Actually, it was a major change. As you said, locking maps in WC3 required the use of third party applications and as such it wasn't a very common practice, especially in the beginning. In SC2 this was present from day one, and as such many if not most developers opt to lock their maps. On top of that, the new Battle.net platform makes it far less common for players to find and share the map files themselves, since they are readily available in the client and do not require you to get a map from another player.
I have nothing against people who want to keep their maps locked. All of mine have been like that since the beginning too. This is a completely voluntary effort.
- This map is quite old now (originally published in Jan 2011), and as such it's contents are a bit dated.
- Most of the work that went into this map can be found in the Triggers. This is not a data heavy map.
- There unfortunately aren't many, if any comments in the triggers for this map. (Sorry, I know I'm a horrible person for that)
Features of interest:
- Multiple game modes and difficulty settings with a voting system to set these options.
- Statistics tracking system that records game play data between games.
- Flexible variable driven spawning system designed to be used for a variety of wave-based game types with any number of waves.
DISCLAIMER: This map is being released AS-IS. Please do not contact me with questions regarding how something in the map works. I will not answer you, nor is it likely that I remember how every detail of the map works given how long it's been since I last worked on the map. Everything in the map is fairly well organized so it shouldn't be too hard to sift through.
Many of you may remember the glory days of the Warcraft III mapping scene and are sad to see that there hasn't been a similar golden age in StarCraft II.
Well I'm right there with you and after all this time I've come to the conclusion that one of the major reasons why we're in the state we're in now as a community is largely due to something that changed between now and then.
Fact of the matter is, back in the days of Warcraft III it was trivial for anyone to take a custom they found and enjoyed playing and could open it up in the World Editor to see what made that map tick. Not only did this result in countless variations for any particular map, but it was also instrumental in helping people learn how to use the tool and do awesome things with it.
In StarCraft II however, developers can lock their maps, making it difficult (though not entirely impossible) for others to see what's going on under the hood.
I think this needs to change.
While I can't force everyone to make their work available to the public, I can at least set an example and hope that others will join in.
So with that I've created this thread to serve as a quick list for newcomers to find Open-Sourced maps to study with.
To kick things off, I'm releasing one of my projects: Tower Defense Classic. Appropriately, this map was an effort to recreate a map that I greatly enjoyed from Warcraft III: Arkguil Tower Defense, one of the first maps that I opened up and tinkered around in. See the following post for more information.
That all said, I'm leaving it up to the each uploader to decide how much supporting information they want to include along with their releases. This is NOT a thread for asking questions. Please only post if you have a map to release to the public so as to keep this thread easy to find maps to download. Moderators please feel free to edit this post should you like to keep a concise list of released maps.
Thanks to everyone who decides to participate in this effort! Your contributions will serve to help the community as whole continue to grow.
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Actually, it was a major change. As you said, locking maps in WC3 required the use of third party applications and as such it wasn't a very common practice, especially in the beginning. In SC2 this was present from day one, and as such many if not most developers opt to lock their maps. On top of that, the new Battle.net platform makes it far less common for players to find and share the map files themselves, since they are readily available in the client and do not require you to get a map from another player.
I have nothing against people who want to keep their maps locked. All of mine have been like that since the beginning too. This is a completely voluntary effort.
Tower Defense Classic
Things to note:
- This map is quite old now (originally published in Jan 2011), and as such it's contents are a bit dated.
- Most of the work that went into this map can be found in the Triggers. This is not a data heavy map.
- There unfortunately aren't many, if any comments in the triggers for this map. (Sorry, I know I'm a horrible person for that)
Features of interest:
- Multiple game modes and difficulty settings with a voting system to set these options.
- Statistics tracking system that records game play data between games.
- Flexible variable driven spawning system designed to be used for a variety of wave-based game types with any number of waves.
DISCLAIMER: This map is being released AS-IS. Please do not contact me with questions regarding how something in the map works. I will not answer you, nor is it likely that I remember how every detail of the map works given how long it's been since I last worked on the map. Everything in the map is fairly well organized so it shouldn't be too hard to sift through.
Hey everyone,
Many of you may remember the glory days of the Warcraft III mapping scene and are sad to see that there hasn't been a similar golden age in StarCraft II.
Well I'm right there with you and after all this time I've come to the conclusion that one of the major reasons why we're in the state we're in now as a community is largely due to something that changed between now and then.
Fact of the matter is, back in the days of Warcraft III it was trivial for anyone to take a custom they found and enjoyed playing and could open it up in the World Editor to see what made that map tick. Not only did this result in countless variations for any particular map, but it was also instrumental in helping people learn how to use the tool and do awesome things with it.
In StarCraft II however, developers can lock their maps, making it difficult (though not entirely impossible) for others to see what's going on under the hood.
I think this needs to change.
While I can't force everyone to make their work available to the public, I can at least set an example and hope that others will join in.
So with that I've created this thread to serve as a quick list for newcomers to find Open-Sourced maps to study with.
To kick things off, I'm releasing one of my projects: Tower Defense Classic. Appropriately, this map was an effort to recreate a map that I greatly enjoyed from Warcraft III: Arkguil Tower Defense, one of the first maps that I opened up and tinkered around in. See the following post for more information.
That all said, I'm leaving it up to the each uploader to decide how much supporting information they want to include along with their releases. This is NOT a thread for asking questions. Please only post if you have a map to release to the public so as to keep this thread easy to find maps to download. Moderators please feel free to edit this post should you like to keep a concise list of released maps.
Thanks to everyone who decides to participate in this effort! Your contributions will serve to help the community as whole continue to grow.