lep / jassdoc

Document the WarCraft 3 API
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Incorporate info from wc3jass.com? #73

Open Luashine opened 1 year ago

Luashine commented 1 year ago

The website disappeared in 2008. Some of it remains on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20080911204136/http://wc3jass.com/

Moyack recreated the website in 2012 but it has been erased since.

Apparently some of the tips described there made it verbatim to current day, like Jass: Known bugs says:

GroupEnumUnitsInRectCounted and GroupEnumUnitsInRangeCounted Those two natives seems to show irregular behaviour when used on large numbers of units.

I remember seeing that exact wording not too long ago (until I described these functions).

The plan:

  1. Read notable forum topics, write down (possibly historic) information from there. Especially the totally undocumented and unintuitive natives will be helpful // UPD: DONE. All of them.
  2. Optional: go back and recreate test cases for affected warcraft versions. // UPD: NOT NEEDED.

Do we need to do this?

Most info on Jass will still be relevant. Some info is not, because various bugs have been fixed. Still, the community is pretty much split between 1.24 (old maps with return bug), 1.26 (maps making use of memhack), 1.30/1.31 (our reforged-less brothers and sisters), 1.32 (due to buggy 1.33), and the latest official 1.33. While nobody's gonna develop for 1.24; 1.26 and others are still somewhat relevant.

The priority should be undocumented natives first and if anyone has the motivation, separately note 1.26+ bugs and quirks.

How?

You can freely* browse the website on archive.org. *But not really freely. Because some topics are not saved (example #2373) and others will be saved under a different URL.

For example,

If you have the latter URL, you can easily try its short version, but if you have the short URL then you have to search/filter all of the archived URLs. It's possible, but limited and buggy: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wc3jass.com/* (takes a long time to load, don't open unless you intend to work on it)

Progress tracking

If multiple people will work on this, I suggest each person to create a single comment and add to it the topic you've read and processed to organize the effort between multiple people. Example:

[x] https://web.archive.org/web/20080113045551/http://www.wc3jass.com:80/viewtopic.php?t=2039 = Jass tutorial by Vexorian

[ ] https://web.archive.org/web/20080607065301/http://www.wc3jass.com:80/viewtopic.php?t=1999&sid=bbe8304984c3779b4fd9c7c6d19ded6a = Tutorial, "Using Timers and Handle Vars"

// Update: Not needed, there were 800 saved post links total with many duplicates.

Luashine commented 1 year ago

Well this endeavour was pretty useless. To sum it up, the website resurrected by moyack (after the original wc3jass went down - and it was not archived by the internet archive) was a very small community of (no offense) kids, a typical tiny 2010s forum. Apart from a few very good models and Jass libraries, there wasn't much. Practically nothing that could be salvaged for jassdoc.

Although moyack seems to have lost the entire forum database while managing that site, the latest posts were all migrated to wc3modding.

These need to be incorporated into jassdoc

I did not find any obvious mentions of game-specific bugs.


Honorary mentions: Advanced Streak System v4.3.0.0 vs currently available Advanced Streak System v5.1.1.0.

Overall wc3modding.info remains a great place for those older Jass libraries, maps and models. I'm not sure they've been all cross-posted to Hive by their authors.

lep commented 1 year ago

I took the trackable stuff and wrote a mini tutorial in commit b31a2dcad17b38d267f97219e7a863b1f4530ca3.