Warcraft II - 29 years! War2Combat 5.0 released!

[iL]

So, that happened 29 years ago:

Blizzard Entertainment this week began shipping "Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness," one of the most anticipated entertainment titles this year. Warcraft II, sequel to the company's award-winning fantasy-strategy game "Warcraft: Orcs and Humans," boasts several enhancements including tactical combat over land, sea and air; head-to-head play against as many as eight players; ability for players to customize their own maps, units and sound effects; and rich Super VGA graphics.

https://www.blizzardarchive.com/pub/index.php?id=press951205

So, let me introduce our new build in honor of that day:

War2Combat 5.0!

    - The main developer of the combat have been changed to: Mistral. Reworking the main executable file of the game: fois. Project curator: il
    - The concept of the combat has been changed.
        - The installer with a bunch of confusing settings has been removed, the optimal default settings have been selected, they are used when installing the game.
        - Important system settings of the game have been moved from the registry directly to the main executable file of the game.
        - A launcher has been made for the most important settings, as well as a configurator.
       - Now the combat can be downloaded and updated online, directly through the launcher.

    - Now the only executable file of the game, has become a widescreen version, adapted for new modern monitors and showing more game space on the screen.
    - Combat allows you to enter both the official Blizzard server and any unofficial ones.
    - The ddraw configurator and the ddraw files themselves have been updated.
    - Now the OpenGL visualizer is selected by default for rendering the game on modern computers, using shaders for anti-aliasing and obtaining a beautiful modern picture.
      OpenGL correctly displays the BNET chat, but it switches the monitor resolution.
      So, it's still possible to switch to the old GDI, which used to be the main visualizer before. The chat is still displayed in a resolution of 640x480.
      You can also use the new GDI visualizer from the developer narzoul, which allows you to scale the BNET chat. However, it does not support switching to windowed mode.
    - All necessary plugins for the game have been updated and tested.
    - Combat includes the final versions of War2InSight and WarVideo, compatible with current and earlier versions of Warcraft II.
    - The map editor has been updated by the developer: fois. Unit limit check has been removed, and other small improvements have been made.
    - Utilities for map makers have been added: PudPic, as well as WarMaker.
    - A trigger editor for maps has been added: War2 Triggers Editor.


Here's it: https://en.war2.ru/downloads/?file=War2Loader.exe

Please, give me any feedback for this thing.

(It's kinda beta-version, so use if carefully, make a backup of your old war2combat or install this one anywhere else.)

[Mistral]

and this time 100% without viruses 
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/447dfdff55a089db3e6593b5bb36fc3882c7ca4dd35550f46065ed6b6ff4c9d0

[fois]

Note: Do install this on Windows XP / Vista / 7 you may need to install the .NET Framework 4.0, otherwise the launcher may not start

.NET 4.0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17718

Windows XP might also need the Windows imaging component: https://archive.org/details/wic_x86_enu

[dannyldd]

this is, as always, just top tier Warcraft 2 quality content by Ed and other guys from russian community. Nothing more to congratulate for the work being set in here !

Now mods have easy access for more people and updates for war2Combat.

so ed, adding Stonia and Mist turns red may get mods up to date with this combat v5.0

[Pandaprewmaster325]

The removal of unit limit is tempting lol , was thinking today about the rework I wanna do to story missions and how much units wanna add , one question what does the trigger editor offer? And does the base game editor have the ability to create triggers? And what sort of triggers? Lets say I want a certain faction in a map to start with 1 armor upgrade is it possible to do so in the base game editor? I heard every trigger is hardcoded which sounds like I won't be able to assign spells to dalaran mages if I wanna include some in the "dead rise ae quel'thlas falls" also if I want to make each single level of beyond the dark portal have heroes fail condition MUST be included if u lose heroes , can I do this without this trigger editor or is it needed.

Oh and does the combat edition include full game like full game I mean music , cutscenes etc basically its warcraft 2 but updated or does this thing lack certain aspects ? You know im someone who would delete a game cuz I didn't get the original intro or a certain sound is missing.

[Mistral]

full game yes, all 400+ mb being downloaded

[The Legend of StarTale]

Not sure what's going on but I experienced other players and myself randomly getting disconnected in the middle of a match. I have not updated to the new 5.0. I did play a few matches with the Blizzard balance mode on. Not sure if that has anything to do with it. Here's a few clips. The games I dc'ed were classic not blizzard mode.

https://www.twitch.tv/karmanation_/clip/ThoughtfulPrettyPresidentMVGame-LqbsdEmMK2DvBg7e

https://www.twitch.tv/karmanation_/clip/PlayfulQuaintBeaverPeteZarollTie-70bdKcVaO0JzC7pO

[Oragorn]

and this time 100% without viruses    

Very bad. "Viruses" is already a sign of quality.

[Oragorn]

Unfortunately, the current build is still full of bugs. But we hope that our programmers will quickly fix everything. Moreover, the new launcher itself can be updated almost in real time. In fact, this is the only good news.

[Pandaprewmaster325]

full game yes, all 400+ mb being downloaded

The size alone is appealing , thats what I like about old games low size plenty of content win win for me

[The Legend of StarTale]

Can we also fix bug where units randomly stop listening to stop / stand ground and go on their own adventure across the map? Peon, grunts, ogres I have experienced this with. I have had neighbor wars with peons where they stop listening, you try to issue a command or send them to mine etc and they just go a certain distance and then run back to go after an enemy unit. Same thing with grunts/ogres. A wave of enemy units start hitting your scout farms far from your units and damaging them causes random ogres to leave the pack that is no where close to the engagement and run at it 1 or 2 ogres/grunts only. You try to pull them back, you try to spam stop / stand ground so you can lust your pack. They listen for 1 second and repeat this. This bug has been around for years. 

[{Lance}]

Can we also fix bug where units randomly stop listening to stop / stand ground and go on their own adventure across the map? Peon, grunts, ogres I have experienced this with. I have had neighbor wars with peons where they stop listening, you try to issue a command or send them to mine etc and they just go a certain distance and then run back to go after an enemy unit. Same thing with grunts/ogres. A wave of enemy units start hitting your scout farms far from your units and damaging them causes random ogres to leave the pack that is no where close to the engagement and run at it 1 or 2 ogres/grunts only. You try to pull them back, you try to spam stop / stand ground so you can lust your pack. They listen for 1 second and repeat this. This bug has been around for years. 

If you can reproduce it reliably,  it can be fixed.  Otherwise,  it's not really practical to try to fix something that happens only randomly once in a while.  I have seen it do this,  it's usually a unit stuck in "attack" mode on some other unit.  If you attack a unit and then immediately try to send it in a mine,  it'll turn right around and go after that unit and will refuse to go into the mine.  However,  I've NOT been able to reproduce it reliably.  It doesnt always happen and I dont know what else needs to be done to reproduce reliably.  Those adventures you speak of,  are your unit chasing some other unit that it had been attacking previously so far as I can tell from when I've seen it happen.

[Rareskills]

Can we also fix bug where units randomly stop listening to stop / stand ground and go on their own adventure across the map? Peon, grunts, ogres I have experienced this with. I have had neighbor wars with peons where they stop listening, you try to issue a command or send them to mine etc and they just go a certain distance and then run back to go after an enemy unit. Same thing with grunts/ogres. A wave of enemy units start hitting your scout farms far from your units and damaging them causes random ogres to leave the pack that is no where close to the engagement and run at it 1 or 2 ogres/grunts only. You try to pull them back, you try to spam stop / stand ground so you can lust your pack. They listen for 1 second and repeat this. This bug has been around for years. 

This only happens when playing U8 since he has magic unit control hack

[{Lance}]

Well,  the loader was the right plan,  but the execution.............. failed .  You forgot to place the loader in the War2Combat dir after install as well as add a start menu item for it.  The campaign is cute,  but it's not actually playable. Moving beyond the starting area simply caused mine to crash and close.  You should have got an english speaker to do the english narration.  I cant understand your accent.  But I've never even played the original campaigns all the way through so I dont think this will be an issue for me anyway since I'll likely never play it heh.  I noticed it also had some new features like a wood counter display (that might actually be an improvement to consider adding to the real game btw but it should be voted on first lol  I could see both pros and cons to adding it).  It would assist with picking which peon to move when splitting up a double chop duo.

[{Lance}]

I had problems getting 640x480 to work correctly.  I do not like HD screen sizes for war2 as it makes the minimap to hard to monitor on a large monitor.  So I started messing with the video settings to try to get the ORIGINAL settings back.

I also HATE that the pvpgn chat window gets taken out of full screen and becomes a window in both openGL and DirectX9 whenever you enter it (from a game or from main menu).  Also,  there's a bug with that as well when using 640x480,  if you enter or create a game,  it only works the first time.  If you enter/create a game the 2nd time,  it sets the starting pixel to 50% rather than 0,  resulting in the screen being shifted to the right and down so that pixel 0 is dead center in the screen.  The only way to fix that was to switch to GDI.  It seems to only do this with small screen sizes like 640x480.  I suspect that the pixel var is using % rather than a number.  IE:  0%/0% and 50%/50% instead of 0/0.  Not sure what would cause it to use 50%/50%.  Either way, it shouldnt be using a % to begin with.

There's also another bug with the "Full Screen" option that causes the minimap to be BLURRY as all hell as well as the menu items having a strange white border on the right side of them and texts to have white in them as well.  Changing to Fullscreen Upscale fixes that problem.... sort of.  Text still has white in it when it should be completely yellow or whatever color the font is set to.

Anyway,  for those that dont like the video and want the original war2 settings back as close as possible,  this is what I used:

Fullscreen Upscaled
640x480
Unchecked Maintain aspect ratio (this stretches the screen so there are no black borders, some people dont like that)
Unchecked Vsync
Unchecked Adjust mouse sensitivity
Checked Lock cursor
=====
OpenGL
Bilinear.glsl
Unchecked limit Frame rate (this improves input latency for me by lowering latency as far as I can tell)
Unchecked Window boxing
Show Window borders (for when alt-tab is used)
Checked Remember window position/size
=====
No Limit for game speed
Everything else checked on the compatibility page