Of course. So, I rewrote my own spinoff of the War3 game and have not been indulging much in Patch 2.0 content but I reckon the fundamentals have not changed. Because the fundamentals would have likely not changed, here's where we stand:
If the game itself adds a new unit editor field then makes that field incorrect for the default units, your map data is stored as a "changeset" against default units. So if they change, your map appears to change. To prevent this, there are 2 copies of all standard units and stuff in War3 -- one of them is locked on Frozen Throne patch 1.07 (Custom_V1/Units folder), and the other updates in melee games for balance (default Units/ folder). Then, Reforged updated both of them, because it doesn't care about you, nor about respecting the original source material, because it's changing hands to different managers all the time.
Assuming then that both versions of the unit data updated, what you are looking at now is a case where you want to make custom content but your map's content is a changeset against incorrect standard units, who include changes you don't want.
This presents two obvious possible options: either
- hack in a replacement for the standard units in your custom map, wherein they all have the settings you originally intended and so a "changeset" against them is likewise how you intend
- run an automated program on your custom map to modify all units (or perhaps all necessary custom units) to have a change applied to "change" them back to what you wanted
There was already someone on Hive who published a tool for "old maps" to do option 1 above. But personally, I would not run their EXE code unless it was Open Source and you could read how it worked. I think that after 20 years of War3 modding, the technologies that have lasted us were typically the ones that were shared for us to understand how they work, and to maintain in the face of patches. So if someone gives you a closed source technology such as an EXE, and if it does not include the code for reconstructing a modified form of that EXE on your own, then the person posting that is probably either extremely uncaring or actually wants to take advantage of you. This is my opinion, and there will be some people who disagree with it, but I am simply describing why I personally will not use the tool linked above, even though I think I already suggested it to someone to solve their problem, as something they could look at, because it looked like it was probably designed to solve their problem.
Your other solution is option 2 from above - automation for Unit Editor. Of course, as long ago as 6 years ago I wrote my own mimic of the object editor so that I could change it in any way, similar to what I just described above, and add any feature. But when I created that, I was not doing novel creative work other than a lookalike user interface. The underlying technology for object editor automation that I used was written by PitzerMike as far back as the 2000s and was also available in Jass NewGen Pack world editor, wherein you could write a lua script in the editor and execute that script to generate any number of unit editor changes that you like, in an automatic way.
More recently, the Wurst team in their WurstScript programming language also provided users with automation for defining unit editor changes that would happen at map script compile time in that system as well. I'm sure other projects like w3x2lni would have likewise written their own "object editor changeset" file parsers, which can do automation on that format.
There are so many people who have done this! But in my opinion, the best solution is to get handy with at least one of them.
For example, here I propose a challenge - how would you automate assigning all units to have None as their Art - Portrait Model File setting, except for units whose name starts with the letter A, in which case those units with a name starting with "A" should have the Sheep unit portrait?
This is an idea that can be expressed in two sentences of English. With a transformer like ChatGPT, it can also be expressed in two sentences of code, translated for you. I don't use the ChatGPT for that, because I already was bilingual in this way, but I wrote a couple of lines of code on my own to do this, and I will attach an example map that the computer generated by executing the code that I typed. I think this is something, if I were making a Warcraft 3 map today, that I would very much want to have a mastery over being able to do. It really is as simple as just the two sentences, as long as you train yourself to have or build a foundation upon which to express those sentences.
