[Georc]

Hello board,

Over the years I have grown frustrated with Warcraft lore and systems. Shadowlands made me soft-quit the game and I decided to make my very own fan-fiction mod.

I have very little experience - during TBC times I tried making my own offline private server using the guides. I swapped faction ID for quest givers to Argent Down so I could do every quest regardless of faction XD As this was ages ago, I remember nothing of it and I am guessing the tools used are completely different now.

I also did some abysmal maps in Warcraft III

I already found some tutorials on this site, but I am hesitant to just... start. The project I have in mind is very ambitious and will take me ages to create. I have little time due to work and personal issues and I am frankly scared to dedicate time and energy to a potential dead end. So far, I have been focused on making notes about system changes and rewriting the lore, but I think it won't lead anywhere unless I start modding and see some tangible progress.

I feel like I should first decide what client to work on?

What I would like to have in core gameplay:

Weapon Skills, Class Trainers, Talent trees, Old Stats

This points me in the direction of WotLK - it is also the last expansion that had the world intact and I feel like it had the least damage done.

But then there are things I enjoy from later expansions:

To name a few bigger ones - Collections, Garrison (I want to heavily rework it) and obviously graphical improvements.

I have seen that porting models to WotLK is possible, but that there is limit to amount of polygons the client could handle. 

I can't decide between

- porting models, maps and a couple of systems I like from higher clients to WotLK and then creating new zones using that, or

-picking the highest client possible, somehow bringing back old systems and then heavily modding the existing maps, how characters function and disabling stuff I don't like.

I also would like to create new UI - for example making the reputation UI separate and account wide, having lore UI in adventure guide probably, etc.

Since I am heavily rewriting the lore (to clean up the mess done with all the retcons), it almost feels like I should just take a blank slate and work from scratch. Is that possible? I mean aside from developing a new game XD (I feel like some modding I can do, but programming is beyond me). I guess I could take the latest client, yeet all the maps with npc's related to systems I don't like and start making my own, but that feels messy and I will probably end up with a bunch of unused data and pointlessly fat client.

Anyway - can anyone give me any pointers? How would you guys approach this?

[Callmephil]

There are no known or public methods for customizing modern clients, So your best bet would be to start working on a 3.3.5 fresh client, it would not be perfect but it's the best solution at the moment.

The rest is totally possible, we have seen custom expansions built in the by members,

If you don't feel like learning programming languages and you are not very interested in the subject, you'd for sure need someone with intermediate experience in Lua, SQL, c++
Otherwise, I'd suggest you start with the basics, set up a server, and play around with the code to create some quests, and items.  mobs etc play around with events and basic scripting.
Then you can jump on server modification and create an encounter, changes the behavior of a  spell, and such.

There's a great mod made by Rochet2 called Eluna-Engine if you're afraid of c++ you can write stuff in LUA which is far simpler.

For retro-porting, there are a lot of resources you can start with.
for example, you mentioned custom U.I you'll need to tap into modifying or creating addons for the game. Eluna Engine helps does that too
for retro-port of content maps, models you'd need to understand what is a DBC and how they affect the game a good doc can be found here WowDed.wiki  lastly, you can find a lot of retro port content on this forum and guide on how to retro port content yourself.

Hope this helped a little bit!