I really loved StarEdit and WorldEdit for their ease of use, as I enjoy dabbling in terrain, unit, and trigger making just for the fun of it. They're like legos to me. One of the issues that I, and some other folks, have with GalaxyEdit is it's sheer complexity and tediousness involved with simple tasks, such as creating a new unit, changing building abilities, trigger functions which would seem basic (For the life of me I cannot figure out how to store a selected Unit's damage value and then modify it with triggers) but end up being headache inducing.
It seems the mapmaking community at large isn't having too much trouble with it, and that's great. But I'm wondering if there will ever be simplification / automation applied to editor for those who don't need the full range of depth provided? I was very excited to experiment with GalaxyEdit, but find myself overwhelmed by it. Will anything like this be in the works, such as the modified editors that were made for StarEdit and WorldEdit (EmeraldEdit comes to mind.)? I'd love to get back to carefree tinkering again. o:
The editor has a simple section, it's called the Map editor. All you need to do is make a map, no custom triggers or data editing required. If you want to make something more exotic, you'll need to learn like the rest of us. And once you do, and you make your first working unit or whatever at the point where it's not a struggle, you'll feel a sense of pride, because it was something that you done, all on your own. Happy days.
I wouldn't count on Blizz to make it any easier, though a helpful guide which explains things would be nice. The only reason it's dificult just now, is because somethings aren't explained fully. And I'm sure some modder will make a program to go along with GE to help simply the process involved, though it may mean alot of control would be lost.
@Khazetuha:
Hello, and welcome.
I dont see any automated processes happening in the near future to make GE any less tedious than it is now. However, things do get better. I for one was in your position when I first started GE. Overwhelmed.
Tutorials/Reading the development thread, Asking for help, Experimenting yourself. All this will aid and help you understand. It gets to a point where it really isn`t that "hard". Tedious however, it shall always be.
The editor has a simple section, it's called the Map editor. All you need to do is make a map, no custom triggers or data editing required. If you want to make something more exotic, you'll need to learn like the rest of us. And once you do, and you make your first working unit or whatever at the point where it's not a struggle, you'll feel a sense of pride, because it was something that you done, all on your own. Happy days.
I wouldn't count on Blizz to make it any easier, though a helpful guide which explains things would be nice. The only reason it's dificult just now, is because somethings aren't explained fully. And I'm sure some modder will make a program to go along with GE to help simply the process involved, though it may mean alot of control would be lost.
Terrain editing is good fun in and of itself, but what I also like to do is make custom units, experiment with values and triggers, and see what kind of horrendous abominations I can come up with. I never had any problems doing this with WorldEdit. I grinned wide, opened it up, and dived right in, and it was a blast. I've made a few units following tutorials in Galaxyedit, but the process is always tedious and not fun at all. Unless one of the recent patches added some flow to this process.
I could understand the lack of user-friendliness regarding tools like Valve's Hammer Editor or the godforsaken Stargraft / Arsenal combos (which, actually, were also a lot of fun). Those tools are powerful and complex (moreso in Hammer's case), and designed specifically for users with the knowledge to use them with modding projects.
The problem here is precedent. StarEdit was very simple to use and recquired virtually no instruction (though, admittedly, this was also due to the game engine's inherent limitations). WorldEdit, while vastly more complex and capable, still made low-level functions like copying units and playing with the data or adding abilities / research to tech trees and whatnot. It was a powerful tool, but it was also a toy, and a lot of fun to play with.
GalaxyEdit, on the other hand, makes me feel as if I'd have to take a course in programming or spend hours plodding through tutorials just to work out basic tasks. While it may end up not being that hard, the tedium is still a factor. This may not be the best example, but James Rolfe, known widely as the Angry Video Game Nerd, has been making films all his life. In his younger years, he used mind-bogglingly haggard methods to do post-film audio and visual editing. It got the job done, but the limitations of what he could accomplish were tight and the methods time-consuming and error-prone. Nowadays, filmmakers can use digital editing software to both simplify and empower their practice in ways that simply were not possible before (on a consumer level) with programs like Adobe Premier and ect.
Those tools have a lot of depth, but also maintain a certain degree of user-friendliness that permits one to quickly edit and compile visual footage at their leisure. The range of possibility is infinitely greater than what it was before, and yet it turns out to be easier than some of the headache-inducers James Rolfe, and I'm sure many filmmakers, had to use.
Starcraft and Warcraft 3 had fame in big part to how expansive the range of possibilities that their editors permitted, while still being easy to use. I'm not saying that high level functions or triggering / programming tasks used to create some of the more ingenious maps be magically dumbed down.
But I would like to be able to play with my Starcraft Legos again without wanting to yank my hair out. In the end, it's likely I'll take the dive just out of desperation of wanting to resume my mad experiments. I'm just disappointed, I suppose, that the depth took a welcome step up while kicking the user-friendliness into the gutter.
I'll probably take the plunge when I get a free weekend. x: And thankyou for the welcome, EternalWraith!
Uh... Arsenal was not difficult to use. And if it was, Datedit corrected any of the issues. The difficulty came from the lack of publicly available information, but I tutored a total newbie to making AO-level effects within about a week or two due to how user friendly the Starcraft tools are. You'd be right if you said Iscript was a bit complicated, but it's easier to break into than even the most basic functions of the SC2 data editor. Meanwhile the BW tools were hardened to perfection and are amongst the best made tools I have ever seen in any game.
Datedit/the Arsenal series should have been used as a basis and foundation for designing the SC2 editor's layout but that would have required effort and Blizzard would much rather be lazy and rush the editor out at the last moment. What's more likely is they used an in-house XML editor for making their data in the campaign. The random locations of values, extremely slow loading of interface elements, and vague nature of naming schemes makes even the most mundane of tasks a trial of endurance. Making a large-scale project with a lot of custom data will drive even the most hearty of men insane.
There is no excuse for the data editor being as clumsy and lazily organized as it is, other than the obvious - it was rushed and not thought out.
I can't say anything about triggers because I'm a modder, not a mapper.
Uh... Arsenal was not difficult to use. And if it was, Datedit corrected any of the issues. The difficulty came from the lack of publicly available information, but I tutored a total newbie to making AO-level effects within about a week or two due to how user friendly the Starcraft tools are. You'd be right if you said Iscript was a bit complicated, but it's easier to break into than even the most basic functions of the SC2 data editor. Meanwhile the BW tools were hardened to perfection and are amongst the best made tools I have ever seen in any game.
Datedit/the Arsenal series should have been used as a basis and foundation for designing the SC2 editor's layout but that would have required effort and Blizzard would much rather be lazy and rush the editor out at the last moment. What's more likely is they used an in-house XML editor for making their data in the campaign. The random locations of values, extremely slow loading of interface elements, and vague nature of naming schemes makes even the most mundane of tasks a trial of endurance. Making a large-scale project with a lot of custom data will drive even the most hearty of men insane.
There is no excuse for the data editor being as clumsy and lazily organized as it is, other than the obvious - it was rushed and not thought out.
I can't say anything about triggers because I'm a modder, not a mapper.
The only tools I'm familiar with are Arsenal, Stardraft, Stargraft, and the various MPQ explorers / packers. I was younger at the time, and probably just didn't click with it. Either way, the point I was making is that there are professional-grade tools out there which require a high level of expertise to use, but Blizzard's editors have set a precedent for user-friendliness that, for whatever reason, GalaxyEdit has seemed to ditch. It's fine if you want to update the swiss army knife, but I still want to be able to get the can opener with one flick and eat my spaghettioes. Layers are great for this, placing levels of simplified, possibly restricted functionality while also allowing the user to choose to open up deeper layers of complexity where control becomes finer at the cost of automation and ease of use.
It may all really fall onto the data editor, and if cleaning that up will make this something fun to use again, then by all means.
I'm hopeful that Blizzard will be making improvements to the editor in times to come. Nobody can say for certain why it's ended up this way, whether through simple neglect or developer oversight. Maybe the ascent to the editor's power overtook foresight regarding usability and form. Maybe they really wanted to finish up the game itself and get to the editor later. Even with it's labyrinthine nature, a lot of cool maps are coming out, so that if nothing else is great news.
It'd be really hard for me to imagine them leaving it this way. Unless they plan to have editor improvements as a selling feature of Heart of the Swarm. >_>;
The sad thing about GE is that I know no less than 3 people who are in Blizzard right here, right now, who were at one point associated with our modding community and know all about tools like Datedit, Arsenal, and such. Yet still, somehow, the editor has been largely ignored in their development and remains the most disorganized and most tedious editor I've yet to use in modding.
Unfortunately because of the extreme levels of tedium and the time requirement to use something like this, becoming more experienced does not dramatically reduce development time unlike BW because the editor's interface only works so fast (re: slow) and is so randomly laid out that it will always be annoying and uninteresting to use. This means that as a result, even though cool proofs of concept and such are being made, very few large-scale projects like campaigns and total conversions with a lot of new assets will be made. Both BW and Wc3, with the latter being considerably more annoying to use and thus had about 90% less big projects than BW, had a large turn-out of people who'd come up with a cool idea but couldn't stick to the project because of the time demand.
As a result wc3 is almost completely dominated by small, individual map projects. DotA contains almost no new custom stuff and is largely dependent on triggers, yet has more custom content in it than 99% of wc3 projects. WE's AI editor is practically unusuable and there's a plethora of bugs and non-functional things in it or things that could be improved. When I asked about the editor shortly after TFT was released, Brett Wood (now in charge of GalaxyEdit) responded and basically said that they were aware of the issues and would never fix them.
Now, I imagine plenty of cool maps will come out for sc2, then get gunned down by publishing limits and the large ratio of idea:success turnouts, resulting in a handful of completed, cool small projects. But me, I'm a modder. I make enormous projects that require extensive use of our equivalents of the data editor. The prospect of using this editor to attempt anything near the scale I did in BW or wc3 is absolutely terrifying to say the least.
An editor doesn't need to be simplified to be user friendly, it just needs to be laid out intelligently and in a manner that allows you access to basic features and functions quickly and efficiently. GalaxyEdit is the total opposite mindset.
I can certainly see the merit in the layout sentiment. It all seems so complex, so my mind begs for simplicity just to start cobbling things together again. But I wouldn't doubt a good portion of that complexity is simply inordinate amounts of tedium because somebody took a boulder to the drawing board when they were penning the UI and they thought the crumbly mess on the ground was a good idea.
It's...actually mind boggling to me that they wouldn't take better care of WorldEdit. I'd venture to say that the editor and UMS are why a big chunk of players even bother with the games. I hate WC3 melee, the whole creeping thing is a pain to me, but the custom content was always a hoot and hooked me for a solid five years. Outstanding value for the price paid. Then again, the melee is probably what makes blizzard big bucks, through sponsorships and e-sports and whatnot. Especially with Starcraft and the pedigree it carries.
The publishing limitation is ludicrous, that much is for certain. I don't see how that could have ever been a good idea. Nor can I grasp why they want to centralize Battle.net so badly. The old one was just dandy, and the P2P model worked fine. Strange how the new one feels less like a community than the old one.
I want to believe they're not dense enough to keep things this way, even if history says otherwise. I adore the base game, but all the new features that were supposed to be so exciting are...not. And to praise and hype this editor so much at blizzcon? Could they really leave it in such a sordid state?
Someone did a pokemon proof-of-concept with a single battle scene. It was wicked to see how it worked, and I've been rubbing my hands in anticipation for something awesome and poke-themed to come out. But from what I'm learning, the chances of that happening to it's potential seem...dull, if at all.
I don't have any reason to doubt what you've said but...I hope they deny history a repeated cycle and work to make this tool as awesome as it can be. I'm a bit put off that they've said nothing about what they intend for the editor in 1.1...but I'd love to be surprised, as I'm sure the whole community would be too.
Always wishing for the best. And trying not to let this blue news depress me, either!
You people have clearly never used any contemporary game development tools. You want a reality check, go play with the Source engine for a weekend.
Here's the dirty little secret of the gaming industry: game design is tedious, laborious work. You're lucky to have a data editor and not have to manually edit XML. Similarly you're lucky to have a visual trigger editor and not have to learn the scripting language if you don't want to.
If you want to avoid tedium you should probably choose a different hobby since game design is about 10% creative thinking and 90% painstaking attention to detail. You think Blizzard is screwing you over and they have amazing unreleased in-house tools? Consider that as buggy as the editor is, when the campaigns were being made, they were using a much earlier and much buggier version of it.
edit: Klishu you're spot on. Once you develop a workflow things go much, much faster. You start to pick up tricks like using event macros and object inheritence and things that formerly took you 30 minutes take you 30 seconds, and you very rarely get stuck or run into unexpected behavior.
At first I thought the editor was shit. But I've been going at it for about 3 weeks now and I'm already a LOT better (I didn't have any experience with previous blizz editors), whenever something gets in my way and I have no idea of how to fix it I first search through this forum and if I find nothing of use I simply make my own thread, I find that if you take your time and describe a problem in detail a lot of pro people will arrive to save your day. Now I think of the editor as "deep", there's almost nothing that you can't make in this editor if you have the skills and willpower ;)
It's only tedious if the editors are intentionally developed to be tedious. There is plenty of games you can jump into high-level modding with without needing to dig through something as sloppy as GalaxyEdit. With sc2 you are better off editing XML files once you figure them out - it will be ten times as fast and you can bypass the ridiculous loading times in the editor. I'm pretty sure most people told me back in wc3's hayday that using JASS was preferable to GUI triggers once you figured it out, too, since GUI triggers introduced even more memory leak issues.
Everything has a learning curve, that I won't deny. I've modded Supreme Commander and Homeworld 2 - those didn't even have editors, and their communities are so elitist and tightly packed that you're lucky to get much of a response on any subject (though really, wc3 was much worse, I was lucky to have known people). Homeworld 2's weapon files were a string of numbers you needed a web page to count through to find what you want.
But when you use an editor as a bullpoint feature for a game, boasting ease of use and functionality, and then totally abandon everyday concepts of organization and layout fundamentals... well, that's bad news for us. The very least they should have done was look at community-made tools and model the UI based on those. We've already gone through all the work of getting feedback, circulating ideas, and proofing them. There is nothing wrong with Firegraft or Datedit.
Right now I'm not holding any hopes for major updates to GE. Blizzard so far hasn't ever acknowledged any modding-specific inquiries (of which I have made many...) and everyone I know is dead silent on the subject.
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Here's the dirty little secret of the gaming industry: game design is tedious, laborious work.
Design is easy, bringing it to life is not. :) Even games with very friendly editors like Starcraft can and will bring you to your knees if you don't keep your wits about you. Editors need to be logical and flow in a cohesive manner. GalaxyEdit does not flow at all.
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of how to fix it I first search through this forum and if I find nothing of use I simply make my own thread, I find that if you take your time and describe a problem in detail a lot of pro people will arrive to save your day.
Just sayin', people won't answer you unless you've already proven yourself most of the time. That's just the way things are. I produce private projects so I don't post much other than previews. Therefore, people aren't inclined to give a shit. I don't really blame them though. That's the way Blizzard's community is. SC2mapster is a lot more open than most places, though. I hope you guys can break the cycle.
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Now I think of the editor as "deep", there's almost nothing that you can't make in this editor if you have the skills and willpower ;)
Hey now, I ain't denying that the editor is powerful. A lot of people seem to mistake my argument like that. The editor is powerful, but it could be far more intuitive and laid out in a much more reasonable manner. Just organizing the values in a logical way, improving the loading times between switching tabs and accessing values, and naming things in a not silly manner would be a huge leap to improving the end-user experience.
All your complaining boils down to the editor doesn't function exactly as you'd intuitively expect it to. Well, guess what - if they made it exactly to your specifications, then it would be unintuitive for somebody else. I'm so sick of the sense of entitlement people have about the editor and the constant complaining. Face it, nothing they could release could possibly be good enough for people not to bitch about it as a way of defending their own egos when they get suck or can't figure something out. And that's what 99% of the complaining on these forums boils down to - people get frustrated and it must be Blizzard's fault for making a shitty tool that doesn't read their minds. It can't possibly be that they're trying to use a tool they haven't spent enough time learning, it must be a bug!
More than anything else that attitude makes me uninterested in helping somebody out and it's way to common around here.
You know, a very simple feature that would make the unit editor a ton easier, is giving us the option to only show attributes we want to change...
I'm customizing 30+ units for a map I'm making, and due to the layout of almost randomly placed attributes, its hard to keep track of what I have changed in a unit, what still needs to be changed and whatnot...
Riley, we all know things arent gonna be as simple as think/edit tools for awhile, but a couple of decent rearranged OR view functions updated into the editor would make it FAR easier to use rather than what it is right now.
Note, I said rearranged, NOT changed or editted, Rearranged....
Riley, people who make maps are not expert professional programmers. Blizzard should have realized that people simply want to dink around in the editor and have fun doing stupid things. The design of the data editor makes this harder, and thus makes the SC2 as a product in its entirety less fun. "All our complaining" is us pointing this out for anyone who doesn't know about it (thus helping them make an informed choice on whether or not to buy the game), and is feedback for Blizzard. We are absolutely, completely entitled to whine all day long about anything and everything SC2.
Most of your vitriolic post seems to espouse the fact that Blizzard cannot satisfy everyone with the editor. This is true, but you seem to be missing the point that they could be satisfying a LOT more people than they are now. If they made it more intuitive and user friendly, they'd have a better and more liked product, resulting in better long-term sales. Which is what Activision cares about.
Consider: The added potential of the SC2 map maker is irrelevant for 98% of all mapmakers. Yes, I made this statistic up, but you get the point. Most people don't care that you can do neat tricks with actors or have custom UIs (that lag very muchly). They want to make their NEXUS WARS SUPER BLOODY EDITION or their LIFE OF AN INFESTED SPACE MARINE.
And for everyone who does care about the added features (which really aren't that impressive. Blizzard took away almost as much as they gave, in my view) they now have to spend longer doing the basic stuff.
The entire point of the WC3, SC1, and SC2 editors is that they make realizing your ideas much easier. If people wanted a complete set of features and freedom, they'd get themselves a C+ + compiler and be happy.
You're proving my point exactly. Blizzard makes a more powerful editor, people bitch about how it's harder to use. Blizzard makes an easier to use editor, or something with an identical feature set to WC3, people will bitch about how it's not an advancement. (This very thread contains examples of both, proving that it's not even a dilemma.) No matter what happens there's only one constant and that's people bitching.
At the end of the day a more powerful and flexible editor allows better maps to be made by the people who are actually going to invest significant time in the process, and that's a better goal than allowing people to easily churn out crap. Sorry if that sounds harsh but think about it for a while.
Anyway I've said my piece so if you want to continue complaining go ahead. I will say that overall the people who are actually making cool shit are the ones with a zen attitude who, instead of getting frustrated that things aren't how they feel they ought to be, learn to deal with the way things actually are.
At the end of the day a more powerful and flexible editor allows better maps to be made by the people who are actually going to invest significant time in the process, and that's a better goal than allowing people to easily churn out crap. Sorry if that sounds harsh but think about it for a while.
No, I get you. I don't like the editor but I'll put up with it. I just feel that things like the editor's slow menu and tab loading speeds could be improved. I guess that's just my bruised ego talking because other people wouldn't like that.
In fact, let's just never have any progression at all. I like that idea. It has a very Blizzard sound to it.
Ultimately, it does make sense to me. Designing the editor for power and capability will enable creation of assets, maps, and mods of high depth and quality. This is sure to come with an increasingly steep learning curve, as complexity is a natural byproduct of favoring control over automation. Me being less able to toy with the device is far smaller a loss than the community being unable to harness it's power for creation.
However, there are points at which tedium is expected and points at which tedium is unnecessary. There is also the matter of information overload, as well as the ability to get to what you need to get to in the most efficient manner as possible.
In no way should the editor be dumbed down. However, as being given control can increase complexity, it can also used to decrease it when it's not necessary. The Data Editor is the biggest point of discussion, in regards to it's layout, it's lag, and the amount of information presented.
Some beneficial changes would be permitting users to sort any list of data by their own criteria, such as moving the most-frequented values that you edit to the top of the list. As someone else mentioned, allowing us to hide / filter values in which we have little or no need to modify would also be a great feature.
I'm not sure if you can do this presently, but the ability to break any single aspect of the editor off as a separate window would be nice too, especially if you were to use it as a reference in other parts of the editor without having to jump back and forth between them.
If you want to modify something specific, do a search for it in the top right hand box, works just the same as the other search box on the left(ish) side, only for fields. At the end of the day, yes the editor can be clumsy, noone is really denying that, but it's gonna stay that way, instead of whining, bitching, griping whatever you consider yourself doing, do some more work in the editor, it WILL become second nature to you, I myself am about 1/4 way through a mod with 3 new races, all units are up, as are buildings, and all I need to do now is turrets and 2 races worth of weapons, which are mostly done tbh. I couldn't even make a decent unit in WC3, now I'm making a full mod. Having more freedom to create what you want is a damn sight better than having things hidden away so much that you forget they're there.
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I really loved StarEdit and WorldEdit for their ease of use, as I enjoy dabbling in terrain, unit, and trigger making just for the fun of it. They're like legos to me. One of the issues that I, and some other folks, have with GalaxyEdit is it's sheer complexity and tediousness involved with simple tasks, such as creating a new unit, changing building abilities, trigger functions which would seem basic (For the life of me I cannot figure out how to store a selected Unit's damage value and then modify it with triggers) but end up being headache inducing.
It seems the mapmaking community at large isn't having too much trouble with it, and that's great. But I'm wondering if there will ever be simplification / automation applied to editor for those who don't need the full range of depth provided? I was very excited to experiment with GalaxyEdit, but find myself overwhelmed by it. Will anything like this be in the works, such as the modified editors that were made for StarEdit and WorldEdit (EmeraldEdit comes to mind.)? I'd love to get back to carefree tinkering again. o:
The editor has a simple section, it's called the Map editor. All you need to do is make a map, no custom triggers or data editing required. If you want to make something more exotic, you'll need to learn like the rest of us. And once you do, and you make your first working unit or whatever at the point where it's not a struggle, you'll feel a sense of pride, because it was something that you done, all on your own. Happy days.
I wouldn't count on Blizz to make it any easier, though a helpful guide which explains things would be nice. The only reason it's dificult just now, is because somethings aren't explained fully. And I'm sure some modder will make a program to go along with GE to help simply the process involved, though it may mean alot of control would be lost.
Terrain editing is good fun in and of itself, but what I also like to do is make custom units, experiment with values and triggers, and see what kind of horrendous abominations I can come up with. I never had any problems doing this with WorldEdit. I grinned wide, opened it up, and dived right in, and it was a blast. I've made a few units following tutorials in Galaxyedit, but the process is always tedious and not fun at all. Unless one of the recent patches added some flow to this process.
I could understand the lack of user-friendliness regarding tools like Valve's Hammer Editor or the godforsaken Stargraft / Arsenal combos (which, actually, were also a lot of fun). Those tools are powerful and complex (moreso in Hammer's case), and designed specifically for users with the knowledge to use them with modding projects.
The problem here is precedent. StarEdit was very simple to use and recquired virtually no instruction (though, admittedly, this was also due to the game engine's inherent limitations). WorldEdit, while vastly more complex and capable, still made low-level functions like copying units and playing with the data or adding abilities / research to tech trees and whatnot. It was a powerful tool, but it was also a toy, and a lot of fun to play with.
GalaxyEdit, on the other hand, makes me feel as if I'd have to take a course in programming or spend hours plodding through tutorials just to work out basic tasks. While it may end up not being that hard, the tedium is still a factor. This may not be the best example, but James Rolfe, known widely as the Angry Video Game Nerd, has been making films all his life. In his younger years, he used mind-bogglingly haggard methods to do post-film audio and visual editing. It got the job done, but the limitations of what he could accomplish were tight and the methods time-consuming and error-prone. Nowadays, filmmakers can use digital editing software to both simplify and empower their practice in ways that simply were not possible before (on a consumer level) with programs like Adobe Premier and ect.
Those tools have a lot of depth, but also maintain a certain degree of user-friendliness that permits one to quickly edit and compile visual footage at their leisure. The range of possibility is infinitely greater than what it was before, and yet it turns out to be easier than some of the headache-inducers James Rolfe, and I'm sure many filmmakers, had to use.
Starcraft and Warcraft 3 had fame in big part to how expansive the range of possibilities that their editors permitted, while still being easy to use. I'm not saying that high level functions or triggering / programming tasks used to create some of the more ingenious maps be magically dumbed down.
But I would like to be able to play with my Starcraft Legos again without wanting to yank my hair out. In the end, it's likely I'll take the dive just out of desperation of wanting to resume my mad experiments. I'm just disappointed, I suppose, that the depth took a welcome step up while kicking the user-friendliness into the gutter.
I'll probably take the plunge when I get a free weekend. x: And thankyou for the welcome, EternalWraith!
Uh... Arsenal was not difficult to use. And if it was, Datedit corrected any of the issues. The difficulty came from the lack of publicly available information, but I tutored a total newbie to making AO-level effects within about a week or two due to how user friendly the Starcraft tools are. You'd be right if you said Iscript was a bit complicated, but it's easier to break into than even the most basic functions of the SC2 data editor. Meanwhile the BW tools were hardened to perfection and are amongst the best made tools I have ever seen in any game.
Datedit/the Arsenal series should have been used as a basis and foundation for designing the SC2 editor's layout but that would have required effort and Blizzard would much rather be lazy and rush the editor out at the last moment. What's more likely is they used an in-house XML editor for making their data in the campaign. The random locations of values, extremely slow loading of interface elements, and vague nature of naming schemes makes even the most mundane of tasks a trial of endurance. Making a large-scale project with a lot of custom data will drive even the most hearty of men insane.
There is no excuse for the data editor being as clumsy and lazily organized as it is, other than the obvious - it was rushed and not thought out.
I can't say anything about triggers because I'm a modder, not a mapper.
The only tools I'm familiar with are Arsenal, Stardraft, Stargraft, and the various MPQ explorers / packers. I was younger at the time, and probably just didn't click with it. Either way, the point I was making is that there are professional-grade tools out there which require a high level of expertise to use, but Blizzard's editors have set a precedent for user-friendliness that, for whatever reason, GalaxyEdit has seemed to ditch. It's fine if you want to update the swiss army knife, but I still want to be able to get the can opener with one flick and eat my spaghettioes. Layers are great for this, placing levels of simplified, possibly restricted functionality while also allowing the user to choose to open up deeper layers of complexity where control becomes finer at the cost of automation and ease of use.
It may all really fall onto the data editor, and if cleaning that up will make this something fun to use again, then by all means.
I'm hopeful that Blizzard will be making improvements to the editor in times to come. Nobody can say for certain why it's ended up this way, whether through simple neglect or developer oversight. Maybe the ascent to the editor's power overtook foresight regarding usability and form. Maybe they really wanted to finish up the game itself and get to the editor later. Even with it's labyrinthine nature, a lot of cool maps are coming out, so that if nothing else is great news.
It'd be really hard for me to imagine them leaving it this way. Unless they plan to have editor improvements as a selling feature of Heart of the Swarm. >_>;
The sad thing about GE is that I know no less than 3 people who are in Blizzard right here, right now, who were at one point associated with our modding community and know all about tools like Datedit, Arsenal, and such. Yet still, somehow, the editor has been largely ignored in their development and remains the most disorganized and most tedious editor I've yet to use in modding.
Unfortunately because of the extreme levels of tedium and the time requirement to use something like this, becoming more experienced does not dramatically reduce development time unlike BW because the editor's interface only works so fast (re: slow) and is so randomly laid out that it will always be annoying and uninteresting to use. This means that as a result, even though cool proofs of concept and such are being made, very few large-scale projects like campaigns and total conversions with a lot of new assets will be made. Both BW and Wc3, with the latter being considerably more annoying to use and thus had about 90% less big projects than BW, had a large turn-out of people who'd come up with a cool idea but couldn't stick to the project because of the time demand.
As a result wc3 is almost completely dominated by small, individual map projects. DotA contains almost no new custom stuff and is largely dependent on triggers, yet has more custom content in it than 99% of wc3 projects. WE's AI editor is practically unusuable and there's a plethora of bugs and non-functional things in it or things that could be improved. When I asked about the editor shortly after TFT was released, Brett Wood (now in charge of GalaxyEdit) responded and basically said that they were aware of the issues and would never fix them.
Now, I imagine plenty of cool maps will come out for sc2, then get gunned down by publishing limits and the large ratio of idea:success turnouts, resulting in a handful of completed, cool small projects. But me, I'm a modder. I make enormous projects that require extensive use of our equivalents of the data editor. The prospect of using this editor to attempt anything near the scale I did in BW or wc3 is absolutely terrifying to say the least.
An editor doesn't need to be simplified to be user friendly, it just needs to be laid out intelligently and in a manner that allows you access to basic features and functions quickly and efficiently. GalaxyEdit is the total opposite mindset.
I can certainly see the merit in the layout sentiment. It all seems so complex, so my mind begs for simplicity just to start cobbling things together again. But I wouldn't doubt a good portion of that complexity is simply inordinate amounts of tedium because somebody took a boulder to the drawing board when they were penning the UI and they thought the crumbly mess on the ground was a good idea.
It's...actually mind boggling to me that they wouldn't take better care of WorldEdit. I'd venture to say that the editor and UMS are why a big chunk of players even bother with the games. I hate WC3 melee, the whole creeping thing is a pain to me, but the custom content was always a hoot and hooked me for a solid five years. Outstanding value for the price paid. Then again, the melee is probably what makes blizzard big bucks, through sponsorships and e-sports and whatnot. Especially with Starcraft and the pedigree it carries.
The publishing limitation is ludicrous, that much is for certain. I don't see how that could have ever been a good idea. Nor can I grasp why they want to centralize Battle.net so badly. The old one was just dandy, and the P2P model worked fine. Strange how the new one feels less like a community than the old one.
I want to believe they're not dense enough to keep things this way, even if history says otherwise. I adore the base game, but all the new features that were supposed to be so exciting are...not. And to praise and hype this editor so much at blizzcon? Could they really leave it in such a sordid state?
Someone did a pokemon proof-of-concept with a single battle scene. It was wicked to see how it worked, and I've been rubbing my hands in anticipation for something awesome and poke-themed to come out. But from what I'm learning, the chances of that happening to it's potential seem...dull, if at all.
I don't have any reason to doubt what you've said but...I hope they deny history a repeated cycle and work to make this tool as awesome as it can be. I'm a bit put off that they've said nothing about what they intend for the editor in 1.1...but I'd love to be surprised, as I'm sure the whole community would be too.
Always wishing for the best. And trying not to let this blue news depress me, either!
You people have clearly never used any contemporary game development tools. You want a reality check, go play with the Source engine for a weekend.
Here's the dirty little secret of the gaming industry: game design is tedious, laborious work. You're lucky to have a data editor and not have to manually edit XML. Similarly you're lucky to have a visual trigger editor and not have to learn the scripting language if you don't want to.
If you want to avoid tedium you should probably choose a different hobby since game design is about 10% creative thinking and 90% painstaking attention to detail. You think Blizzard is screwing you over and they have amazing unreleased in-house tools? Consider that as buggy as the editor is, when the campaigns were being made, they were using a much earlier and much buggier version of it.
edit: Klishu you're spot on. Once you develop a workflow things go much, much faster. You start to pick up tricks like using event macros and object inheritence and things that formerly took you 30 minutes take you 30 seconds, and you very rarely get stuck or run into unexpected behavior.
It's tedious once while you're starting out. But you'll be repeating things so much that you'll eventually be performing these tasks so quickly.
At first I thought the editor was shit. But I've been going at it for about 3 weeks now and I'm already a LOT better (I didn't have any experience with previous blizz editors), whenever something gets in my way and I have no idea of how to fix it I first search through this forum and if I find nothing of use I simply make my own thread, I find that if you take your time and describe a problem in detail a lot of pro people will arrive to save your day. Now I think of the editor as "deep", there's almost nothing that you can't make in this editor if you have the skills and willpower ;)
stick to it.
@RileyStarcraft: Go
It's only tedious if the editors are intentionally developed to be tedious. There is plenty of games you can jump into high-level modding with without needing to dig through something as sloppy as GalaxyEdit. With sc2 you are better off editing XML files once you figure them out - it will be ten times as fast and you can bypass the ridiculous loading times in the editor. I'm pretty sure most people told me back in wc3's hayday that using JASS was preferable to GUI triggers once you figured it out, too, since GUI triggers introduced even more memory leak issues.
Everything has a learning curve, that I won't deny. I've modded Supreme Commander and Homeworld 2 - those didn't even have editors, and their communities are so elitist and tightly packed that you're lucky to get much of a response on any subject (though really, wc3 was much worse, I was lucky to have known people). Homeworld 2's weapon files were a string of numbers you needed a web page to count through to find what you want.
But when you use an editor as a bullpoint feature for a game, boasting ease of use and functionality, and then totally abandon everyday concepts of organization and layout fundamentals... well, that's bad news for us. The very least they should have done was look at community-made tools and model the UI based on those. We've already gone through all the work of getting feedback, circulating ideas, and proofing them. There is nothing wrong with Firegraft or Datedit.
Right now I'm not holding any hopes for major updates to GE. Blizzard so far hasn't ever acknowledged any modding-specific inquiries (of which I have made many...) and everyone I know is dead silent on the subject.
Design is easy, bringing it to life is not. :) Even games with very friendly editors like Starcraft can and will bring you to your knees if you don't keep your wits about you. Editors need to be logical and flow in a cohesive manner. GalaxyEdit does not flow at all.
I thought this too but so far people have ignored what I would think be a pretty simple question... http://forums.sc2mapster.com/development/map-development/7322-data-footstep-sounds/
Just sayin', people won't answer you unless you've already proven yourself most of the time. That's just the way things are. I produce private projects so I don't post much other than previews. Therefore, people aren't inclined to give a shit. I don't really blame them though. That's the way Blizzard's community is. SC2mapster is a lot more open than most places, though. I hope you guys can break the cycle.
Hey now, I ain't denying that the editor is powerful. A lot of people seem to mistake my argument like that. The editor is powerful, but it could be far more intuitive and laid out in a much more reasonable manner. Just organizing the values in a logical way, improving the loading times between switching tabs and accessing values, and naming things in a not silly manner would be a huge leap to improving the end-user experience.
@IskatuMesk:
All your complaining boils down to the editor doesn't function exactly as you'd intuitively expect it to. Well, guess what - if they made it exactly to your specifications, then it would be unintuitive for somebody else. I'm so sick of the sense of entitlement people have about the editor and the constant complaining. Face it, nothing they could release could possibly be good enough for people not to bitch about it as a way of defending their own egos when they get suck or can't figure something out. And that's what 99% of the complaining on these forums boils down to - people get frustrated and it must be Blizzard's fault for making a shitty tool that doesn't read their minds. It can't possibly be that they're trying to use a tool they haven't spent enough time learning, it must be a bug!
More than anything else that attitude makes me uninterested in helping somebody out and it's way to common around here.
That's pretty much exactly the wrong way to see things but ok if you want to be anal about it don't let me stop you ^_^
You know, a very simple feature that would make the unit editor a ton easier, is giving us the option to only show attributes we want to change...
I'm customizing 30+ units for a map I'm making, and due to the layout of almost randomly placed attributes, its hard to keep track of what I have changed in a unit, what still needs to be changed and whatnot...
Riley, we all know things arent gonna be as simple as think/edit tools for awhile, but a couple of decent rearranged OR view functions updated into the editor would make it FAR easier to use rather than what it is right now.
Note, I said rearranged, NOT changed or editted, Rearranged....
Riley, people who make maps are not expert professional programmers. Blizzard should have realized that people simply want to dink around in the editor and have fun doing stupid things. The design of the data editor makes this harder, and thus makes the SC2 as a product in its entirety less fun. "All our complaining" is us pointing this out for anyone who doesn't know about it (thus helping them make an informed choice on whether or not to buy the game), and is feedback for Blizzard. We are absolutely, completely entitled to whine all day long about anything and everything SC2. Most of your vitriolic post seems to espouse the fact that Blizzard cannot satisfy everyone with the editor. This is true, but you seem to be missing the point that they could be satisfying a LOT more people than they are now. If they made it more intuitive and user friendly, they'd have a better and more liked product, resulting in better long-term sales. Which is what Activision cares about. Consider: The added potential of the SC2 map maker is irrelevant for 98% of all mapmakers. Yes, I made this statistic up, but you get the point. Most people don't care that you can do neat tricks with actors or have custom UIs (that lag very muchly). They want to make their NEXUS WARS SUPER BLOODY EDITION or their LIFE OF AN INFESTED SPACE MARINE. And for everyone who does care about the added features (which really aren't that impressive. Blizzard took away almost as much as they gave, in my view) they now have to spend longer doing the basic stuff. The entire point of the WC3, SC1, and SC2 editors is that they make realizing your ideas much easier. If people wanted a complete set of features and freedom, they'd get themselves a C+ + compiler and be happy.
You're proving my point exactly. Blizzard makes a more powerful editor, people bitch about how it's harder to use. Blizzard makes an easier to use editor, or something with an identical feature set to WC3, people will bitch about how it's not an advancement. (This very thread contains examples of both, proving that it's not even a dilemma.) No matter what happens there's only one constant and that's people bitching.
At the end of the day a more powerful and flexible editor allows better maps to be made by the people who are actually going to invest significant time in the process, and that's a better goal than allowing people to easily churn out crap. Sorry if that sounds harsh but think about it for a while.
Anyway I've said my piece so if you want to continue complaining go ahead. I will say that overall the people who are actually making cool shit are the ones with a zen attitude who, instead of getting frustrated that things aren't how they feel they ought to be, learn to deal with the way things actually are.
No, I get you. I don't like the editor but I'll put up with it. I just feel that things like the editor's slow menu and tab loading speeds could be improved. I guess that's just my bruised ego talking because other people wouldn't like that.
In fact, let's just never have any progression at all. I like that idea. It has a very Blizzard sound to it.
If you want to modify something specific, do a search for it in the top right hand box, works just the same as the other search box on the left(ish) side, only for fields. At the end of the day, yes the editor can be clumsy, noone is really denying that, but it's gonna stay that way, instead of whining, bitching, griping whatever you consider yourself doing, do some more work in the editor, it WILL become second nature to you, I myself am about 1/4 way through a mod with 3 new races, all units are up, as are buildings, and all I need to do now is turrets and 2 races worth of weapons, which are mostly done tbh. I couldn't even make a decent unit in WC3, now I'm making a full mod. Having more freedom to create what you want is a damn sight better than having things hidden away so much that you forget they're there.