r/warcraft2

Long-time WC2 player. I always wanted to play it on my iPad without a keyboard, a mouse, or streaming it off a PC, so I got the Stratagus engine with the Wargus data layer compiled and running natively on iPadOS.

It's not emulated and it's not streamed, it's the actual engine built for ARM64, rendering through Metal. Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal campaigns, skirmish, and save/load all work. Touch works: one finger to select and drag-select, two-finger tap for right-click commands, three-finger drag to pan.

This is a dev preview. No App Store build, you build it yourself on a Mac and deploy to your iPad over USB, and the full guide is in the repo. It uses zero Blizzard content, you extract the data from your own copy with the Wargus tooling, same as the desktop version. Multiplayer's in the engine but I'm still testing it on iPad.

Repo and build steps: https://github.com/chrissotraidis/peonpad

Out of the blue, both remastered classics received some enigmatic patches yesterday (about 100 Mbs downloaded for WC2R and less than 50 Mbs for WC1R), but there are no changelogs on Battle.net forums yet.

Checking the version number in the Bnet app reveals that WC2R is now at v1.0.2.2818.

A minor observation: no assets were altered in the "x86/Data" folder aside from a bunch of .json files containing the games' credits in different languages (those can be found in the "Strings" subfolder). Maybe that's about it for the mysterious "updates"?