Idea for a whole new level of WC3 RPG

Ok I just had a great idea for a whole new level of RPG realism via WC3. You make a sweet, huge RPG map or series of maps (different continents, planes, whatever). Now you make this map stand-alone so that you wouldn't have to log onto battlenet to play it with other people. Because you could write a client/server based program that you could run locally every time u want to play this sweet RPG, and this client would continually update a Game Cache (that you would create via triggers in your RPG) from the client to the server (which u would have constantly running on some machine somewhere). So the server would be receiving all these incoming socket connections, download everbody's game cache (which would store unit locations and inventories, etc), merge them into a master cache and then send that cache back out to every client. Then your map would re-load the unit info from the new master cache into the real-time map. And this would happen (assuming the overhead wouldn't be too great - i have no idea really) every like .1 seconds, so it would appear to be a real-time RPG. How frickin sweet would that be??? It would essentially be a mini-WoW.
So you could have say 100 people on a map at a time (100 people to a server) all saving game caches of their personal character info, updating that with a master cache and sending it out to everyone else so all the clients would know where everyone else was. And you could also do text messages via cache's.
Now I wouldn't be putting this up here if I thought I could do it, but i just finished a good size map that took me FOREVER, so I don't even want to think about undertaking this project, so I'm just throwing the idea out there for any die-hard RPG mappers.
Email me if you wanna talk about it:
[email protected]

Peace out.

I'm sorry to say but that it most likely impossible. I'm 99.9% certain there is no way you can connect through a server outside b.net. This is an idea someone can try, but I highly doubt anyone is going to go to the extremes of even attempting something this massive, as it is likely not to work in the end. I wish I could show you this map right here that was cancelled because of the complexity, and this is nowhere near as complex as this idea. Unfortunately, I deleted that map xD It was a good idea, though, don't get me wrong on that part.

The hardest part about it would be getting the socket functions working, since I know nothing about program with TCP/IP libraries. Copying and merging the game caches would be easy. So would actually writing the server/client (once you figure sockets out). But it seems a lot less complicated than that FPS Blademaster mod, which looks like it took FORVER to figure out.
Anyway all you would need is someone well-versed in C/C++ and/or Visual Basic network programming.... any of you out there?

Well first of all, since this just an idea you are throwing out, it doesn't belong in maps in development.

Second of all, sounds like it would just be a much easier idea to just buy WoW.

Third, I heard somewhere that a group tried to make a server outside of battle.net without blizzard permission, and got their asses sued.

The concept is interesting, but probably very impossible.

First there are the legal issues, as Quickshok suggested. You wish to make a third party program to generate a game-cache file for Warcraft to read, and you also want to read warcraft-generated game-cache files with it. It's possible that this violates the EULA in some or more ways.


The next problem is implementation. You just can't make a real-time thing with this. And as far as making something turn-based goes, like chess, if you are capable of seting up a server that runs the whole thing and a client that downloads data and writes it to game-cache so you can then use Warcraft for your interface, you might as well make the client and the interface itself.

It would be much more effective and easier to just completely make a new Multiplayer RPG game. sounds like an ill thought and very farfetch idea.

The idea is to use Warcraft's game cache triggers to create the cache files, then write a completely independent client/server to deal with *transferring* those files, and nothing more (apart from some concatination). This would be as "illegal" as the Blademaster FPS mod, since that actually interferes with WC3's memory addressing, which is far more intrusive than handling external files that have been generated from your wc3 map using functions that Blizzard itself took the time to include in its editor. So as far as legalities I'm sure it would fly under the radar. Because it would definately NOT be setup as a profitable service running outside battlnet.

So.... aside from that the only thing is whether WC3 could write a cache file every .1 seconds or so, your client could grab the file, send it to your server, the server merge that file with all the other incoming caches, then send that single master cache back out to all the clients, all within a feasible amount of "real-time". I don't see how it would be unreasonable, unless the mere logistics of "caching" get in the way.

But if logistics were a problem, yah a turn-based thing could be do-able. And the idea is to, you know, use a game that's already been written (for example, WARCRAFT!), rather than writing my own RPG, since, you know, that would be insane and all.

Anyway, its just an idea and I think it could work.