How do you make a mod?

This looks like as good a forum as any to ask this.

I have been interested in designing custom heroes for Warcraft, and so far I have made 1. I have plans for many more, but I had to think, what do I actually expect to do with these heros? I realized that what really want is some sort of a mod where you would load up this modded version of Warcraft and then have access in any of your standard maps to buy these custom heroes from the tavern. Or maybe I will make some racial heroes. Anyway, I don't really have any idea how to go about modding and I can't seem to find information on modding anywhere. Could somebody point me to some tutorials or give me a rundown on the basic of modding or give me an estimation of how difficult my idea would be to make?

Also if other people are already doing something like my idea that would be good to know.

Err... I think this is more fit for the General Discussion forum. ^^ Even though I might be mistaking since I only came 3 times to the General Discussion forum in all my years of being a member here :P I'll move it there, let someone move it back if I made a mistake :P

There is a tutorial section out here somewhere too, take a look there.
http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forumdisplay.php?f=425

-Fladian

I'll move this first...

It sounds like it is a bit of a pain to do a nice clean mod, but this Custom Campaign Installer I have heard bout sounds very handy. Unfortunately all the links I find to it are dead.

So I am guessing I will want to put all the object data and imported files for my heros into an MPQ file. But what about the triggers that run all the trigger spells for my heros? I don't expect that you can use them from within and MPQ. Can you?!

i've modded fora bitnow- it's interesting what you can do with an MPQ. talk to me on msn some time.... i'll see what i can do.

I appreciate the offer but a) I don't know your MSN address or where to find it. b) If we discussed this stuff on the forum it could be usefull for other people as well. I am downloading TToR to see how that is done.

I know you can modify that war3patch.mpq and put all your objects in there. But can you tell Warcraft to just load extra MPQs so you don't have to mess with the official ones? Another thing, as I have mentioned before, is what do you do about triggers? Can you stick those into an MPQ?!

Can anybody tell me how "Use local files" with WEU works??? That sounds potentially usefull.

hmm... it may be better to write your own patching software. what i mean is - to modify your war3patch.mpq, find the differences to the normal mpq using binary compare software, and write a little patcher. it'll save you space. i've seen no way to load extra mpq's with the game.

I can just have a batch file that switches the war3patch.mpq with a custom one if I must.

What I want to know now is how would take triggers from a map and put them into the modified war3patch.mpq so that they could be used by any and every map?