Global declaration Freedom

Warcraft III world editor always made everything harder for us, inluding declaring globals, you needed to use that dialog and it was really difficult to recreate global variables from a map or another and you were forced to use GUI for that. It was also impossible to declare globals of some types without modding world editor and then make your map completelly unopenable by normal world editor.

Global declaration freedom simply allows you to write globals blocks wherever you want, for example in the custom script section or in a 'trigger', and because of this you can even use the constant prefix which can even make finalizers able to inline constants and stuff.

The JassHelper preprocessor will simply merge all the global blocks found around the map script and move them to the top of the map, all merged in a single globals block.

function something takes nothing returns nothing
    set somearray[SOMETHING_INDEX]=4
endfunction

globals
    constant integer SOMETHING_INDEX = 45
    integer array somearray
endglobals

Will now work without any error, there is one limitation though, you can't use functions or non-constant values in the default value, for example you can make a global start on null, 1, 19923, 0xFFF, true, false, "Hi", etc. But you can't make them initialize with any function call or with a native (although it is possible to use a native, most natives tend to crash the thread when used in globals declaration). You can't also assign to another global variable, because there isn't really a way to control to what position of the map would a global declaration go.

Last modified: 16 October 2024