Platform-agnostic editing tools?

Given that editing programs primarily deals with Warcraft 3 files, which are same whether it is on Windows or OS X, it seems to me very feasible to create a portable back-end of a given editing program so it would be now a matter of giving it a front-end for a particular platform. Would it be possible to take a existing editing program's source code and re-organize it into the FE/BE format so someone with OS X can come up with a front-end?

It'd still be one program in terms of supporting and updating. Problems with front-end are generally trivial and easily resolved compared to rewriting the code necessary to deal with a given file.

So, why not?

Grats, you just invented wxwidgets and SDL. But this won't work because of mPQ editing tools, and how the heck do you modify a program's memory in mac?

Hm, I'm not sure why it won't work because of MPQs. MPQ is MPQ, whether it's on a PC or Mac, no?

Furthermore, I'm not sure why program's memory is an issue. If Blizzard can get Warcraft 3 and WE to run on either platforms using same custom formats (MPQ, MDL, BLP, etc), then obviously they've dealt with whatever issues they might have with different architectures' ways of handling memory and whatnots...

Need some more elaboration....

The DLLs most of our tools are using to read/write MPQs are... DLLs ! you would need a mac library with the same capabilities, there aren't any, you would have to use those console MPQ tools for mac that are kind of limited so porting will get hard.

Also, I can't think of anybody that would know how to hack mac's World Editor, and that kind of renders 50% of our tools useless even if we wanted and could make them cross platform.
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The short answer for you people is to get those Intel*86 Macs, those are actually PCs in disguise but I guess the reason you like Macs is because of the OS and design in hardware, none of the tools require a lot of processor or graphics so vmware will work very well, in fact vmware can even run a hacked world editor. Or you could even dual boot now...

Be realistic, very few people will bother making their programs cross platform, source of some important ones is not even available and the programmers are missing now, then you still need people to actually port them, and test them. I myself would love to use Kubuntu all the time but this whole wc3 modding stuff won't let me, unfortunally for you guys, it is also the case for Mac OSX.

The problem is not how the program handles its memory within, the thing is how the computer architecture loads the program and how much freedom a third program has to handle a running application. This obviously just affects programs that hook on war3 (or WE) while it is running, like grimoire and the like, or custom loaders, like mpqdraft (which IIRC there was something akin to it, at least during the starcraft era).

Hm. I'm confused. Why are they in DLLs? I mean, if someone hacked MPQ and figured out the schematic therein, the information needed to be able to write and read MPQs should be easily portable to any platform, no? Heck, there's already Mac MPQ read/write apps out there! But that's not what I'm really after anyhow; see below.


Fair enough. Alexia's explanation about memory management made it all clearer.

That said, even only have a certain few tools would make all the difference (e.g. MDX/MDL viewer/extractor comes immediately to mind).


Oh, good point there.

Thanks for enlightening me! :)