Version 1.2.2 and Announcement

Version 1.2.2 is here. This version will be delivering improvements to the custom heroes and custom hero abilities. In particular, units converted to heroes with -makehero will no longer lose their visual values (such as name and size), and the -makehero command itself has been turned into a player command. For abilities, the limit has been increased from 4 abilities per hero to 7 abilities per hero. More importantly, the save/load system has been improved, which means that units converted to heroes will be saved as heroes, and all hero abilities will also be saved, so you won't have to add each ability manually to your heroes anymore, if you have saved them.

You can download and find the patch notes of version 1.2.2 here: github.com/Son-Guhun/Titan-Land-Lands-of-Plenty/releases/tag/v1.2.2


Important announcement

I am very happy to announce that King_Katanova, the main developer of the most popular Titan Land maps since 2011, has joined the Titan Land LoP team. He will be a senior race designer, and will help populate the race spawner with many new races, some of them imported from KoT, and others brand new. Now that I once again have someone to help me with development, version 1.3.0 will probably be coming much sooner than anticipated, which will put my schedule back in track after the month-long 1.2.0 beta.

There are, however, a few challenges when it comes to having two people working on the same map, at the same time. To make a long story short, all the models in the to-do list of the current races will be postponed from the 1.2.x patch cycle, and will instead be added during the 1.3.x patch cycle. Still, with all the new races being added, it's more than worth it to pay this small price.

I would like to warmly welcome King_Katanova, and I hope all players do so as well. You can expect great things from the future of Lands of Plenty!

Version 1.2.1 is here

Version 1.2.0 has been a pretty bumpy road. I ended up releasing 8 betas of 1.2.0. The first few betas were mostly intended to catch any bugs with the new unselectable decoration system. Previously, unselectable decorations were units with the Locust ability (a kind of special ability in wc3 that makes units unselectable, used by locusts of the Crypt Lord's ultimate ability). With the new natives added in patches 1.29 and 1.31, Blizzard has allowed map makers to manipulate Special Effects to an unprecedented extent. With this in mind, I rewrote the unselectable unit systems of LoP to instead turn decorations into Special Effects.


The first 3 beta versions were pretty effective at catching bugs related to converting untis to special effects. However, along the course of the betas, I decided that the map was way too unstable as it was. It just sucks to crash or desync in 1/3 games that you play. With this in mind, I set out to fix crashes and desyncs. Unfortunately, all the solutions I was able to come up with didn't really seem to make any difference at all. In the end, I will be skipping version 1.2.0 and releasing 1.2.1 in order to avoid any confusion with the beta versions.


Sacrifices made in order to fix desyncs & crashes:

  • The maximum player count has been reduced to 12.
  • The Vines terrain tile has been removed.

Some or all of these changes may be reversed in the future, as now I am able to more accurately isolate desync causes. I can slowly reintroduce each new feature, and collect data to see if that reintroduction has led to more people desyncing.


A Roadmap for Versions 1.2.x:

  • Improve the customizable ability system, hopefully including every hero and unit ability that can reasonably be removed or added. Additionally, save all removable abilities of a hero when it is saved, so that it can be loaded with the correct custom abilities.
  • Improve the -makehero command, allowing players to use the command without having to resort to the Titan. Additionally, allow custom heroes to be saved by the save system and loaded as custom heroes. The reason this command was limited to the Titan before was because there were too many random crashes in the map. Now I can more easily isolate any crashes that are caused by this command (right now, I haven't found any).
  • I have a lot of models in my to-do list for the current races. I plan to add at least most of them in the 1.2.x patch cycle.


A Roadmap for Version 1.3.0:

  • New Terrain: the terrain survey that I posted in the Titan Land discord was a great success. It got people talking about the map's terrain and their frustrations with it, and it also exposed me to ideas that I probably would not have thought of myself. In light of this, version 1.3.0 is going to include a significant overhaul to a big chunk of the maps terrain. Hopefully the community will be much more satisfied with this new scenery.
  • New Races: Vampires and Ghosts. They were supposed to come out in 1.2.0, but they have been postponed due to other features being prioritized.
  • There won't be that many new code-related features added to the map. The reason for this is the fact that I will be converting the map from JASS (wc3's native scripting language, which sucks and is very slow) to Lua (a professional scripting language that can be used with WC3 after patch 1.31).