Playing on Older Computer..

Just being honest, forgive me I can be 'long-winded'....
Due to unfortunate circumstances in my Life, I've had an excess of Time on my hands.
I have an old Laptop Computer I use for "Entertainment purposes", running Windows 7 which has 4 gigs of RAM (only approx. 3.6 available due to the memory it takes to run Windows 7)
Sometime along the way Blizzard has updated this 20+ year old game Warcraft III, an old favorite of mine.
When they did this they 'broke everything', many of the maps I used to play use -save/load and due to the update with .pld extensions all of these maps required updating.
Worse off just connecting to the internet forces the update through battle.net and there were several hair pulling hours I spent to get Warcraft III to still function on my old laptop.
Sadly the new update draws 2 gigs of RAM per map now (which is an improvement, no doubt). But on my older laptop with Windows 7 OS the updated War 3 just desyncs on the internet, and behaves strangely if I were to attempt to play single player. The fix I had to do was to downgrade to older version Warcraft III and do a double install so I still have the modern updated version which really *sigh* cannot run on Windows 7 due to lack of RAM (available Memory).
....Truthfully, I've been bored lately... & spend to-much-time on my ancient Laptop now-a-days...
I was surprised to find an old favorite map FFEPICRPG has been updated with the new natives and new quests and is totally Kewl-beans {yea}

On my machine I simply run out of RAM eventually, after about 1.1 gigs of RAM used War3 gives me that horrible "access violation" screen and crashes.
So I spent some time going through the script within and optimizing it and through some weeks I've got a version that runs on my Windows 7 without running out of memory and eventually crashing.... {trouble is }
Honestly.. I also did a bit of ju-ju hackery within the .w3x. Which would be totally Taboo for me to spread such things around...
Curious I am though, since I have success running this game with under 1 gig of RAM if it would be a worthwhile investment in my time to rinse-and-repeat the few Jass optimizations I've done and repost the .w3x here {hoping this is the right place for someone to get it where it's got to go...}, I don't have access to the internet at home so it's not so easy for me to just do things on the internet anyways. I always prefer to be *-off the grid*
I have success in running FFEPIC on my older computer with less RAM available, all the way through the 80+ quests and things...
Was thinking I Might rinse-and-repeat without any ju-ju hackery included and perhaps a more optimized script would be valuable to someone out there..

I find the script is done remarkably well; all things considered. Its mostly the string processing that's the waste of my valuable RAM, and in this game especially there's a very high excess use of strings. In Warcraft III the memory for strings is used and never recycled. The editor places some "" strings into the proper place in the .w3x archive so you reference a TrigString file instead, but every "string" used in Jass works that way, one of the things Jass does worse than the editor, "strings" use memory and never restores it. So playing through FFEPICRPG eventually I run out of RAM due to just simple string processing within the functions. I did a bit of copy-pasting and naming constant string globals to replace the "strings", a few other optimizations too like replacing a few arrays with some get/set functions (every array initializes 8192 variables per...) and PauseTimer(GetExpiredTimer()) DestroyTimer(GetExpiredTimer()) to all the after initial triggers. Which resulted in a rather stable version of FFEPICRPG that I can play indefinitely and uses less than 1 gig of RAM on my old Windows 7 older version War III.

I do enjoy this map it gave some new flavor to an old game [lots of love to the Devo's for taking the time to update]
Maybe someday soon I would be happy to share such Jass optimizations with the community which would result in just less use of RAM memory to play.
I've read that others are doomed on older versions of War3 with older comps like me and report *crashes*; it's not due to errors in the map at all (I haven't found any), just due to the string processing which is horrid in War III due to its memory used, never recycled. And this map uses many,many,many,manymanymany "strings". Eventually older comps just run out of RAM and *poof*. Updated War 3 draws 2 gigs per map and has much more RAM to play with. The new natives function fine on older versions of War III.

In a little bit of time I *just mite* produce a more stable version of this old favorite map FFEPIC, with the above listed changes to the script. *no promises* -butiamthatbored

Hi! I'd be interested to hear some more details on how you cut down on the RAM usage of the map, so I can optimize the official version as well. I wasn't aware String management was so problematic; I imagine the sheer amount of concatenation of strings doesn't help much either. I made a few strings into globals in 0.9.7.3 but it looks like the RAM usage is still as high as before. The PauseTimer/DestroyTimer you did on all the Time - Elapsed events I take it?

Are you on our Discord perchance so we could chat more about it?

I apologize. I have become burdened with well, LIFE. And Life always comes first with me.
I was making progress. Truthfully it's a PIA. Extract the .j, and Manually find each "string", put in the globals block as a constant string and replace the "string" with the constant global I named. It's successful in reducing the RAM, I just couldn't use the version I used since I did other hacky stuff that's not kewl to spread around. So I was kinda re-doing it all. But manually replace the many strings, one by one. And then LIFE. I actually thought there's a better way of processing the .j using some code or batch file that would optimize the script automatically. I read about FindStr and looked up a few things since then, if I could get some sort of batch file to just auto replace every "string" with a named constant string global this would be SOOOOOO much better, especially for you with the future you could just *hopefully* drag-drop on a batch file the .j and it would auto do it all. But, haven't gotten to it yet, life always comes first. I wouldn't worry too much about the other things, like replacing an array with named constant globals or pause destroy timers, these are good to do but truthfully looking over the 103,000 some lines of script that happened maybe once, or twice in the whole of the script.
It's the strings and excess use of strings that really kills it. String memory is not recycled in War3 in the editor it turns some strings into the TRGSTR_ and does it that way (since strings aren't recycled memory), using vJass it's the one thing vJass doesn't do with "strings"...
I was so bored I did it manually but *meh*
I'll spend a lil' time here trying to find the right code for a batch or something so it'll just auto-replace the strings
If I have success I'm sure I'll post it up here.
In the meantime I should just apologize, I've been pulling my hair out with changes in the updated War3, tried to use the new editor and *meh*
My old windows 7 comp just really isn't that compatable with the new War3
And then problems come up and I have to deal with Life. Hopefully I'll get around to it soonish. *no promises*