Two things I'd kill to see:
New multiplayer support, where maps can broadcast for new members to join...
...while the map is in progress.
Though the editor would also need a way to recognize new players then I assume.
This obviously isn't helpful for most maps, but it really helps for RPG maps.
...It'd be also cool if there could be a "cross-game cache," so players can simply
load content straight out rather than the current gimp-solution.
Dear SC2mapsters,
I was really looking forward to do custom maps at SC2. Had big plans what to do with it, how I will master it and so on. I started learning it at Beta and it looked promising. A lot of options was confusing but "Hey it's new stuff, be patient!" But that confusion just wasn't dissappearing. It took me more then hour to unsuccesfully make Throw Grenade abillity with arc I wanted. What I really liked at WC3 editor was that to basic things editor was perfect and to everything other there was JASS. Sure there is Galaxy too, but that simple steps like creating new unit or abillity are too complicated at sc2 (or rather frustrating to newbie). I wasn't probably patient enough and I'm sure some of others here will appreciate that complexity, which generally means more options to map makers. But I abaddoned my idea on creating maps and I will probably not buy sc2 (map making was the main reason why to do so). On the other hand I really wish you guys out there good luck with it and I'll probably keep an eye on mapster. Its awesome community! (High five to Vjeux).
Guy that you hardly know and will forget in few secs Listonos
Two things I'd kill to see: New multiplayer support, where maps can broadcast for new members to join... ...while the map is in progress.
Though the editor would also need a way to recognize new players then I assume. This obviously isn't helpful for most maps, but it really helps for RPG maps.
...It'd be also cool if there could be a "cross-game cache," so players can simply load content straight out rather than the current gimp-solution.
QFT. Diablo style game joining would be awesome for many more game types than RPGs
To elaborate on the last paragraph (which was the 2nd thing I wanted, honest!)
we currently use a "Write in code, receive bacon" thing. It tends to be buggy and stuff.
So what I'd like to see would be a way for maps to "carry over" characters from game to game,
presumably as a flag in the trigger menu to replace default "Save" option with it.
didn't read all the stuff which others already wrote but i have got MANY ideas!
something i already missed in the wc3 editor was a feature to be able to organise the object (or data) - editor.
in my mind it would be just an option to create your own folders instead of just having the standart ones ...
in wc3 for example i would have made folders like Heroes, Towers (for TD's) and Dummyunits etc. =)
then an option to make galaxy triggers and functions etc. like we were able to do that in wc3.
in my opinion this is a really huge step back from the good old wc3!
bigger banks for multiplayer. when i tested them first in singleplayer i already was confused why it was soo easy to delete or to change them.
so i figured out that you again need to encrypt your codes which is more or less work, work, work.
but the worst thing with banks is, that they are nearly useless in multiplayer - i instantly stopped my big RPG map when i found out that they are extremely limited in multiplayer! blizzard won't see any RPG map by me until they changed the limits to something which is about 10 times bigger. xD (im serious)
many functions are still not working. during the beta i always said - yeah man it is just a beta. but now i hoped that blizzard added them until release - well no ...
and during the beta i could not publish any locked map for public, but i don't know if that bug still exists.
(Keep in mind I am copying and pasting this from a thread I created during beta, but from what I hear the editor has not changed much and I don't have a release copy yet. Feel free to let me know if something I've noted has been covered.)
GalaxyEdit's data editor interface should be rebuilt completely from the ground up in the image of previous editors. It's not that it's too complex, it's that its organized in the most haphazard and time-consuming manner possible. Even the most simple of tasks are drawn out to insane lengths by just trying to find basic elements.
The biggest gripe I have with the sc2 editor is the extremely disorganized and confusing manner in which the attributes for many of the menus are laid out.
In the above tileset editor, the name for the tileset should be on the top. Instead, since it's listing alphabetically, the name is in a very random location. http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/9047/ed5o.jpg
Far worse than this is the unit editor. The arrangements of values in this are completely random and cripple any hope of making an efficient, painless run through a new unit. I cannot possibly imagine making a large-scale project in this editor - wc3 was bad enough with several values, like Armor, requiring repeatedly scrolling through a big list to find.
The Unit Name and Unit Description fields are on opposing ends of the list and key values like health, shields and armor are separated by totally random and unrelated values.
Recommendations;
I feel that the data editor is in serious need of reworking layout-wise. With the editors the community created for Starcraft 1 having had their interfaces perfected over the course of many years of feedback it seems prudent to learn from our mistakes and our discoveries. While I would never expect an exact copy to be made the editors in question I feel that several important attributes of these editors need to be adopted in the Sc2 editor to help facilitate faster, easier, and more efficient production for users of all skill levels.
Attributes related to each other, like Vitals (Health, Shields, Armor - Cost, Tech Requirements, Build Time, ect.) should be grouped together for easy identification and access. The user should not have to scroll down a big list to find any of these attributes. Grouping and organizing these appropriately will go a very long way to helping new users break into the power of this editor as well as help advanced users produce their projects faster, more efficiently, and with less irritation.
Unnecessary dialogues like the above only serve to waste the user's time and instead annoy the user, especially when they are editing an exceptionally large amount of data at once.
In its current state the GUI editor for data is practically unusable. There is virtually no usage of horizontal space whatsoever.
Obscurity
It is clear that many of the help dialogues in the editor are simply not finished, and I do believe that there was going to be a documentation of some kind in the future. Regardless, I feel a lot of dialogues and entries in the data editor need to be clarified as to what they actually do.
I have no idea why the weapon cooldown is called Period, for example. It just seems natural to me that it would be called something that makes it easy and quick to identify. Additionally there are no classifications to ANY of these attributes, and thus not even the slightest bit of organization. Again, I think developers would need a considerable hand-holding process by other developers to become acquainted with the obscurity of the data editor and the confusing nature of its arrangement, while with many other games most individuals can jump in and make basic changes without much hand holding. Unfortunately, with sc2 even changing damage and cooldown values can be a bit confusing for first-timers, and these critical, basic things become no less time consuming to do as the user becomes experienced with the editor because of their scattered nature.
I understand that the editor is complex and powerful. When dealing with games like this I do not expect the editor to be easy or newbie-friendly. I have modded games like Supreme Commander and Homeworld 2 in which there are no editors, just half-assed user made tools that are horrendously inefficient and often extremely buggy. There are many features in sc2's editor that I thoroughly enjoy, and the ui's for water and lights are exceptional and straight to the point - I like them a lot. But the data editor itself feels very haphazard and not much thought was put into it.
My effort is to spread awareness of the need for having the interface improved in the nature of organization and ease of use. This will not "simplify" the editor, this will improve the editor for those already using it by accelerating their production times through intuitive layout and arrangement that presents the immense power of the editor to them in a way that makes editing the game enjoyable and timely. That is why so few large-scale projects were attempted with wc3.
Some things like the Game Attributes editor give me only minor clues as to what they are capable of doing, and no hope for understanding their capabilities without an extensive external documentation or potentially weeks if not months of simply doing random things until something happens.
Within Blizzard's opportunity is the capacity to fix Battle.net and, more importantly, make the editor all it can be. They need but put effort into it. The editor is best seen as a foundation right now, ready for supports and construction to create the tool developers will be able to use in the future to create custom content. The groundwork is laid out but it needs engineering and planning to begin building the real thing.
Actordata and Modeldata
The two most important aspects of custom units are those involving the graphics and the physical functions of the unit, being modeldata and actordata. These are two reasonably complicated files that, currently, are a complete and total pain in the ass to do even the most basic things with. This is in part because they are complex subjects and also in part because the interface for them compounds the complexity issue ten fold.
Luckily for us, and Blizzard, there's an easy way to get around this. The editor already contains a model viewer - this could easily be copied and modified into a real-time preview editor for actors and models, probably even Movers as well. By simulating game events with the viewer, the editor can provide a level of fine control previously only reserved for things like the RPGMaker series and Age of Wonders 2. This seems to be the natural course of evolution and it's a wonder few games have attempted this in the modern market. No, I know why - developers are lazy. But the hardest part is already out of the way for Blizzard.
Animation editing is a tricky business, but perhaps Blizzard might consider making a simple scripting language for actordata. Something like what they employed for the iscript in Starcraft 1.
(I was going to post some iscript code like I did with my original post but it seems that code tags don't work and the forum doesn't have spoiler tags, either... or they just aren't the same and I am too stupid to find them :( )
Making these two files accessible is key to improving the overall user experience in creating custom assets and applying them ingame. But if Blizzard truly does care about the editor they will go above and beyond to provide the means to really get into the thick of these files without having a clunky interface to complicate the process.
Key functions of the new graphical actor editor should be an easy way to determine new events with only 1-2 clicks. Being able to insert a preset event - such as a sound - without any typing or external dialogues. You don't need to dumb down an editor to make it easy to use and intuitive.
This editor is not very powerful, but it's very quick and easy to use, and gets you where you want to go quickly. This is what I'd like to see in sc2 - an organized, intuitive, and streamlined interface where functions are obvious and quick to learn.
The key to making an editor as powerful as the one necessary for Actordata but as easy to use as this one lays entirely in how you arrange and manage the interface, and how you present it to the end-user. Enormous clusters of unrelated options like what we see commonly throughout many editors, sc2's included, bombards new users with unknowns and overwhelms them, as well as making finding exactly what you want annoying and time-consuming for more advanced and experienced users. This plays back into the first part where I talk about tabs and categorization. Speaking of which, tabs were added in patch 13, though the organization remains non-existent. At least they're updating the editor! Hopefully they continue to improve it for many years and don't abandon it like they did wc3. This editor still has a very long ways to go to.
Although not as graceful as as the AoW2 editor, the RPGMaker XP animation editor for spell effects and the like is another good example of a functional and fairly clearly interface. It is not necessary to jump into an external dialogue for adding SFX files, though unlike AoW2 this editor doesn't support multiple animations per entry (aka not a unit editor).
Also worth showing is the RPGMaker XP monster editor, as another source of reference of a good, clean interface for editing units.
Doodads
Doodads need to have their own editor. Additionally, they need to have a way of telling the editor which doodads to randomize in the placement tool without having to copy all of their assets around and make new entries. I wanted to place trees without placing palm trees and then manually changing them but such is a pipedream without bending over backwards. I also had a fun time trying to find doodads until I discovered the actordata IS their editor... which seems a bit weird.
~
The terrain placement tool could bear to be more intuitive and water placement in general needs a significant amount of work. I'd recommend to look at something like the Titan Quest editor.
The circles in the placement tool tell you about the intensity of blending for stuff like hills and textures, as well as the tool telling you the relative position it is to lower ground and its current position. Additionally, note how water need not be placed in enormous, clunky squares and water height is not based on individual water types.
Other "minor" things that are ridiculous arbitrary limits and should be remedied asap;
- 8 texture limit
- 256x256 map size
- only 2 levels of cliff and 1 level of unpathable subcliff? Really? What happened to wc3?
Something I'd like to see but is a bit more complicated is for creep to be worked out of being hardcoded into terrain and instead worked into data in the form of abilities or somesuch. This renders making a second independent creep kind of insanely time-consuming and difficult if not impossible.
The game also is in dire need of an actual mod loader. Currently, the sc2 "mod" system is just the wc3 campaign system with a new name and is easier to use. The fact you have to make maps dependent on the "mod" completely excludes it from the definition of a mod. A mod completely changes the game and effects every map regardless of what the map says it loads from. In warcraft 3 and Brood War this entailed the use of Mpqdraft. In games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme Commander, who natively support mods, you have a menu in-game that loads from either an archive or a directory. Sc2 will probably never have any mods unless support for it comes out due to Blizzard continually mixing up the definitions of maps/mods and sc2 monitoring RAM usage (aka you'll get banned for running mpqdraft).
Additionally, another key thing separating Blizzard's "mod" system from actual mods is the fact that their mod system is still arbitrarily limited by the absolutely insane restrictions of Battle.net 2.0. You can not make a mod with only 20 megs global of space. Not even close. Armageddon Onslaught, a gametype conversion for Brood War, is still 88 megs because it contains custom music, sounds, and graphics like all mods do. Any significant conversion in sc2 will easily outscale that because of the larger amount of texture data alone. But also because each unit will have more sound data than they did in brood war as well.
The solution is to not have Battle.net be responsible for transfers of mod archives. Mods can be externally downloaded like they always have been, loaded through the mod loader interface, and flag vanilla achievements as unable to be obtained, and exclude the ladder system from being accessed (it just desyncs and drops/crashes you anyway).
Currently you can just modify patch mpqs for modding but... again, this is not ideal and not "supported".
too many limitations. why cant you support massive games? what is it hurting? who gives a shit if its 20megs, if you got a slow connection dont play it!
The trigger command "UI - Display Custom Dialog" doesn't work at all as of phase two beta, and still remains broken upon game release. Attempting to use this trigger in any way causes an error message. Honestly there's no reason this bug has lasted this long without being addressed...
I want a freaking ice texture set. With cliffs, textures and doodads (mainly icy stuff, snowy stuff and snow weather).
I also totally agree with IskatuMesk: the textures limit, the map size limit and the cliff's levels number limit are all very retarded. Fix this now blizzard: it hinder my mapmaking.
My pre-order C-edition is still in the mail to my house, so I'm going off of the last bit of beta i messed around with.
I back up the quotes about the needless limitations.
Mods being limited to 20megs is going to kill me. How am I going to make a full conversion Warcraft mod, in only 20 megs...
Cliff Level Limitations.
The Texture system could easily support a palette of all texture types. Why doesn't it? Even then, why can't it at least support 12? Also, having more than 2 cliff types would be neat too; having up to 4 (the other 2 chosen by custom tileset prefereance by the user)
I havn't done much with the triggers or scripting, but I can't even begin to describe the frustrations with the Data Editor.
After using it well enough, i do, truely understand I believe the thought put behind it. Essentially, the Data Editor is the true, object editer. Everything that is NOT Terrain tiles, is an object; and ONE editor can edit them all, even if its a projectile.
But, still, holy hell; does it have to be so disorginized?
Why must it take me 3 hours to make ONE new unit sometimes? On War3, I can make a whole new race in under 2 hours. SC2s is insane.
You go, you make a new "Unit".
But wait.
You need to specify the "actor".
You set up the attack.
But wait.
Need to make a weapon.
Oh god, forgot, need to make a new unit to make the projectile.
JESUS, all these things drive me NOT to want to use the Editor. I was Hard Core with World Edit. Even found it relaxing after a 15hr day at my job, but..
I find myself AVOIDING Galaxy because of situations like these. So much so, where I strayed into Modding Dawn of War1: Dark Crusade because the slew of 3rd party tools? ARE STILL Easier to use, and faster to process than Galaxy edit.
Suggested thing for the Data Editor is to force it back to nearly War3s, where tabs orginized the objects into different catagories. From then on, the process of making 5 different sets of objects to meld into one can be much more simplified.
For instance, on the simple view, you see a tree on the left that is, the unit you selected in the search list to view.
That tree could be a template. If you're creating a unit; it could have slots already there, empty, that high light as "Unit", "Unit's Actor" (under which you could to right click and select from a menu "Add another Actor"), "Effects", "Weapon", "Upgrade".
For each catagory of object, be it unit, doodad or whatever, the template will be there to show you what you need to get it to work. By also clicking on them, you wont have to shuffle through tabs, hunt different objects or play hit and miss trying to find that one part that's missing.
Another note: In War3, you had this option to "edit game play constants". I don't see such an option. Certain things in War3 could be changed that I can't find out how to do on Galaxy; simple things like editing and enabling a hard armor value system like that of Warcraft 3s; corpse decay time; default building facing direction and a few other things.
i'm sry, i'm ion a hurry, wanted to reformat my pc, but win wont install anymore, so i'm not at my regular pc (so i wont respond to answers on this post immediatly)
my suggestion:
make triggers be triggered in the we (like mass placing doodads thru an algorithm, test triggered spells in we and not ingame)
Terrain Editor
- Move cliff levels would be nice
- Smaller water texture chunks.
- Give us a Snap To Grid function for drawing textures that actually works.
- Reduce the amount of "blending" steps of textures to save map space. 255 is way more than we need. 100 would be much better.
Data Editor
- Better sorting of the fields in the data editor.
- Help tooltips for all entries and not only for the most obvious ones.
- Allow us to change tint colors on icons.
Trigger Editor
- Give us some more trigger options with doodads.
- Ability to force UI keys like in WC3.
- Fix the player leaves event.
- Allow Set Catalog to change more data on-the-fly.
- Dynamic memory allocation would be nice.
- Give us access to objects' handle integers.
- Make Dialog Images able to display a part of a larger image so we can use all the game files.
- Improve the Galaxy compiler. It's horrible.
- Give us an option to get a player's name as string.
- Make banks more secure. Don't let them crash the map -.-
- Give us actions for conveniently displaying special effects.
- Give us text messages that show their text x seconds instead of something predefined.
- Give us a Unit Is Damage event that triggers before the damage is dealt.
- Give us a convenient Damage Unit trigger, just like in WC3.
- Give us a "Any unit enters region" if possible.
- Give us more options to change the UI and all UI texts.
- Give us an option to determine a player's screen resolution or make dialogs size relative.
Text Editor
- Allow us to specify text size seperately.
- Being able to input variables into texts would be nice.
General
- Improve editor speed (syntax highlighting, opening tabs, libraries).
- Better map protection.
- Fix lobby settings or make them easier to use (in case we all just don't understand how it works).
- Increase maximum storage limit for your maps.
- Reducing custom map delay would be nice.
- Get that Help Menu working already. "404 Page not found" isn't an error you should get after the game's released.
- Don't listen to our complaints (100% this'll get me the Curse Premium)
Very simple, I would like a way to change the mechanics of armor. Currently points of armor indicate the amount of damage reduction a unit has, and each weapon can have a greater or lesser damage penalty for each point of armor. I'd like a way to change it so that each point of armor makes a percentage reduction from all attacks.
Also I think each premium map should allow the map author to award a small number of achievements that actually count towards the player's achievement score.
Unfortunately, with the power of the new editor comes complexity. Im torn, because I love the new power the data editor has, but it Is tricky for m, and I have been using wc3 editor for years. The editor would be really confusing to newbies.
IDEA 1
It would be alot of work on blizzards part, but they could add in a nice help feature, where you ctrl click on something and it has a pop up that explains that thing. Ex.. Oh I wonder how this abiliy works? Click...This ablity works by having etc etc...
MY IDEA #2-
And (this will never happen but it would be nice), A simple mode. What I mean is, there is a check box under "file" you un-check it, and BAM the editor is in "simple" mode. This mode removes alot of the harder aspects from the data editor, only providing you with the bare minimum, like behaviors, models, units, actors, abilities, and effects.When you create a new ability, for example, it asks what kind of ability. Like, instant effect, missle that does not lock onto targets, area of effect, instant effect on target, etc. That way noobs could figure it out with ease.
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Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
- i just really want a folder that works like in warcraft 3 so i can download maps and put them there then just easily find them ingame to play them. and i want to have the option so that i can easily view my maps folder. now when you go to multiplayer you can only choose blizzard, popular etc and its just so annoying cause what i wanna play is my own downloaded map with my friends. :D
- and i think it could be kinda cool if blizzard themselves tried to make a decent TD map for this game (yes i know the other map makers out there is pretty insanely good at making those but i just want to see how well blizzard would do it.
Also, please have MouseGetX/MouseGetY functions, I don't want to have to create another program that runs behind SC2 that just clicks the mouse for me...
Also, please have MouseGetX/MouseGetY functions, I don't want to have to create another program that runs behind SC2 that just clicks the mouse for me...
There are no mousex/mousey functions due to the network architecture. The server can't know the mouse position of the client without asking for it and due to network latency the mouse position is likely very different by the time the trigger runs to when the client sees the response.
The basic issue is the lack of a "client-side" trigger which is not synced across the network. That would be a non-trivial addition to the engine though and would probably be massively complicated as there would be a very strict set of rules as to what could and couldn't be done in such triggers, and you'd need to marshal data (local vs. synced), etc. So it's not going to happen.
However, making it so the client sends the mouse cursor position when certain other events occur - like keypresses - is entirely possible and hopefully is added.
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Two things I'd kill to see: New multiplayer support, where maps can broadcast for new members to join... ...while the map is in progress.
Though the editor would also need a way to recognize new players then I assume. This obviously isn't helpful for most maps, but it really helps for RPG maps.
...It'd be also cool if there could be a "cross-game cache," so players can simply load content straight out rather than the current gimp-solution.
Dear SC2mapsters, I was really looking forward to do custom maps at SC2. Had big plans what to do with it, how I will master it and so on. I started learning it at Beta and it looked promising. A lot of options was confusing but "Hey it's new stuff, be patient!" But that confusion just wasn't dissappearing. It took me more then hour to unsuccesfully make Throw Grenade abillity with arc I wanted. What I really liked at WC3 editor was that to basic things editor was perfect and to everything other there was JASS. Sure there is Galaxy too, but that simple steps like creating new unit or abillity are too complicated at sc2 (or rather frustrating to newbie). I wasn't probably patient enough and I'm sure some of others here will appreciate that complexity, which generally means more options to map makers. But I abaddoned my idea on creating maps and I will probably not buy sc2 (map making was the main reason why to do so). On the other hand I really wish you guys out there good luck with it and I'll probably keep an eye on mapster. Its awesome community! (High five to Vjeux). Guy that you hardly know and will forget in few secs Listonos
QFT. Diablo style game joining would be awesome for many more game types than RPGs
To elaborate on the last paragraph (which was the 2nd thing I wanted, honest!) we currently use a "Write in code, receive bacon" thing. It tends to be buggy and stuff.
So what I'd like to see would be a way for maps to "carry over" characters from game to game, presumably as a flag in the trigger menu to replace default "Save" option with it.
hiho,
didn't read all the stuff which others already wrote but i have got MANY ideas!
something i already missed in the wc3 editor was a feature to be able to organise the object (or data) - editor. in my mind it would be just an option to create your own folders instead of just having the standart ones ... in wc3 for example i would have made folders like Heroes, Towers (for TD's) and Dummyunits etc. =)
then an option to make galaxy triggers and functions etc. like we were able to do that in wc3. in my opinion this is a really huge step back from the good old wc3!
bigger banks for multiplayer. when i tested them first in singleplayer i already was confused why it was soo easy to delete or to change them. so i figured out that you again need to encrypt your codes which is more or less work, work, work. but the worst thing with banks is, that they are nearly useless in multiplayer - i instantly stopped my big RPG map when i found out that they are extremely limited in multiplayer! blizzard won't see any RPG map by me until they changed the limits to something which is about 10 times bigger. xD (im serious)
many functions are still not working. during the beta i always said - yeah man it is just a beta. but now i hoped that blizzard added them until release - well no ...
and during the beta i could not publish any locked map for public, but i don't know if that bug still exists.
Robbepop
really really really. It would also be nice to have dynamic allocation of structs in galaxy.
(Keep in mind I am copying and pasting this from a thread I created during beta, but from what I hear the editor has not changed much and I don't have a release copy yet. Feel free to let me know if something I've noted has been covered.)
GalaxyEdit's data editor interface should be rebuilt completely from the ground up in the image of previous editors. It's not that it's too complex, it's that its organized in the most haphazard and time-consuming manner possible. Even the most simple of tasks are drawn out to insane lengths by just trying to find basic elements.
The biggest gripe I have with the sc2 editor is the extremely disorganized and confusing manner in which the attributes for many of the menus are laid out.
In the above tileset editor, the name for the tileset should be on the top. Instead, since it's listing alphabetically, the name is in a very random location.
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/9047/ed5o.jpg
Far worse than this is the unit editor. The arrangements of values in this are completely random and cripple any hope of making an efficient, painless run through a new unit. I cannot possibly imagine making a large-scale project in this editor - wc3 was bad enough with several values, like Armor, requiring repeatedly scrolling through a big list to find.
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/5246/ea1g.jpg
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/908/ea2r.jpg
The Unit Name and Unit Description fields are on opposing ends of the list and key values like health, shields and armor are separated by totally random and unrelated values.
Recommendations;
I feel that the data editor is in serious need of reworking layout-wise. With the editors the community created for Starcraft 1 having had their interfaces perfected over the course of many years of feedback it seems prudent to learn from our mistakes and our discoveries. While I would never expect an exact copy to be made the editors in question I feel that several important attributes of these editors need to be adopted in the Sc2 editor to help facilitate faster, easier, and more efficient production for users of all skill levels.
http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/8291/editor1.jpg
Attribute Relationships
Attributes related to each other, like Vitals (Health, Shields, Armor - Cost, Tech Requirements, Build Time, ect.) should be grouped together for easy identification and access. The user should not have to scroll down a big list to find any of these attributes. Grouping and organizing these appropriately will go a very long way to helping new users break into the power of this editor as well as help advanced users produce their projects faster, more efficiently, and with less irritation.
Elimination of Redundancy
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/4229/ed6pg.jpg
Unnecessary dialogues like the above only serve to waste the user's time and instead annoy the user, especially when they are editing an exceptionally large amount of data at once.
GUI editor
http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/7088/ed7v.jpg
In its current state the GUI editor for data is practically unusable. There is virtually no usage of horizontal space whatsoever.
Obscurity
It is clear that many of the help dialogues in the editor are simply not finished, and I do believe that there was going to be a documentation of some kind in the future. Regardless, I feel a lot of dialogues and entries in the data editor need to be clarified as to what they actually do.
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/3346/ed8z.jpg
I have no idea why the weapon cooldown is called Period, for example. It just seems natural to me that it would be called something that makes it easy and quick to identify. Additionally there are no classifications to ANY of these attributes, and thus not even the slightest bit of organization. Again, I think developers would need a considerable hand-holding process by other developers to become acquainted with the obscurity of the data editor and the confusing nature of its arrangement, while with many other games most individuals can jump in and make basic changes without much hand holding. Unfortunately, with sc2 even changing damage and cooldown values can be a bit confusing for first-timers, and these critical, basic things become no less time consuming to do as the user becomes experienced with the editor because of their scattered nature.
I understand that the editor is complex and powerful. When dealing with games like this I do not expect the editor to be easy or newbie-friendly. I have modded games like Supreme Commander and Homeworld 2 in which there are no editors, just half-assed user made tools that are horrendously inefficient and often extremely buggy. There are many features in sc2's editor that I thoroughly enjoy, and the ui's for water and lights are exceptional and straight to the point - I like them a lot. But the data editor itself feels very haphazard and not much thought was put into it.
My effort is to spread awareness of the need for having the interface improved in the nature of organization and ease of use. This will not "simplify" the editor, this will improve the editor for those already using it by accelerating their production times through intuitive layout and arrangement that presents the immense power of the editor to them in a way that makes editing the game enjoyable and timely. That is why so few large-scale projects were attempted with wc3.
Some things like the Game Attributes editor give me only minor clues as to what they are capable of doing, and no hope for understanding their capabilities without an extensive external documentation or potentially weeks if not months of simply doing random things until something happens.
Within Blizzard's opportunity is the capacity to fix Battle.net and, more importantly, make the editor all it can be. They need but put effort into it. The editor is best seen as a foundation right now, ready for supports and construction to create the tool developers will be able to use in the future to create custom content. The groundwork is laid out but it needs engineering and planning to begin building the real thing.
Actordata and Modeldata
The two most important aspects of custom units are those involving the graphics and the physical functions of the unit, being modeldata and actordata. These are two reasonably complicated files that, currently, are a complete and total pain in the ass to do even the most basic things with. This is in part because they are complex subjects and also in part because the interface for them compounds the complexity issue ten fold.
Luckily for us, and Blizzard, there's an easy way to get around this. The editor already contains a model viewer - this could easily be copied and modified into a real-time preview editor for actors and models, probably even Movers as well. By simulating game events with the viewer, the editor can provide a level of fine control previously only reserved for things like the RPGMaker series and Age of Wonders 2. This seems to be the natural course of evolution and it's a wonder few games have attempted this in the modern market. No, I know why - developers are lazy. But the hardest part is already out of the way for Blizzard.
Animation editing is a tricky business, but perhaps Blizzard might consider making a simple scripting language for actordata. Something like what they employed for the iscript in Starcraft 1.
(I was going to post some iscript code like I did with my original post but it seems that code tags don't work and the forum doesn't have spoiler tags, either... or they just aren't the same and I am too stupid to find them :( )
All of the source iscript code for Armageddon Onslaught is included in the mod's release package - http:www.campaigncreations.org/starcraft/armageddon_onslaught
Making these two files accessible is key to improving the overall user experience in creating custom assets and applying them ingame. But if Blizzard truly does care about the editor they will go above and beyond to provide the means to really get into the thick of these files without having a clunky interface to complicate the process.
Key functions of the new graphical actor editor should be an easy way to determine new events with only 1-2 clicks. Being able to insert a preset event - such as a sound - without any typing or external dialogues. You don't need to dumb down an editor to make it easy to use and intuitive.
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/5532/edg1.jpg
The AoW2 unit body editor (effectively a modeldata-esque editor)
This editor is not very powerful, but it's very quick and easy to use, and gets you where you want to go quickly. This is what I'd like to see in sc2 - an organized, intuitive, and streamlined interface where functions are obvious and quick to learn.
The key to making an editor as powerful as the one necessary for Actordata but as easy to use as this one lays entirely in how you arrange and manage the interface, and how you present it to the end-user. Enormous clusters of unrelated options like what we see commonly throughout many editors, sc2's included, bombards new users with unknowns and overwhelms them, as well as making finding exactly what you want annoying and time-consuming for more advanced and experienced users. This plays back into the first part where I talk about tabs and categorization. Speaking of which, tabs were added in patch 13, though the organization remains non-existent. At least they're updating the editor! Hopefully they continue to improve it for many years and don't abandon it like they did wc3. This editor still has a very long ways to go to.
http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/2374/62769663.jpg
Although not as graceful as as the AoW2 editor, the RPGMaker XP animation editor for spell effects and the like is another good example of a functional and fairly clearly interface. It is not necessary to jump into an external dialogue for adding SFX files, though unlike AoW2 this editor doesn't support multiple animations per entry (aka not a unit editor).
http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/2718/39088999.jpg
Also worth showing is the RPGMaker XP monster editor, as another source of reference of a good, clean interface for editing units.
Doodads
Doodads need to have their own editor. Additionally, they need to have a way of telling the editor which doodads to randomize in the placement tool without having to copy all of their assets around and make new entries. I wanted to place trees without placing palm trees and then manually changing them but such is a pipedream without bending over backwards. I also had a fun time trying to find doodads until I discovered the actordata IS their editor... which seems a bit weird.
~
The terrain placement tool could bear to be more intuitive and water placement in general needs a significant amount of work. I'd recommend to look at something like the Titan Quest editor.
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/24/waht3.jpg
The circles in the placement tool tell you about the intensity of blending for stuff like hills and textures, as well as the tool telling you the relative position it is to lower ground and its current position. Additionally, note how water need not be placed in enormous, clunky squares and water height is not based on individual water types.
Other "minor" things that are ridiculous arbitrary limits and should be remedied asap;
- 8 texture limit
- 256x256 map size
- only 2 levels of cliff and 1 level of unpathable subcliff? Really? What happened to wc3?
Something I'd like to see but is a bit more complicated is for creep to be worked out of being hardcoded into terrain and instead worked into data in the form of abilities or somesuch. This renders making a second independent creep kind of insanely time-consuming and difficult if not impossible.
The game also is in dire need of an actual mod loader. Currently, the sc2 "mod" system is just the wc3 campaign system with a new name and is easier to use. The fact you have to make maps dependent on the "mod" completely excludes it from the definition of a mod. A mod completely changes the game and effects every map regardless of what the map says it loads from. In warcraft 3 and Brood War this entailed the use of Mpqdraft. In games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme Commander, who natively support mods, you have a menu in-game that loads from either an archive or a directory. Sc2 will probably never have any mods unless support for it comes out due to Blizzard continually mixing up the definitions of maps/mods and sc2 monitoring RAM usage (aka you'll get banned for running mpqdraft).
Additionally, another key thing separating Blizzard's "mod" system from actual mods is the fact that their mod system is still arbitrarily limited by the absolutely insane restrictions of Battle.net 2.0. You can not make a mod with only 20 megs global of space. Not even close. Armageddon Onslaught, a gametype conversion for Brood War, is still 88 megs because it contains custom music, sounds, and graphics like all mods do. Any significant conversion in sc2 will easily outscale that because of the larger amount of texture data alone. But also because each unit will have more sound data than they did in brood war as well.
The solution is to not have Battle.net be responsible for transfers of mod archives. Mods can be externally downloaded like they always have been, loaded through the mod loader interface, and flag vanilla achievements as unable to be obtained, and exclude the ladder system from being accessed (it just desyncs and drops/crashes you anyway).
Currently you can just modify patch mpqs for modding but... again, this is not ideal and not "supported".
too many limitations. why cant you support massive games? what is it hurting? who gives a shit if its 20megs, if you got a slow connection dont play it!
The trigger command "UI - Display Custom Dialog" doesn't work at all as of phase two beta, and still remains broken upon game release. Attempting to use this trigger in any way causes an error message. Honestly there's no reason this bug has lasted this long without being addressed...
@Timthetoolman: Go
Thats what I was saying here. Does anyone know why this is happening? The error is some sort of authorization issue.
I want a freaking ice texture set. With cliffs, textures and doodads (mainly icy stuff, snowy stuff and snow weather).
I also totally agree with IskatuMesk: the textures limit, the map size limit and the cliff's levels number limit are all very retarded. Fix this now blizzard: it hinder my mapmaking.
All I have to ask are 2 things:
That's all.
My pre-order C-edition is still in the mail to my house, so I'm going off of the last bit of beta i messed around with.
I back up the quotes about the needless limitations.
Mods being limited to 20megs is going to kill me. How am I going to make a full conversion Warcraft mod, in only 20 megs... Cliff Level Limitations. The Texture system could easily support a palette of all texture types. Why doesn't it? Even then, why can't it at least support 12? Also, having more than 2 cliff types would be neat too; having up to 4 (the other 2 chosen by custom tileset prefereance by the user)
I havn't done much with the triggers or scripting, but I can't even begin to describe the frustrations with the Data Editor. After using it well enough, i do, truely understand I believe the thought put behind it. Essentially, the Data Editor is the true, object editer. Everything that is NOT Terrain tiles, is an object; and ONE editor can edit them all, even if its a projectile. But, still, holy hell; does it have to be so disorginized? Why must it take me 3 hours to make ONE new unit sometimes? On War3, I can make a whole new race in under 2 hours. SC2s is insane. You go, you make a new "Unit". But wait. You need to specify the "actor". You set up the attack. But wait. Need to make a weapon. Oh god, forgot, need to make a new unit to make the projectile. JESUS, all these things drive me NOT to want to use the Editor. I was Hard Core with World Edit. Even found it relaxing after a 15hr day at my job, but.. I find myself AVOIDING Galaxy because of situations like these. So much so, where I strayed into Modding Dawn of War1: Dark Crusade because the slew of 3rd party tools? ARE STILL Easier to use, and faster to process than Galaxy edit.
Suggested thing for the Data Editor is to force it back to nearly War3s, where tabs orginized the objects into different catagories. From then on, the process of making 5 different sets of objects to meld into one can be much more simplified. For instance, on the simple view, you see a tree on the left that is, the unit you selected in the search list to view. That tree could be a template. If you're creating a unit; it could have slots already there, empty, that high light as "Unit", "Unit's Actor" (under which you could to right click and select from a menu "Add another Actor"), "Effects", "Weapon", "Upgrade". For each catagory of object, be it unit, doodad or whatever, the template will be there to show you what you need to get it to work. By also clicking on them, you wont have to shuffle through tabs, hunt different objects or play hit and miss trying to find that one part that's missing.
Another note: In War3, you had this option to "edit game play constants". I don't see such an option. Certain things in War3 could be changed that I can't find out how to do on Galaxy; simple things like editing and enabling a hard armor value system like that of Warcraft 3s; corpse decay time; default building facing direction and a few other things.
i'm sry, i'm ion a hurry, wanted to reformat my pc, but win wont install anymore, so i'm not at my regular pc (so i wont respond to answers on this post immediatly)
my suggestion: make triggers be triggered in the we (like mass placing doodads thru an algorithm, test triggered spells in we and not ingame)
Terrain Editor
- Move cliff levels would be nice
- Smaller water texture chunks.
- Give us a Snap To Grid function for drawing textures that actually works.
- Reduce the amount of "blending" steps of textures to save map space. 255 is way more than we need. 100 would be much better.
Data Editor
- Better sorting of the fields in the data editor.
- Help tooltips for all entries and not only for the most obvious ones.
- Allow us to change tint colors on icons.
Trigger Editor
- Give us some more trigger options with doodads.
- Ability to force UI keys like in WC3.
- Fix the player leaves event.
- Allow Set Catalog to change more data on-the-fly.
- Dynamic memory allocation would be nice.
- Give us access to objects' handle integers.
- Make Dialog Images able to display a part of a larger image so we can use all the game files.
- Improve the Galaxy compiler. It's horrible.
- Give us an option to get a player's name as string.
- Make banks more secure. Don't let them crash the map -.-
- Give us actions for conveniently displaying special effects.
- Give us text messages that show their text x seconds instead of something predefined.
- Give us a Unit Is Damage event that triggers before the damage is dealt.
- Give us a convenient Damage Unit trigger, just like in WC3.
- Give us a "Any unit enters region" if possible.
- Give us more options to change the UI and all UI texts.
- Give us an option to determine a player's screen resolution or make dialogs size relative.
Text Editor
- Allow us to specify text size seperately.
- Being able to input variables into texts would be nice.
General
- Improve editor speed (syntax highlighting, opening tabs, libraries).
- Better map protection.
- Fix lobby settings or make them easier to use (in case we all just don't understand how it works).
- Increase maximum storage limit for your maps.
- Reducing custom map delay would be nice.
- Get that Help Menu working already. "404 Page not found" isn't an error you should get after the game's released.
- Don't listen to our complaints (100% this'll get me the Curse Premium)
Very simple, I would like a way to change the mechanics of armor. Currently points of armor indicate the amount of damage reduction a unit has, and each weapon can have a greater or lesser damage penalty for each point of armor. I'd like a way to change it so that each point of armor makes a percentage reduction from all attacks.
Also I think each premium map should allow the map author to award a small number of achievements that actually count towards the player's achievement score.
Unfortunately, with the power of the new editor comes complexity. Im torn, because I love the new power the data editor has, but it Is tricky for m, and I have been using wc3 editor for years. The editor would be really confusing to newbies.
IDEA 1
It would be alot of work on blizzards part, but they could add in a nice help feature, where you ctrl click on something and it has a pop up that explains that thing. Ex.. Oh I wonder how this abiliy works? Click...This ablity works by having etc etc...
MY IDEA #2-
And (this will never happen but it would be nice), A simple mode. What I mean is, there is a check box under "file" you un-check it, and BAM the editor is in "simple" mode. This mode removes alot of the harder aspects from the data editor, only providing you with the bare minimum, like behaviors, models, units, actors, abilities, and effects.When you create a new ability, for example, it asks what kind of ability. Like, instant effect, missle that does not lock onto targets, area of effect, instant effect on target, etc. That way noobs could figure it out with ease.
- i just really want a folder that works like in warcraft 3 so i can download maps and put them there then just easily find them ingame to play them. and i want to have the option so that i can easily view my maps folder. now when you go to multiplayer you can only choose blizzard, popular etc and its just so annoying cause what i wanna play is my own downloaded map with my friends. :D
- and i think it could be kinda cool if blizzard themselves tried to make a decent TD map for this game (yes i know the other map makers out there is pretty insanely good at making those but i just want to see how well blizzard would do it.
Well this article pretty much sums up everything wrong with the Galaxy language: http://www.sc2mod.com/board/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=77
Also, please have MouseGetX/MouseGetY functions, I don't want to have to create another program that runs behind SC2 that just clicks the mouse for me...
There are no mousex/mousey functions due to the network architecture. The server can't know the mouse position of the client without asking for it and due to network latency the mouse position is likely very different by the time the trigger runs to when the client sees the response.
The basic issue is the lack of a "client-side" trigger which is not synced across the network. That would be a non-trivial addition to the engine though and would probably be massively complicated as there would be a very strict set of rules as to what could and couldn't be done in such triggers, and you'd need to marshal data (local vs. synced), etc. So it's not going to happen.
However, making it so the client sends the mouse cursor position when certain other events occur - like keypresses - is entirely possible and hopefully is added.