I think the editor is a great way to make actually a proof of concept or something like that of your game you want. Say you want to make an RPG, learn how to make it and put everything in SC2. Then when you're ready to move onto whatever engine you want to use, I like UDK, you will know the basics of what need to be done. But controls are still another thing.
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely. Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I don't know a lot about them, but if I had a 3d project in mind, where I would invest money, I would go in my own and forget about SC2. If they're willing to work that much, they can step a bit further and buy/develop a small/simple engine. Sometimes making from scratch is better than remaking an entire game.
And yeah, I mostly do SC2 for fun, because I like it. Personally, I think the marketplace will be an epic fail, because the mapper community is heavily injured from Blizzard's negligence, and the pop sys isn't flexible at all. Will be hard to bring back lot of the people that left (and I know a lot of particular cases of good W3 friends that make me really sad).
And no, shall I "leave", I wouldn't leave SC2; but I won't develop anything serious either. If anything, I'll try to port some mobile game ideas I have to SC2, just to see how they work, but I don't expect to work on them seriously, just fast-tests and maps made in some hours.
Thats the exact reason you dont see me doing many maps at all, and only
a tech demo here and there.
I spend my time doing web/standalone games that any user, anywhere can
enjoy while I have no limitations working on it.
Problem with sc2 it takes more work to make something that first only
people with sc2 will see, and even then its limited again.
The truth of the mater is I program for myself, and not others, but it
sure is a billion times better when others get to enjoy you what you
made out of your own enjoyment.
But Im not given up sc2 dev like you tho =P Theres room in my heart for
all forms of programming.
I feel pretty similar... The greatest factor of SC2 was that you could share your content fast with whoever you wanted, but the pop sys, regions and more make it much more limited. I don't want to be top popular, I want people to be able to play my map without needing to spam chat channels or stay in a reduced group.
Also, I don't feel SC2 is as popular regarding custom games as W3 was. Hell, 3 years ago W3 had more activity than SC2 now. Where are all those custom map lovers now? I feel the "lot of people available to play your map" factor has gone down.
Right now, I'm thinking on working with Java for Android, Blitz, Unity or Corona. I want something 2D that works on PC without emulators, so I'll probably end with Corona or Blitz, Corona probably, since they have a lot of great libraries, and you can do complicated stuff easily in a single line. It has watermark, but I can always port it or buy the license if I'm really serious. I need to research more anyway.
And yes, I was like most of you, I thought this was goddamn hard, but it's not, and even more, it may even be easier, considering all the libraries out there, that already provide the hard/engine parts. Right now, programming is pretty easy, and you only need to give the manual a read for the specific functions, like loading images and frames. Everything else, in the end, is just the same. If you want something serious, you'll need good art, but for tests you are fine with a crappy 2-frame png.
PS: I don't want to turn this into a pop-sys discussion, so sorry if it may look like that during some point.
How SCII Battle.net is handled already shows that mappers are too discouraged to keep mapping community going. Aka mostly those who gets at least one of their map played or are in some years long project what might not even finish to released state are staying mostly.
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely. Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I wasn't aware that you could work "for fake." Anything you do is entirely feasible if you are creative enough to monetize it. Most of the YouTube stars certainly aren't doing "real" work, comedians don't have "real" jobs, actors are just "playing" in front of a camera. . .
Everything you do is work. Whether or not you enjoy it is up to you, but at the end of the day, what that work does for you is entirely up to you. Anyone can make SC2 mapping a profession if they go about it appropriately. Selling a product is obviously not the only way you can make money.
If I really wanted to, I could probably take all of my tutorials off the site and move them to my own website. There I could give previews of my tutorials and "sell" them like E-Books so that anyone wanting to learn the Data editor had to pay me to do so. Even if I charged $0.50 per tutorial, at the 100k+ plus views, that's $50,000. . . a considerable amount for "fake" work. I wouldn't even have to make maps at that point, just pump out tutorial after tutorial. Eventually I could even write a real book and sell that too! I choose not to because I don't think that would be helpful to the community as a whole, but it's clearly one way of making money that doesn't require making maps at all.
I think this thread would be completely different if there was no popularity system.
Fact of the matter is that, there is no legit opportunities for the average modder, to test or play with the SC2 general community. With maps monopolizing the front page, not even the best of the best maps can become playable. That in itself I think makes modding SC2 pointless. Which, we already know since this community is less active than WC3 Modding community and the whole SC2 Bnet failure tainted Blizzard name pretty badly.
I don't know...there's still a lot of great mappers out there and the upcoming sc universe is going to be excellent. There's no way any other rts is better in mapping than sc2. Popularity system shows off what the people want to play. It's just the way things are. : / I'd say the best you can do is play it with friends and look through the channels and try and find other people who are looking for a new game. The popularity system seems fine to me. I love sc2 mapping. I do programming myself, but sc2 mapping has prepared me for it and it seems so much easier. I'd stick with mapping until you think you actually have a chance of making money off of a game, then doing something about it. Those are my thoughts. It's all up to your opinion though. Haha, just realized I'm dominating a lot of the current threads. XD Nobody's ever on enough these days. Maybe this thread has already bandwagoned everyone away? :(
The main problem of Battle.net 2.0 is that it killed casual gaming, and that's the base for any modding community. You need people to be able to easily play any map when they want. Now you can't play what you want when you want properly. Not being able to host maps privately isn't good either. Without a website showing all maps, the community dies a bit more, being forced to either look at names and then search them ingame, or look ingame and scroll over the maps without knowing what they're about. This particular point makes me hell-angry, since Blizzard was so excited with making everything social, and they just made it autistic, forcing you to reveal your personal data if you wanted more chat features.
The official page should host a map database, with extensive descriptions and statistics, and profiles of every player should have its favorites displayed, just like achievements and leagues. And the pop sys needs an extra tab where maps with lobbies requiring people are displayed. It's as easy as that, but they haven't moved a single finger. I feel abandoned, and I feel Blizzard gives a shit about us, they just don't care about anything. What we've been asking since nearly 2 years ago is goddamn simple.
The community is already dead, and once people gets bored of laddering, SC2 will be dead, too. I'll get HotS because I love the campaign and the design of the game, but I don't think I'll stay around the system, which sucks terribly, longer than necessary. Hell, I had a clan of mappers in W3, and we were 40-50 active, making small maps and stuff. Most of them returned, but left months ago, and now I only have 2 left, that log in once a week. How doy ou want me to feel?
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working
for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is
great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely.
Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind
of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I wasn't aware that you could work "for fake." Anything you do is
entirely feasible if you are creative enough to monetize it. Most of the
YouTube stars certainly aren't doing "real" work, comedians don't have
"real" jobs, actors are just "playing" in front of a camera. . .
Everything you do is work. Whether or not you enjoy it is up to you, but
at the end of the day, what that work does for you is entirely up to
you. Anyone can make SC2 mapping a profession if they go about it
appropriately. Selling a product is obviously not the only way you can
make money.
If I really wanted to, I could probably take all of my tutorials off the
site and move them to my own website. There I could give previews of my
tutorials and "sell" them like E-Books so that anyone wanting to learn
the Data editor had to pay me to do so. Even if I charged $0.50 per
tutorial, at the 100k+ plus views, that's $50,000. . . a considerable
amount for "fake" work. I wouldn't even have to make maps at that point,
just pump out tutorial after tutorial. Eventually I could even write a
real book and sell that too! I choose not to because I don't think that
would be helpful to the community as a whole, but it's clearly one way
of making money that doesn't require making maps at all.
You don't own 100% what you make with the SC2Editor. No need to go into demagogy, I think you understood what I was talking about perfectly. It's not the same as videos, casts or tutorials.
I don't know...there's still a lot of great mappers out there and the upcoming sc universe is going to be excellent. There's no way any other rts is better in mapping than sc2. Popularity system shows off what the people want to play. It's just the way things are. : / I'd say the best you can do is play it with friends and look through the channels and try and find other people who are looking for a new game. The popularity system seems fine to me. I love sc2 mapping. I do programming myself, but sc2 mapping has prepared me for it and it seems so much easier. I'd stick with mapping until you think you actually have a chance of making money off of a game, then doing something about it. Those are my thoughts. It's all up to your opinion though. Haha, just realized I'm dominating a lot of the current threads. XD Nobody's ever on enough these days. Maybe this thread has already bandwagoned everyone away? :(
I think people is simply tired. This site in particular is problematic for forum activity, too, and discourages checking often (I don't check subforums outside general anymore, since I get tired of opening 20 subforums to find nothing new). We need a good list with the last 30 active topics, but Curse hates us :(.
And no, the pop sys isn't right; but I won't turn this thread into a discussion about that. Also, most of the problems come from above, from Battle.net 2.0 itself.
The civilization games and WC3 editor were what got my brother into programming.
Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179654-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/187/40/Screenshot2011-04-17_09_16_21.jpg
What is the point of this thread?
To discuss the Ops thoughts.
I think the editor is a great way to make actually a proof of concept or something like that of your game you want. Say you want to make an RPG, learn how to make it and put everything in SC2. Then when you're ready to move onto whatever engine you want to use, I like UDK, you will know the basics of what need to be done. But controls are still another thing.
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely. Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I don't know a lot about them, but if I had a 3d project in mind, where I would invest money, I would go in my own and forget about SC2. If they're willing to work that much, they can step a bit further and buy/develop a small/simple engine. Sometimes making from scratch is better than remaking an entire game.
And yeah, I mostly do SC2 for fun, because I like it. Personally, I think the marketplace will be an epic fail, because the mapper community is heavily injured from Blizzard's negligence, and the pop sys isn't flexible at all. Will be hard to bring back lot of the people that left (and I know a lot of particular cases of good W3 friends that make me really sad).
And no, shall I "leave", I wouldn't leave SC2; but I won't develop anything serious either. If anything, I'll try to port some mobile game ideas I have to SC2, just to see how they work, but I don't expect to work on them seriously, just fast-tests and maps made in some hours.
I feel pretty similar... The greatest factor of SC2 was that you could share your content fast with whoever you wanted, but the pop sys, regions and more make it much more limited. I don't want to be top popular, I want people to be able to play my map without needing to spam chat channels or stay in a reduced group.
Also, I don't feel SC2 is as popular regarding custom games as W3 was. Hell, 3 years ago W3 had more activity than SC2 now. Where are all those custom map lovers now? I feel the "lot of people available to play your map" factor has gone down.
Right now, I'm thinking on working with Java for Android, Blitz, Unity or Corona. I want something 2D that works on PC without emulators, so I'll probably end with Corona or Blitz, Corona probably, since they have a lot of great libraries, and you can do complicated stuff easily in a single line. It has watermark, but I can always port it or buy the license if I'm really serious. I need to research more anyway.
And yes, I was like most of you, I thought this was goddamn hard, but it's not, and even more, it may even be easier, considering all the libraries out there, that already provide the hard/engine parts. Right now, programming is pretty easy, and you only need to give the manual a read for the specific functions, like loading images and frames. Everything else, in the end, is just the same. If you want something serious, you'll need good art, but for tests you are fine with a crappy 2-frame png.
PS: I don't want to turn this into a pop-sys discussion, so sorry if it may look like that during some point.
I generally get the impression that the marketplace isn't intended for the hobbyist modders.
People seem to expect the marketplace to be some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, and I think they will be sorely disappointed.
But maybe I'll be wrong.
How SCII Battle.net is handled already shows that mappers are too discouraged to keep mapping community going. Aka mostly those who gets at least one of their map played or are in some years long project what might not even finish to released state are staying mostly.
I wasn't aware that you could work "for fake." Anything you do is entirely feasible if you are creative enough to monetize it. Most of the YouTube stars certainly aren't doing "real" work, comedians don't have "real" jobs, actors are just "playing" in front of a camera. . .
Everything you do is work. Whether or not you enjoy it is up to you, but at the end of the day, what that work does for you is entirely up to you. Anyone can make SC2 mapping a profession if they go about it appropriately. Selling a product is obviously not the only way you can make money.
If I really wanted to, I could probably take all of my tutorials off the site and move them to my own website. There I could give previews of my tutorials and "sell" them like E-Books so that anyone wanting to learn the Data editor had to pay me to do so. Even if I charged $0.50 per tutorial, at the 100k+ plus views, that's $50,000. . . a considerable amount for "fake" work. I wouldn't even have to make maps at that point, just pump out tutorial after tutorial. Eventually I could even write a real book and sell that too! I choose not to because I don't think that would be helpful to the community as a whole, but it's clearly one way of making money that doesn't require making maps at all.
I think this thread would be completely different if there was no popularity system.
Fact of the matter is that, there is no legit opportunities for the average modder, to test or play with the SC2 general community. With maps monopolizing the front page, not even the best of the best maps can become playable. That in itself I think makes modding SC2 pointless. Which, we already know since this community is less active than WC3 Modding community and the whole SC2 Bnet failure tainted Blizzard name pretty badly.
I don't know...there's still a lot of great mappers out there and the upcoming sc universe is going to be excellent. There's no way any other rts is better in mapping than sc2. Popularity system shows off what the people want to play. It's just the way things are. : / I'd say the best you can do is play it with friends and look through the channels and try and find other people who are looking for a new game. The popularity system seems fine to me. I love sc2 mapping. I do programming myself, but sc2 mapping has prepared me for it and it seems so much easier. I'd stick with mapping until you think you actually have a chance of making money off of a game, then doing something about it. Those are my thoughts. It's all up to your opinion though. Haha, just realized I'm dominating a lot of the current threads. XD Nobody's ever on enough these days. Maybe this thread has already bandwagoned everyone away? :(
The main problem of Battle.net 2.0 is that it killed casual gaming, and that's the base for any modding community. You need people to be able to easily play any map when they want. Now you can't play what you want when you want properly. Not being able to host maps privately isn't good either. Without a website showing all maps, the community dies a bit more, being forced to either look at names and then search them ingame, or look ingame and scroll over the maps without knowing what they're about. This particular point makes me hell-angry, since Blizzard was so excited with making everything social, and they just made it autistic, forcing you to reveal your personal data if you wanted more chat features.
The official page should host a map database, with extensive descriptions and statistics, and profiles of every player should have its favorites displayed, just like achievements and leagues. And the pop sys needs an extra tab where maps with lobbies requiring people are displayed. It's as easy as that, but they haven't moved a single finger. I feel abandoned, and I feel Blizzard gives a shit about us, they just don't care about anything. What we've been asking since nearly 2 years ago is goddamn simple.
The community is already dead, and once people gets bored of laddering, SC2 will be dead, too. I'll get HotS because I love the campaign and the design of the game, but I don't think I'll stay around the system, which sucks terribly, longer than necessary. Hell, I had a clan of mappers in W3, and we were 40-50 active, making small maps and stuff. Most of them returned, but left months ago, and now I only have 2 left, that log in once a week. How doy ou want me to feel?
You don't own 100% what you make with the SC2Editor. No need to go into demagogy, I think you understood what I was talking about perfectly. It's not the same as videos, casts or tutorials.
I think people is simply tired. This site in particular is problematic for forum activity, too, and discourages checking often (I don't check subforums outside general anymore, since I get tired of opening 20 subforums to find nothing new). We need a good list with the last 30 active topics, but Curse hates us :(.
And no, the pop sys isn't right; but I won't turn this thread into a discussion about that. Also, most of the problems come from above, from Battle.net 2.0 itself.