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Dual path forward for DotA?

Talk about anything DotA-related.
cen
Posts: 8
Joined: May 13, 2016
Gaming Platform: eurobattle

Dual path forward for DotA?

Postby cen » May 24th, '17, 13:07

There is a major problem in W3 DotA community right now, as we all know with 1.26 and 1.27b+ incompatibility. Operators of bnet servers and DotA leagues like me have a difficult choice to make:

1. Keep up to date with official if Blizzard ever decides to release some good patches or perhaps a game remaster. Keep playing 6.85k forever.
2. Stay on 1.26 and be able to play 6.88x, lose all other future possible benefits.

So far we decided to go with option 1 but DotA players have nothing to look forward to and there is zero excitement. Being able to play 6.88x would be great news.

I think there might be a path forward with both options altho it is a bit convoluted. This is how I imagine it would work.

1. Allow 1.26 and 1.28.2 to connect to a pvpgn server simultaniously. This already works.
2. Switch hostbot dota league (next: HBD) to 6.88X map. This league only allows players on 1.26 patch.
3. Allow 1.28 users to join all games as normal except HBD games to prevent desync and game crashes.

There is no mechanism to prevent players with different w3 versions from joining the same game but it could be done at gproxy level.
1. Expand hostbot config to specify which w3 version is exclusively supported
2. Expand GPS protocol between ghost and gproxy so gproxy can tell ghost the W3 version of the client, at the same time ghost tells which w3 version it supports.
3. Ghost kicks wrong w3 version players and GProxy refuses to join if version mismatch is found.

With these steps you can achieve:
-1.26 users happily play on HBD on latest dota map
-1.28 users happily play as normal, except they can't join HBD games

The final thing to solve is that you should be able to easily switch between W3 versions. Through a launcher client we currently have 2 options:
Normal gateway (1.28)
GProxy gateway (1.28)
---
And we need a third option, something like:
DotA 6.88X Gateway (1.26)

Depending on chosen gateway the launcher must switch your w3 version instantly. The simplest idea would be to rename core w3 files, ex:
war3.exe.126
war.exe
->Select DotA 6.88X Gateway
war3.exe.126->war3.exe
war3.exe->war3.exe.128
run war3.exe

The negative side of this proposal is that you have to decide what you want to play before launching W3. You either play DotA 6.88X the whole session or play something else. If you are playing latest DotA and your friend plays some custom map, you have to restart W3 to join him. This could be annoying and it could divide the player base.

Security issue of 1.26 can also be avoided by a hard check in GProxy to only allow to join predefined maps that mach a hash, as long as you can trust d1stats map is not doing something nefarious. If there is a map hash mismatch, gproxy simply refuses to join the game since it could be an exploit.

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Loki
Posts: 1833
Joined: Jan 12, 2015
Gaming Platform: ВременоБезплатформеный

Re: Dual path forward for DotA?

Postby Loki » May 24th, '17, 14:14

What reason to update over 1.27?
New patches crash many interesting custom maps
1.27 need just for Win10, and no reason update more
All new patches is absolute garbage
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cen
Posts: 8
Joined: May 13, 2016
Gaming Platform: eurobattle

Re: Dual path forward for DotA?

Postby cen » May 24th, '17, 14:20

Loki wrote:What reason to update over 1.27?
New patches crashing many intresting custom maps
1.27 need just for Win10, and no reason update more
All new patches is absolute garbage

Yes, for now. But it is highly likely that Blizzard will release something actually good in the future, they probably didn't rework the update system just to fu** shit up for a few months. We just don't know.

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Loki
Posts: 1833
Joined: Jan 12, 2015
Gaming Platform: ВременоБезплатформеный

Re: Dual path forward for DotA?

Postby Loki » May 24th, '17, 14:24

Ok we dont know, but no reason to suppose that blizzard will do wc3 better.
At this moment we dont have the difficult choice
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DracoL1ch
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Location: Russia
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Re: Dual path forward for DotA?

Postby DracoL1ch » May 24th, '17, 14:28

1.27a and higher cannot be used to play with other wc3 versions. If you mix 26 + 27, you'll get random errors like fatal errors or desync. Reasons unknown, but I know for sure they did change couple of internal mechanics, and they work differently in 26 & 27. There are no way to hope that Blizzard won't break even more in 28+ patches. I'd rather say there would be no compatibility between 26 and any newer versions at all.

There are 0 reasons to keep up with "official" patches as they provide nothing new - nor for players, nor for mapmakers. Custom servers can use extended files to increase map size limit, and all the rest can be done via user. If only you are using win10+, there are couple of fixes in 27a for this OS. But from what I know, there are people who run win10 & WC3 with no issues at all, so it's also dependable.

Even if blizzard do something valuable, which I highly doubt, IDK what should it be to override all the stuff we already did. Graphics? No way, engine is just too old and they do only small fixes. Perfomance? Again, nope, they didn't even bothered to ask what is it. What should it be, enlight me?

Overall, 26 is the most stable and bug-free version of all WC3 for today. Not to say, it's easy to maintain as it doesn't require anything at all, you can keep it as standalone WC3 in different folder and run it manually, as needed. You just don't press BNet button and it's just fine, for anything. Same for 27. At RGC, for instance, 27a is runned now as default, supporting all memhack features of 88.

I explained about safeness issue before, and can repeat once again - there are no point to do anything malicious on that low communities. But sure, if anyone bothered, fixed list of maps which can be hosted is the way to go.

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letruck
Posts: 90
Joined: Jan 13, 2015
Location: Russia
Gaming Platform: omg-stats
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Re: Dual path forward for DotA?

Postby letruck » May 24th, '17, 14:49

Ну вот огорчил ты сен сея ). Админа евробатле


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