drive error message ;-; Any assistance or input on everything that I stated here would be super appreciative♥! ^. ^’ Thanks for the read my dudes!
