SC2Mapster

I haven't posted here in a while, but I just wanted to drop in and say I'm happy to see the codebase getting some love.

Sc2mapster is, first and foremost, a community full of amazing and talented people. No matter what features are added or removed from the site, I know everyone here will continue to push the modding scene forward in a great way. :) 

Unfortunately I don't have the recordings with me anymore. They might still be on my old PC, but I'm out of town until at least next week.

That said, I did write this tutorial on user types. If you don't like the way I explain things (or you want a more simple tutorial), there's another one by FuzzYD here. I'll see if I can dig up those old files, but to be honest, you'll probably find the written significantly more useful.

Either of those should give you a good overview of user types. If you need specific help, shoot me a PM and I'd be happy to help. :)

Edit: I see you made a comment on the tutorial, so I guess you've already seen it. Send me a PM and I can help explain things ;)

Disclaimer: I don't have the editor available right this second, so these answers are just off the top of my head. No guarantees :)

Quote from Bareleon: Go

Is it possible to have different names of the same unit for different players? Example: Ghost for both players. Player 1: Name stays the same. Player 2. Name changes to something else. if its possible how do I do it?

I believe this is possible. You can modify data entries for a single player via triggers. This is the action you're looking for. Note how "player" is a value you can specify. So you'd change the "name" entry for the ghost unit for player 2, and then that player would see a different name.

Quote from Bareleon: Go

How do I make a unit have no vision but every 30 seconds he can see everything for 1 second?

I'm not entirely sure on this one, but I think you should be able to modify a unit's vision with behaviors. So you might be able to create a behavior which grants vision, but only lasts one second. And then you'd create another behavior (and give this one to your unit) that applies the first one every 30 seconds. You'd need an "Add Behavior" effect to add the 1-second behavior. You'd set that effect to the periodic effect of your 30-second behavior, and set the period length to 30 seconds.

Hey guys! Just a quick update post.

We did a few multiplayer tests recently, and things are mostly working....minus a few very frustrating game-breaking bugs. There's some problems with move menus disappearing and players getting stuck in battles that need to be resolved first, but once they're fixed we should be good-to-go for the alpha. We're going to try and resolve them as soon as possible! :)

Quote from SoulTaker916: Go

Dropbox works well.

Dropbox is fantastic, I highly recommend it (that's my referral link, feel free to use that if you wanna sign up so I get free storage ;) ). You get 2 GB of cloud storage for free, and it's easily set up on your computer. The files are stored locally and synched up with a cloud. It's what I use to work on my own maps and share them with members of the same development team.

But yeah, emailing it to yourself would accomplish the same thing, although maps are pretty large files to be emailing.

I know, it's a little confusing at first :)

If you lock your map, it means that nobody else can download your map from battle.net. If you leave the map unlocked, anybody can open up the editor and download your entire map. The only reason you would want to leave the map unlocked is if you want other people to be able to download it and see how it works.

If you lock a map, you can still change it. It just means you won't be able to download it from blizzard servers in the event that, say, your hard drive fails and you loose the local copy you have. You can still make changes by opening the file you have locally (just like you always do) and re-publish the map again under the same name and it'll update.

Oops, I meant to post this last Sunday. I've been gone for the last two days, sorry about that ^.^

Lots of and lots of bugfixes..again. The map now is configured to support up to 4 players, which is probably where we'll leave it for the time being. I put in a few more side quests as well- At the moment, we've got a total of 13 quests/side-quests, which is enough to get some alpha testing done. It's going to be a little grindy when we first let you guys play it, because we don't have enough content to smooth out the progression. We may put in some cheat codes so you'll be able to level up your starmon instantly. This next week I'm going to be away for at least a few days, but we're pretty close to something you guys can play. :D

Quote from OceanFlex: Go

@Trieva: Go I wanted to ask the devs, now that Heart arcade games are all free to play, are you interested in using any HotS resources?

Oh, wow, thanks for pointing that out :D That's going to give us a lot more freedom now with assets.

Quote from fishy77: Go

Even though I've never gotten to play this map yet, just from looking at the screenshots, I think you could enter this contest. All of your elements seem well polished, and you seem to be almost done except for some statistical and balance work. Maybe you should consider it. Just bringing this up, in case it actually interests you.

We're definitely considering it. The game engine is pretty much done, but there's not a lot of game yet. So we'd need to get enough quests in to make it actually enjoyable to play for the average battle.net user. But yeah, we're absolutely looking at it.

Quote from DaFunk86: Go

@OceanFlex: Go

A very well said post libertymonk that I agree with I prefer more choices to a few for a Starmon game. I hope they release soon it seems so Great that there HORDING the PRECIOUS all to themselves Smeagol thinks.

Yeah, yeah ;)

Over the last few days I've been doing a huge amount of bugfixing. I tend to hop around different parts of the game with our debugging commands to test specific pieces of content, but I haven't done as much "start to finish" testing. And that's what I've been doing, over and over, to get the bugs ;) Most of the remaining bugs are smaller visual hiccups instead of anything game-breaking.

The good news is that, as far as I can tell, the last big bug with the battle system has been squashed. I'm sure there's lots of smaller, hidden bugs in there somewhere (especially once we start playing it with multiple people, ugh), but the system is looking pretty stable now.

I also made a quick addition in the form of the codex- it's sort of like you have in Mass Effect, if you've ever played that. As you encounter new characters and locations, they're added to the codex for easy reference. It's still pretty early but it'll get filled with more content as we go along. It even has a shnazzy little "new" marker next to unread articles. :D Here's a screenshot of what type of entry you might find. On a side note, if you guys have a better name for our "Arena City", let us know. It's a terrible name >.>

We've got enough room to support 3 simultaneous players now, and I'll probably get that number up to 4 today or tomorrow. The biggest hurdles for us to overcome now are probably going to be adding content, balancing that content, and polishing everything up.

And here's a picture of me literally squashing (well, more like punching) a bug. :)

We'll take a look at it. A name change should be fine as long as it doesn't break anything. You never know with mapster though, she's a delicate beast. :P

Don't give up :D

You can create a variable array of type 'dialog item'. Create the labels however you want them to appear, and save them to variables. For example:

// This would get run one time when you make the leaderboard
Dialog Item- Create label
Set variable LeaderboardLabels[1] = Last Created Dialog Item
Dialog Item- Create label
Set variable LeaderboardLabels[2] = Last Created Dialog Item
Dialog Item- Create label
Set variable LeaderboardLabels[3] = Last Created Dialog Item
etc....

Then when you update the scores, you can reference the variables.

// Whenever you want to update it (every second or so)
Set dialog item text for dialog item (LeaderboardLabels[1]) to (the score for player 1)
Set dialog item text for dialog item (LeaderboardLabels[2]) to (the score for player 2)
Set dialog item text for dialog item (LeaderboardLabels[2]) to (the score for player 3)
etc...

You could probably do it more efficiently if you used a loop. Something like this:

Pick each integer from 1 to 3
{
  // Check if the player is alive
  if (player 'picked integer' is alive)
    {
    Set dialog item text for dialog item (LeaderboardLabels[picked integer]) to (the score for player 'picked integer')
    }
  else
    {
    Set dialog item text for dialog item (LeaderboardLabels[picked integer]) to (the respawn time for player 'picked integer')
    }
  }

I've taken advantage of Christmas break to get a bunch of work done on the map. It's been mostly bugfixing. I fixed a ton of small problems with quests, I fixed a bug that was wrecking save files, and I fixed a bunch of small visual glitches. I also added an early version of the map screen.

The point is, it's far more stable now than it was a week ago :P

Quote from Trieva: Go

I hope I'm not coming off harsh but I'm critical because I care ;) . To finish off this post on a lighter note, I have an idea. How about our trainer can level up with our starmon. Based on our levels or abilities, we can apply passive buffs to our active starmon to enhance them. There's a variety of buffs to choose from and the choosing can be done before each battle or switch in. This should add the interesting idea of "we're in this together". Why should starmon do all the hard work like their our slaves or tools of war? :P.

I think we've discussed this idea before. It's not something we're looking to add for the alpha, but I think it's a cool idea nevertheless. We're going to add some type of "trainer level" that's based on a bunch of different things, so we'd be able to tie your trainer level into some sort of passive buff system. Maybe the higher level you are, the more passive buffs you can equip at once. We'll have to see.

Quote from Trieva: Go

My idea was intended to allow us to train our desired team asap. Going through the effort of removing unwanted EVs and then retraining is still a slight inconvenience. As soon as I catch a starmon I'd like to prevent pick up of EVs for any or more of the stats, but allow picking up of others. Please don't make us wait until end-game (by defeating the Elite Four or unlocking the DNA machine) before we can train our better teams. I can't see any good reason for that. What if I want a pidgeot (assuming pidgey can be caught in the first set of grass) in my competitive team? You should let us tweak EV absorb/block that early. Realistically, why would any creature just magically get proficient at everything simply by making other creatures faint? :P

I think allowing people to disable the gain of certain Ev's could work. It'd slow down your overall gain of strength, but it'd help you focus on what you want. And it'd be pretty understandable to people. That said, we might not add it right away for alpha just because it's not too relevant for low-level combat.

It's only about 10 pm here in California, so we're not quite at 2014 yet. But the ball in Times Square has dropped, so I guess that covers the whole country :P

Happy 2014 everybody!

Edit: It look me far longer than it should have to get the picture. Neo's ear. New Year. Very clever ;)

Quote from TheSC2Maniac: Go

@zeldarules28: Go

WTF!!! 79 degrees? Really? Where do you live man, in Redstone or in Char? :)

Yeah, that would be Fahrenheit. I think 79 degrees Celcius would kill you :P

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, be safe, have fun :D

In case any of you haven't seen it yet, here's Carbot's latest.

And, according to mapster tradition, we're sharing our christmas avatars here.