First of all I want to thank everyone involved in this forum and page, everyone always seems to be helpful and contributes so much. I love it :) Thank you.
I wanted to introduce myself and wasn't sure where I could do it. This idea of creating maps and content with a game editor was stuck in my head for a really long time, I fiddled around with the Titan Quest Editor for a while, and I looked into the SC2 Galaxy Editor right when SC2 came out. But I wasn't able to figure it out for myself, everything was so complicated and it wasn't explained anywhere. So I gave up after 30 minutes.
But now I came back and to my pleasure you guys wrote so many tutorials and so many helpful replies to hundreds of questions, that I can actually figure out how some stuff links together :) And when I stepped over the first few barriers and figured stuff out myself it became really addicting, so I basically spent every free minute of the last 2 days messing around with the editor. I had so much fun, I just want to thank all of you, you are great.
I always thought Top View Shooters are fun, that is why I spent the last 2 days trying to get into the Trigger Editor by learning how to make a turret spin by using your mouse, or experiencing the awesome possibilities of the projectile/missile and mover system, and getting a glimpse of how everything links together. I wouldn't say that I really understood all the stuff I copied from different tutorials, so I just repeated it and changed little stuff, and it made more and more sense every time. And the learning just began :)
Enough blabla, I have some questions:
- Are Top View Shooters playable with Battle.net Latency? Not necessarily player versus player, I think some kind of coop mode map could also provide some really interesting gameplay with a lot of possibilities.
- Are there good Top View Shooter maps around (Single- or Multiplayer)? I would like to see how they use the SC2 engine and get some UI ideas. I'm far away from designing a really big project, that might be a cool thing once the expansion hits or something. I just want to know :)
And some more specific stuff I encountered while messing around the last few days, has anyone figured out a good way how projectile cliff collision works in a fast and good (working) way? I tried to do that and found some topics about it, but I was never able to get it to work properly. I think I used the Validators wrong, but if it is too time consuming to explain here it's fine, I'll figure it out somehow. :)
So, I'll link my first map here, tell me what you think about the controls (WASD), the missile effects (left mouse, right mouse, and 1) and my first custom mover (the 1 missiles). Are there any major flaws?
Do you think the overall concept of a Top View Shooter is fun? Can it work for the SC2-Engine without starting to lag because there are too many projectiles around?
tldr; I would be really grateful if you check out my map and tell me what you think about it.
"Are Top View Shooters playable with Battle.net Latency?"
All the traffic goes through the battle.net servers, so there is definitely some latency. That being said, for some kind of shooter where units can act by themselves to an extend ( such as firing at stuff in sight ), it should be playable.
"Are there good Top View Shooter maps around?"
A lot of people have attempted to create first person shooter ( or third person ) maps, with WASD motion and so on. It might look good in single-player, but you seriously need to think about latency for anything multiplayer. It's not going to feel responsive and that could be terribly annoying. I haven't seen any good or popular shooting map, probably for these reasons.
"Has anyone figured out a good way how projectile cliff collision works in a fast and good (working) way?"
I haven't done precisely that, but a periodic check every 0.0625 second ( from a behavior ) on the missile to make sure it never goes to a cliff level above its starting cliff level should work well enough. You may want to check the point just ahead of the missile, rather than the actual point of the missile's position.
"Can it work for the SC2-Engine without starting to lag because there are too many projectiles around?"
Projectiles that constantly scan around for targets demand more processing than typical source-target missiles. With properly designed data, I'm sure you could safely have 100 of these flying around at the same time, but if you expect to have more, it would require some performance testing.
I wouldn't personally recommend to make a WASD with fire control map. All traffic goes through the server, unlike real FPS engines where clients anticipate the future and smoothly interpolate to hide the latency... Playing a non-responsive shooting game could easily turn to be a rather frustrating experience.
Okay, thank you so far.
This leads to another question, is it possible to play a published singleplayer map in a way you would play for example the singleplayer campaign, so you don't have to deal with the battle.net latency with every action you are doing? It should be theoretically possible to get the same latency and delay as you would when testing the map in the Editor, as long as you are playing singleplayer, right? But is this also supported by Battle.net?
Hey guys,
First of all I want to thank everyone involved in this forum and page, everyone always seems to be helpful and contributes so much. I love it :) Thank you.
I wanted to introduce myself and wasn't sure where I could do it. This idea of creating maps and content with a game editor was stuck in my head for a really long time, I fiddled around with the Titan Quest Editor for a while, and I looked into the SC2 Galaxy Editor right when SC2 came out. But I wasn't able to figure it out for myself, everything was so complicated and it wasn't explained anywhere. So I gave up after 30 minutes. But now I came back and to my pleasure you guys wrote so many tutorials and so many helpful replies to hundreds of questions, that I can actually figure out how some stuff links together :) And when I stepped over the first few barriers and figured stuff out myself it became really addicting, so I basically spent every free minute of the last 2 days messing around with the editor. I had so much fun, I just want to thank all of you, you are great.
I always thought Top View Shooters are fun, that is why I spent the last 2 days trying to get into the Trigger Editor by learning how to make a turret spin by using your mouse, or experiencing the awesome possibilities of the projectile/missile and mover system, and getting a glimpse of how everything links together. I wouldn't say that I really understood all the stuff I copied from different tutorials, so I just repeated it and changed little stuff, and it made more and more sense every time. And the learning just began :)
Enough blabla, I have some questions:
- Are Top View Shooters playable with Battle.net Latency? Not necessarily player versus player, I think some kind of coop mode map could also provide some really interesting gameplay with a lot of possibilities.
- Are there good Top View Shooter maps around (Single- or Multiplayer)? I would like to see how they use the SC2 engine and get some UI ideas. I'm far away from designing a really big project, that might be a cool thing once the expansion hits or something. I just want to know :)
And some more specific stuff I encountered while messing around the last few days, has anyone figured out a good way how projectile cliff collision works in a fast and good (working) way? I tried to do that and found some topics about it, but I was never able to get it to work properly. I think I used the Validators wrong, but if it is too time consuming to explain here it's fine, I'll figure it out somehow. :)
So, I'll link my first map here, tell me what you think about the controls (WASD), the missile effects (left mouse, right mouse, and 1) and my first custom mover (the 1 missiles). Are there any major flaws? Do you think the overall concept of a Top View Shooter is fun? Can it work for the SC2-Engine without starting to lag because there are too many projectiles around?
tldr; I would be really grateful if you check out my map and tell me what you think about it.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9962/EditorTest.SC2Map
"Are Top View Shooters playable with Battle.net Latency?"
All the traffic goes through the battle.net servers, so there is definitely some latency. That being said, for some kind of shooter where units can act by themselves to an extend ( such as firing at stuff in sight ), it should be playable.
"Are there good Top View Shooter maps around?"
A lot of people have attempted to create first person shooter ( or third person ) maps, with WASD motion and so on. It might look good in single-player, but you seriously need to think about latency for anything multiplayer. It's not going to feel responsive and that could be terribly annoying. I haven't seen any good or popular shooting map, probably for these reasons.
"Has anyone figured out a good way how projectile cliff collision works in a fast and good (working) way?"
I haven't done precisely that, but a periodic check every 0.0625 second ( from a behavior ) on the missile to make sure it never goes to a cliff level above its starting cliff level should work well enough. You may want to check the point just ahead of the missile, rather than the actual point of the missile's position.
"Can it work for the SC2-Engine without starting to lag because there are too many projectiles around?"
Projectiles that constantly scan around for targets demand more processing than typical source-target missiles. With properly designed data, I'm sure you could safely have 100 of these flying around at the same time, but if you expect to have more, it would require some performance testing.
I wouldn't personally recommend to make a WASD with fire control map. All traffic goes through the server, unlike real FPS engines where clients anticipate the future and smoothly interpolate to hide the latency... Playing a non-responsive shooting game could easily turn to be a rather frustrating experience.
Okay, thank you so far. This leads to another question, is it possible to play a published singleplayer map in a way you would play for example the singleplayer campaign, so you don't have to deal with the battle.net latency with every action you are doing? It should be theoretically possible to get the same latency and delay as you would when testing the map in the Editor, as long as you are playing singleplayer, right? But is this also supported by Battle.net?
@Bommes: Go
I believe the "single player vs AI" option works this way, as it is accessible in Offline mode.
You can play custom maps in SP vs AI.
Okay, I tried that, but for some reason my published map was not listed in the Singleplayer vs. AI mappool. I tried both Private and Public Publish.
Do you have any idea what I have to change in my map preferences to get it listed there? It is pretty confusing :)