Making spells in wc3: still torture

I spent a lot of holiday time making spells for the failed hero contest at wc3c.net My spells are somewhere around that page.

My conclusion is that. I have ZINC which makes typing very fast. Let me self indulge by saying it really does help. Of course, it also allows me to code atrocious things like:

        t = CreateTrigger();
        TriggerRegisterAnyUnitEventBJ(t, EVENT_PLAYER_UNIT_SPELL_CAST );
        TriggerAddCondition(t, function()->boolean {
            return BUILD_SPELL_ID == GetSpellAbilityId();
        });
        TriggerAddAction(t, function () {
            onRebuildStart( GetTriggerUnit() );
        });

Yay! anonymous functions... I wonder if people can actually read that code...

Another accomplishment of the year was the discovery of jEdit. It has also been amazing at increasing my efficiency. Thanks to auto complete I don't actually need to browse common.j every 5 minutes...

I have also made a lot of things to my linux command-line based warcraft map build system.

So, in theory I should now be able to make spells and maps quite quickly. Unfortunately that's not true. Just like I thought, the bottleneck was never coding or compiling, it was testing. In fact, I think I could have finished the spells using the vJass from 3 years ago much faster than I did now if map loading time took 1 second instead of 40 seconds. The other major issue is that wc3's engine is full of idiosyncrasies that force you to keep tweaking and testing object editor until you find something that actually works. In fact, making these spells was a fight against the engine. I had to deal with pocket factory and storm, earth and fire, both things required a lot of reverse engineering.

Reality is that regardless of all the work in the last years to make coding easier, and although we succeeded at that. Making spells is still torture. But I also figured that we still lack specialized libraries or at least I do. The spell making process invokes using certain tools and processes over and over and over again. The spells I made all are really just combinations of the same old 'processes' I've been using since 2004. The language has changed. The rules about how to code have changed. But it is still the same. Doing all these things over and over again is very repetitive.

I think some sort of library combination that has all these common processes abstracted in a way that you can just put them together as LEGO bricks would be amazing and seriously improve the speed of these things. I also think that maybe we need a better language. We've been messing with syntax and OOP concepts for ages but maybe we need something that would free us from having to use all that attaching and defensive programming related to it manually.