@Delphinium1987: Go
Agreed. Blizzard gave us very little attention and their popularity rankings messed things up. Thanks for your take on the art side.
@Ultimaswc3: Go
Now this here is the key question - Lobbies. How well Valve handles this will most likely determine their success.
I'd personally rather not jump to conclusions about how this will compare to other editors, like the Galaxy Editor. While what we have seen is pretty good so far, I have my doubts as to how well this editor will handle other game types than the traditional MOBA. We've just not seen enough of the editor or its capabilities so far.
I think sc2 editor is pretty good, once you fully learned actor system and effect chains relations it feels comfortable to work with. The areas they could improve though are reconnect feature (which is already on the way) and trigger improvements for mouse control, perhaps increasing update rate at least for mouse events, because right now it's very hard to play diablo-style or shooter maps on battle.net especialy if there is also some noticeable latency. Also if they will make it easier to create custom ui's somehow (like in-game ui editor) it will be even greater and a huge time-saver.
Also, considering that even current complexity of galaxy editor deterred many potential mapmakers with wc3 background from using it, i dont think people rly need more advanced tools. Ofcourse you can get limitless engine and editor like Unreal4 or CryEngine3 or FrostBite, but what you will do with it? Without high quality assets that costs 400-700$ per each (7000 - 14000 poly character models with rig and animations) this tools are useless (or you can just make some "revolutionary" indie game where ball dodging walls). And even with that assets there is slight chance that some enthusiastic individuals will be able to do something greater than casual shootem-ups and tetris games. I mean even in sc2 editor in my opinion physics actors are a little overkill already and it is quite a tedious task to use them for every action actor for example. Especialy if you're already invested hundreds of hours in data work.
You can oppose by saying that there are lot's of free models on the internet, but let's face it - it's mostly complete unusable garbage. And most importantly, it doesn't feel good when you will download for example goblin model from the one author and knight model from another modeller, they most likely won't match by general style and will look like models from different games. There is no such problem with sc2 however so another "+" to blizzard tool
I agree 100% on all points. However, I think that, as a map/mod developer, it is futile to care about the popularity of any given game, release platform, or own project. See the engines as potential avenues for your work and nothing more. Whether or not some game succeeds monetarily or popularity-wise in competition to other games doesn't really matter to the end user as a content producer. At least, it shouldn't, as that is a dangerous mentality to work by and will certainly make your development life miserable. The best games I've worked with are the ones you wouldn't have expected to be facilitating big TC projects (Diablo 2, Age of Wonders 2, Brood War, etc) and generally had no actual custom content communities (I don't count Brood War map community because I didn't make maps :3).
That terrain gif looks a lot like how NWN does terrain. A lot less powerful than sc2 currently, but it may be some configurable thing. Loved the gui editor for that thing, hated how hardcoded/restricted it was. Couldn't get into Source, though. Didn't ever seem like the engine could facilitate my kind of project.
complexity of galaxy editor deterred many potential mapmakers
Complexity =! difficulty. Don't tell anyone, it's a secret. Hundreds of hours is a drop in the bucket for any project, that alone will deter most casuals regardless of game anyways.
Hard to believe that is a somewhat interesting conversation going on here but..
First of all about the modding. There are 2 general kinds, those that require actual coding skills, and those that don't. In this case Blizzard made the only mod maker that doesn't require a large amount of coding skills to make maps in. That was until SC2 came along. Now you needed to understand a fair wack of programming and you had a very cumbersome GUI to do it with.
If you are a mod maker without coding skills (and not other skills like terrainer and model maker) then you will be stuck with SC2 and pretty much stuck. If you are a mod maker with the required skills then more doors are opening. Source 2, Space Engineers, MineCraft (the new download features appear to be finally coming) and even WarThunder has released a very early scenario editor that appears to be promising and StarDock appears to be moving that way as well. And who know what GrayGoo will bring?
By the time Activision realizes the extend of their error it will be too late. Blizzard had a nice run (over a decade being the number one studio in the media industry is not bad by a long shot with the turnover rates the industry has) but that run is clearly over. LotV will almost certainly not be the release everyone is hoping it will be. Activision has decreed Blizzard must replace WoW with Titan (aka keep the cash cow mooing) and they are just trying to get SC2 out of the way. This means the absolute minimum of money and time will be diverted from Titan to finish SC2. The edrama this will cause will be entertaining but also very predictable.
In the end we will just have to see whether any companies manage to get it right or not. Modding is clearly an integrated experience and as such every component of the experience is very important.
I agree 100% on all points. However, I think that, as a map/mod developer, it is futile to care about the popularity of any given game, release platform, or own project. See the engines as potential avenues for your work and nothing more. Whether or not some game succeeds monetarily or popularity-wise in competition to other games doesn't really matter to the end user as a content producer. At least, it shouldn't, as that is a dangerous mentality to work by and will certainly make your development life miserable. The best games I've worked with are the ones you wouldn't have expected to be facilitating big TC projects (Diablo 2, Age of Wonders 2, Brood War, etc) and generally had no actual custom content communities (I don't count Brood War map community because I didn't make maps :3).
That terrain gif looks a lot like how NWN does terrain. A lot less powerful than sc2 currently, but it may be some configurable thing. Loved the gui editor for that thing, hated how hardcoded/restricted it was. Couldn't get into Source, though. Didn't ever seem like the engine could facilitate my kind of project.
Well, basicly, a independ modder doesn't have to care about the game itself.
If you ask me, I personally like the script style of the dota 2 mod tool, but I couldn't careless about the dota games. These games are not of my taste.
But aside from as a map maker, I'm the China modder community lead since 2002(And we have site just like sc2mapster in CN). So it's my duty to analyse, to provide info to my people, to help them make their decision if a centain game editor is worth for their next few years' life or not.
Most modders do maps for fun, while still a small portion of the community want to make their living on it (I guess they kind of like the SCU team here), or achieve some things. If I told them 'that thing is fine, go with it,' and it ends like a disaster, it's irresponsible, right?
And even for these modders that do things for fun. They still like to cooperate with others. I myself is more of a independ modder, but sometimes I still need to ask Delphinium to create 1-2 models for me. And if a game is failing, you tend to lose your colleagues more frequently, even if you want to hold on the scene, it would still hurt you a lot, both your feeling and your project.
Take Delphinium as a example, he is a relatively newer to the modder scene(compared to myself). While in these two years, he lost couples of his best friends - They didn't died of course, they just quit. And that makes he a very sad fog now. And I've in this scene for 15 years now, guess how many things like this I've experienced.
Yeah, I've been modding a long time, too (starting 1999 with brood war/age of empires). Almost everyone I once knew is long gone and I haven't heard from them or of them for nearly a decade. Only a few diehards remain, and only a single one still does any form of modding. Unfortunately, people coming and going is simply a part of online communities, especially ones as niche (and often times demanding) as modding. I don't think the success of any given game is necessarily the sole responsible factor for that. Yes, a lot of people I knew got excited about sc2, returned, discovered the mess the editor was, and then just disappeared. But they weren't the kind of people that were going to make a project in sc2 regardless of how good it was. Most of the games I have modded that were considered failures or very niche tend to be those that had the longest-standing communities behind them. That's why I don't try to build ties around any single game, I build general production relationships when possible (so if something doesn't go right, no one has a reason to just vanish).
I would hope that most people would see mutual work as a thing between them and other modders and not necessarily care about the game itself in that case. But I understand we come from two entirely different styles of thinking as well.
While you could construe recommending something that turns out badly as irresponsible, it should really be up to the person developing the project in the end to determine if the game is right for them (and thus bear the responsibility if it doesn't work out). A lot of people told me to go with Unity, but I won't ever touch Unity. I tried to develop projects for Sins of a Solar Empire and the limitations held me back every step of the way, causing me to waste years upon years of nonstop work. But that was my decision. I think seeing it as simply providing a perspective and some information is healthy enough, you shouldn't bear the responsibility of what people choose to do with that information.
Hoping to earn a living on modding is very often a hopeless venture all in itself. Even if you produce a lot of 3d graphics and sell them on sites like Turbosquid, ultimately modding is a personal venture and should always be seen as such. Else, only disappointment awaits.
Yeah, we just see things from two different ways. And I totally agreed on your part.
What you said is very rational opinion. Unfortunately, it needs years of experience to make them obvious. While this scene alway tend to have more 'fresh' people than 'old people' (since the old ones keep disappearing), they have passions, hoping to become another Icefrog, but they also easy to be misadvised.
The internet medias outside of the modder community always tend to overblown every editor when they released - "Such Powerful", "True Bringer of the Next Custom Map Era", they talked as if you just need to sit there as press the "create an awesome map for me" button, and the map is done, these media knows nothing about the actual editor, they just see it as a way to catch eyes. Some certain editor sub-communities even tend to add fuel to the boasts, hoping to attract more freshmeat. And these things only hurt the commmunity. At lest these things happened in China, not sure if it is same here though.
Fresh people can't even get any real infomation before they actually be familiar with this field. So these are the informations which I need to provide to them.
Yeah, those are very common here. I see it all the time. Starcraft 2 is a very good example of that, especially when it was first announced.
Usually if I am looking to get into something I do a lot of random perfomance testing and personal research and then look up specific inquiries. But I'm not a programmer, so certain subjects are too advanced for me to get into, so it can be hard to judge some aspects of things because of that. For example, generally many things that I want to do in a game can be achieved by reverse engineering. But since I don't know how to do that, I plainly can't do what I want. So I have to look elsewhere.
Plus, not sure about other regions. But in China, sometimes you can actually earning your living with your editor skill. I would say we did some very good job in 2003 - 2006 period, which make me pround. And at that period, some of the most skilled of our 1st generation war3 modders had become key developers of some large game companies in China: Kingsoft, Perfect World, Tencent, Netease etc. And they spread the their map making method into the whole game industry in China.
Today, many china game designer use the editors to create pototype of their game design. Some editor skill has become part of a game designer's job requirement of may companies, even for some mobile game companies (I't sounds funny even for me).
Even for some people who knows only to create maps, there are still some companies in China which willing to hire people to create maps for them (mostly WC3 maps), and add these companies' advertisement into the maps of course. (They are mostly create maps on pirate platforms rather than the battle.net, so I don't recommeded. These people is decreasing since WC3 was started to out of fashion in China. LoL reigns now)
The competition for generic company positions is insanely high here, and most companies who may be looking for editor experience are generally looking more for Unreal, CryEngine kind of experience. Of all the people I've known who had any involvement with modding, only a select few were ever hired - and not because of any mod experience. One was hired because of a recruiter in his college (hired for QA), one was hired for casting wc3 (now esports manager at riot) and one I think was IT (and quit after some years, from Codemasters). All the rest moved on. I often get the impression that most western companies don't know what modding actually is (clearly Blizzard doesn't, since they didn't even make an effort to support big-scale projects in sc2 at all), and modding has become more and more niche with most people who posses major skills moving on to actual game SDK's. That, and most game-specific toolsets can't really be applied to other games. Some methods and concepts can be at best in most cases. Sc2 has an advantage here in that Galaxy is based on C to an extent.
From that it sounds like, in China it's much more likely for people to get noticed. Here, mappers are a dime a dozen (in regards to all games as a whole, I know sc2 is very small) and almost none of them really stand out from one another, plus you have an immense sea of cheap labor coming from cookie cutter college classes. Anything of note in most companies generally requires existing industry experience on top of it. That may be different if you have exceptional UDK/etc skills, though. I have not looked too indepth into the market for people with game SDK skills. It's probably just as saturated. I personally had quite a few job offers, but they were from my voice acting and graphics galleries and were never related to any of my mods.
I think if Dota 2's editor is just a retooled Hammer toolset, it would be far more beneficial to familiarize yourself with it than sc2 if your end goal was commercial-applicable skills.
/edit
I am not familiar with the European game development scene in regards to modder recruitment, though. Most modders I know are European but none have spoken about the companies there, so I'm not sure about that.
The people just goes greedy about the modding lately and don't want to invest any time if there is no money payoff they get from it. In 2002-2006 there was a golden era of modding (NVN1, Morrowind, WC3, UnrealTournament2004, Doom3). Lot's of people was excited and just wanted to be creative and do something, in that time very few people think of it as of future job. Thats why there was a realy vast amount of mods (especialy for Morrowind and NVN).
Another crucial factor is that this modders was actualy a hardcore gamers which got Ultima, EverQuest, Daggerfal, Baldur'sGate, Quake, LaserSquad etc., - such kind of experience. I think that titles could realy grow a love to computer games in people's hearts. Now most of games tastes like a popcorn, people just enter it, casualy spends a few hours (just to look if graphics is shit or Crysis), in best case they will finish it. Good example is how BioWare gone from what they did in Baldurs and NVN1 to what they got in Dragon Age 2. The story was okay but in gameplay part it's total degradation after moving away from D&D rules. I mean if there was an option to force computer play in game by it's own, i could just watch the story movie with a popcorn and did not loose much.
I think game development in general needs total revision now. Or we will all play in Angry Flappy Barfy Birds soon
How is Unreal 4 compared to the UDK? I know they added some new Blueprints thing and such to it. I'd love to get into it, but I don't know programming, so... regardless of how my current sc2 endeavor goes, I hope to focus on Unreal exclusively in the future.
If we're talking the old community, HKS, though only to a limited extent (my current campaign is the most major work he's done in like 5-6 years). I don't think I knew you back then. JademusSreg also does some modding presently (though I hardly knew him back then either), but like most "modern" people I currently converse with, I don't think he pursues a major personal project. That's a bit of an interesting subject, but outside the scope of this thread. Some people I knew from back then I had outsourced some stuff to for modding I had held contact with either until semi-recently (DarkPrimus, who disappeared) or still have contact with (non-community members generally). But none who did any of their own mods.
Meanwhile, how many people stick around that haven't touched a mod in forever? Just about everyone currently on CC staff with the exception of Oracle who expressed interest in an sc2 project, paid someone to make a cinematic, and allegedly paid someone to do some ingame assets. Offered to pay me for voice acting, then promptly vanished. Next up is RCX whose last ventures are Wc3-era in which he was the sole truly major active person on the site in forever. We have a few people on the forum who did sc1 work in semi-recent times, though. How many people who were once modders but then vanished, never to touch modding again? The list is beyond recount. Just like the sites that hosted them, the vast majority of our old community gone and long forgotten. Oh, I think we have a newer staff member who does Sc2 stuff, but I don't know him, so I don't count him. :3
SEN? I don't count maps as mods and they were all youngbloods from what I knew.
It's funny how many people thought sc2 was going to revive our community, and how immediate and sudden those thoughts were abandoned the second the editor showed up. I remember we had a ton of old faces show up I hadn't seen in many, many years. I doubt I'll ever see any of them again now.
@Delphinium1987: Go Agreed. Blizzard gave us very little attention and their popularity rankings messed things up. Thanks for your take on the art side.
@Ultimaswc3: Go Now this here is the key question - Lobbies. How well Valve handles this will most likely determine their success.
Valve won, good bye Blizzard.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RussianMapster
I'd personally rather not jump to conclusions about how this will compare to other editors, like the Galaxy Editor. While what we have seen is pretty good so far, I have my doubts as to how well this editor will handle other game types than the traditional MOBA. We've just not seen enough of the editor or its capabilities so far.
There are a lot of things that Valve needs to get right in order to "win".
Furthermore, if there's one thing that Blizzard are good at, it's taking other people's ideas and making them better.
We'll see what happens. One thing is for sure though, we're the ones benefiting from this, no matter who "wins".
I think sc2 editor is pretty good, once you fully learned actor system and effect chains relations it feels comfortable to work with. The areas they could improve though are reconnect feature (which is already on the way) and trigger improvements for mouse control, perhaps increasing update rate at least for mouse events, because right now it's very hard to play diablo-style or shooter maps on battle.net especialy if there is also some noticeable latency. Also if they will make it easier to create custom ui's somehow (like in-game ui editor) it will be even greater and a huge time-saver.
Also, considering that even current complexity of galaxy editor deterred many potential mapmakers with wc3 background from using it, i dont think people rly need more advanced tools. Ofcourse you can get limitless engine and editor like Unreal4 or CryEngine3 or FrostBite, but what you will do with it? Without high quality assets that costs 400-700$ per each (7000 - 14000 poly character models with rig and animations) this tools are useless (or you can just make some "revolutionary" indie game where ball dodging walls). And even with that assets there is slight chance that some enthusiastic individuals will be able to do something greater than casual shootem-ups and tetris games. I mean even in sc2 editor in my opinion physics actors are a little overkill already and it is quite a tedious task to use them for every action actor for example. Especialy if you're already invested hundreds of hours in data work.
You can oppose by saying that there are lot's of free models on the internet, but let's face it - it's mostly complete unusable garbage. And most importantly, it doesn't feel good when you will download for example goblin model from the one author and knight model from another modeller, they most likely won't match by general style and will look like models from different games. There is no such problem with sc2 however so another "+" to blizzard tool
Too bad they weren't very good at taking their own idea (w3 custom games) and making it better.
Had a good chortle.
@Renee2islga: Go
I agree 100% on all points. However, I think that, as a map/mod developer, it is futile to care about the popularity of any given game, release platform, or own project. See the engines as potential avenues for your work and nothing more. Whether or not some game succeeds monetarily or popularity-wise in competition to other games doesn't really matter to the end user as a content producer. At least, it shouldn't, as that is a dangerous mentality to work by and will certainly make your development life miserable. The best games I've worked with are the ones you wouldn't have expected to be facilitating big TC projects (Diablo 2, Age of Wonders 2, Brood War, etc) and generally had no actual custom content communities (I don't count Brood War map community because I didn't make maps :3).
That terrain gif looks a lot like how NWN does terrain. A lot less powerful than sc2 currently, but it may be some configurable thing. Loved the gui editor for that thing, hated how hardcoded/restricted it was. Couldn't get into Source, though. Didn't ever seem like the engine could facilitate my kind of project.
Complexity =! difficulty. Don't tell anyone, it's a secret. Hundreds of hours is a drop in the bucket for any project, that alone will deter most casuals regardless of game anyways.
Just dont say that hardcore players is a dying breed. The hardcore games on the other hand....
Hard to believe that is a somewhat interesting conversation going on here but..
First of all about the modding. There are 2 general kinds, those that require actual coding skills, and those that don't. In this case Blizzard made the only mod maker that doesn't require a large amount of coding skills to make maps in. That was until SC2 came along. Now you needed to understand a fair wack of programming and you had a very cumbersome GUI to do it with.
If you are a mod maker without coding skills (and not other skills like terrainer and model maker) then you will be stuck with SC2 and pretty much stuck. If you are a mod maker with the required skills then more doors are opening. Source 2, Space Engineers, MineCraft (the new download features appear to be finally coming) and even WarThunder has released a very early scenario editor that appears to be promising and StarDock appears to be moving that way as well. And who know what GrayGoo will bring?
By the time Activision realizes the extend of their error it will be too late. Blizzard had a nice run (over a decade being the number one studio in the media industry is not bad by a long shot with the turnover rates the industry has) but that run is clearly over. LotV will almost certainly not be the release everyone is hoping it will be. Activision has decreed Blizzard must replace WoW with Titan (aka keep the cash cow mooing) and they are just trying to get SC2 out of the way. This means the absolute minimum of money and time will be diverted from Titan to finish SC2. The edrama this will cause will be entertaining but also very predictable.
In the end we will just have to see whether any companies manage to get it right or not. Modding is clearly an integrated experience and as such every component of the experience is very important.
Well, basicly, a independ modder doesn't have to care about the game itself.
If you ask me, I personally like the script style of the dota 2 mod tool, but I couldn't careless about the dota games. These games are not of my taste.
But aside from as a map maker, I'm the China modder community lead since 2002(And we have site just like sc2mapster in CN). So it's my duty to analyse, to provide info to my people, to help them make their decision if a centain game editor is worth for their next few years' life or not.
Most modders do maps for fun, while still a small portion of the community want to make their living on it (I guess they kind of like the SCU team here), or achieve some things. If I told them 'that thing is fine, go with it,' and it ends like a disaster, it's irresponsible, right?
And even for these modders that do things for fun. They still like to cooperate with others. I myself is more of a independ modder, but sometimes I still need to ask Delphinium to create 1-2 models for me. And if a game is failing, you tend to lose your colleagues more frequently, even if you want to hold on the scene, it would still hurt you a lot, both your feeling and your project.
Take Delphinium as a example, he is a relatively newer to the modder scene(compared to myself). While in these two years, he lost couples of his best friends - They didn't died of course, they just quit. And that makes he a very sad fog now. And I've in this scene for 15 years now, guess how many things like this I've experienced.
@Renee2islga: Go
Yeah, I've been modding a long time, too (starting 1999 with brood war/age of empires). Almost everyone I once knew is long gone and I haven't heard from them or of them for nearly a decade. Only a few diehards remain, and only a single one still does any form of modding. Unfortunately, people coming and going is simply a part of online communities, especially ones as niche (and often times demanding) as modding. I don't think the success of any given game is necessarily the sole responsible factor for that. Yes, a lot of people I knew got excited about sc2, returned, discovered the mess the editor was, and then just disappeared. But they weren't the kind of people that were going to make a project in sc2 regardless of how good it was. Most of the games I have modded that were considered failures or very niche tend to be those that had the longest-standing communities behind them. That's why I don't try to build ties around any single game, I build general production relationships when possible (so if something doesn't go right, no one has a reason to just vanish).
I would hope that most people would see mutual work as a thing between them and other modders and not necessarily care about the game itself in that case. But I understand we come from two entirely different styles of thinking as well.
While you could construe recommending something that turns out badly as irresponsible, it should really be up to the person developing the project in the end to determine if the game is right for them (and thus bear the responsibility if it doesn't work out). A lot of people told me to go with Unity, but I won't ever touch Unity. I tried to develop projects for Sins of a Solar Empire and the limitations held me back every step of the way, causing me to waste years upon years of nonstop work. But that was my decision. I think seeing it as simply providing a perspective and some information is healthy enough, you shouldn't bear the responsibility of what people choose to do with that information.
Hoping to earn a living on modding is very often a hopeless venture all in itself. Even if you produce a lot of 3d graphics and sell them on sites like Turbosquid, ultimately modding is a personal venture and should always be seen as such. Else, only disappointment awaits.
Yeah, we just see things from two different ways. And I totally agreed on your part.
What you said is very rational opinion. Unfortunately, it needs years of experience to make them obvious. While this scene alway tend to have more 'fresh' people than 'old people' (since the old ones keep disappearing), they have passions, hoping to become another Icefrog, but they also easy to be misadvised.
The internet medias outside of the modder community always tend to overblown every editor when they released - "Such Powerful", "True Bringer of the Next Custom Map Era", they talked as if you just need to sit there as press the "create an awesome map for me" button, and the map is done, these media knows nothing about the actual editor, they just see it as a way to catch eyes. Some certain editor sub-communities even tend to add fuel to the boasts, hoping to attract more freshmeat. And these things only hurt the commmunity. At lest these things happened in China, not sure if it is same here though.
Fresh people can't even get any real infomation before they actually be familiar with this field. So these are the informations which I need to provide to them.
Yeah, those are very common here. I see it all the time. Starcraft 2 is a very good example of that, especially when it was first announced.
Usually if I am looking to get into something I do a lot of random perfomance testing and personal research and then look up specific inquiries. But I'm not a programmer, so certain subjects are too advanced for me to get into, so it can be hard to judge some aspects of things because of that. For example, generally many things that I want to do in a game can be achieved by reverse engineering. But since I don't know how to do that, I plainly can't do what I want. So I have to look elsewhere.
Plus, not sure about other regions. But in China, sometimes you can actually earning your living with your editor skill. I would say we did some very good job in 2003 - 2006 period, which make me pround. And at that period, some of the most skilled of our 1st generation war3 modders had become key developers of some large game companies in China: Kingsoft, Perfect World, Tencent, Netease etc. And they spread the their map making method into the whole game industry in China.
Today, many china game designer use the editors to create pototype of their game design. Some editor skill has become part of a game designer's job requirement of may companies, even for some mobile game companies (I't sounds funny even for me).
Even for some people who knows only to create maps, there are still some companies in China which willing to hire people to create maps for them (mostly WC3 maps), and add these companies' advertisement into the maps of course. (They are mostly create maps on pirate platforms rather than the battle.net, so I don't recommeded. These people is decreasing since WC3 was started to out of fashion in China. LoL reigns now)
The competition for generic company positions is insanely high here, and most companies who may be looking for editor experience are generally looking more for Unreal, CryEngine kind of experience. Of all the people I've known who had any involvement with modding, only a select few were ever hired - and not because of any mod experience. One was hired because of a recruiter in his college (hired for QA), one was hired for casting wc3 (now esports manager at riot) and one I think was IT (and quit after some years, from Codemasters). All the rest moved on. I often get the impression that most western companies don't know what modding actually is (clearly Blizzard doesn't, since they didn't even make an effort to support big-scale projects in sc2 at all), and modding has become more and more niche with most people who posses major skills moving on to actual game SDK's. That, and most game-specific toolsets can't really be applied to other games. Some methods and concepts can be at best in most cases. Sc2 has an advantage here in that Galaxy is based on C to an extent.
From that it sounds like, in China it's much more likely for people to get noticed. Here, mappers are a dime a dozen (in regards to all games as a whole, I know sc2 is very small) and almost none of them really stand out from one another, plus you have an immense sea of cheap labor coming from cookie cutter college classes. Anything of note in most companies generally requires existing industry experience on top of it. That may be different if you have exceptional UDK/etc skills, though. I have not looked too indepth into the market for people with game SDK skills. It's probably just as saturated. I personally had quite a few job offers, but they were from my voice acting and graphics galleries and were never related to any of my mods.
I think if Dota 2's editor is just a retooled Hammer toolset, it would be far more beneficial to familiarize yourself with it than sc2 if your end goal was commercial-applicable skills.
/edit
I am not familiar with the European game development scene in regards to modder recruitment, though. Most modders I know are European but none have spoken about the companies there, so I'm not sure about that.
The people just goes greedy about the modding lately and don't want to invest any time if there is no money payoff they get from it. In 2002-2006 there was a golden era of modding (NVN1, Morrowind, WC3, UnrealTournament2004, Doom3). Lot's of people was excited and just wanted to be creative and do something, in that time very few people think of it as of future job. Thats why there was a realy vast amount of mods (especialy for Morrowind and NVN).
Another crucial factor is that this modders was actualy a hardcore gamers which got Ultima, EverQuest, Daggerfal, Baldur'sGate, Quake, LaserSquad etc., - such kind of experience. I think that titles could realy grow a love to computer games in people's hearts. Now most of games tastes like a popcorn, people just enter it, casualy spends a few hours (just to look if graphics is shit or Crysis), in best case they will finish it. Good example is how BioWare gone from what they did in Baldurs and NVN1 to what they got in Dragon Age 2. The story was okay but in gameplay part it's total degradation after moving away from D&D rules. I mean if there was an option to force computer play in game by it's own, i could just watch the story movie with a popcorn and did not loose much.
I think game development in general needs total revision now. Or we will all play in Angry Flappy Barfy Birds soon
This is big. I for one would not be surprised to see the workshop community overtaking in a year or two...
I Left sc2 completely. Moved to Unreal Engine 4, now to Dota 2 Workshop Tools. Sc 2 is dead until blizzard will not monetize arcade.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RussianMapster
@abvdzh: Go
Yeah. Absolutely.
@KorvinGump: Go
How is Unreal 4 compared to the UDK? I know they added some new Blueprints thing and such to it. I'd love to get into it, but I don't know programming, so... regardless of how my current sc2 endeavor goes, I hope to focus on Unreal exclusively in the future.
If we're talking the old community, HKS, though only to a limited extent (my current campaign is the most major work he's done in like 5-6 years). I don't think I knew you back then. JademusSreg also does some modding presently (though I hardly knew him back then either), but like most "modern" people I currently converse with, I don't think he pursues a major personal project. That's a bit of an interesting subject, but outside the scope of this thread. Some people I knew from back then I had outsourced some stuff to for modding I had held contact with either until semi-recently (DarkPrimus, who disappeared) or still have contact with (non-community members generally). But none who did any of their own mods.
Meanwhile, how many people stick around that haven't touched a mod in forever? Just about everyone currently on CC staff with the exception of Oracle who expressed interest in an sc2 project, paid someone to make a cinematic, and allegedly paid someone to do some ingame assets. Offered to pay me for voice acting, then promptly vanished. Next up is RCX whose last ventures are Wc3-era in which he was the sole truly major active person on the site in forever. We have a few people on the forum who did sc1 work in semi-recent times, though. How many people who were once modders but then vanished, never to touch modding again? The list is beyond recount. Just like the sites that hosted them, the vast majority of our old community gone and long forgotten. Oh, I think we have a newer staff member who does Sc2 stuff, but I don't know him, so I don't count him. :3
SEN? I don't count maps as mods and they were all youngbloods from what I knew.
It's funny how many people thought sc2 was going to revive our community, and how immediate and sudden those thoughts were abandoned the second the editor showed up. I remember we had a ton of old faces show up I hadn't seen in many, many years. I doubt I'll ever see any of them again now.