I gotta ask you something: have you considered making separate thread for every seperate issue you're dealing with? Because you're mixing various topics, that are often hardly related within a single thread. By a result you're limiting yourself to help from people who are capable of keeping up with it - apparently only DSE.
Not to mention in future other people might encounter same problems. When they'll attempt at looking up some info about it, they'll either not find it, as posts are not indexed as good as threads - title is always most important keyword. Or they'll have to crawle through all the irrelevant stuff before getting to the actual answer.
Although if goal of this thread is some kind exclusive mentorship between you and DSE, then I guess that's okayish - assuming he's fine with doing so.
(Also these are not even triggers questions, but Layouts / UI.)
It might be also in the Wiki, bout couldn't find it - this was provided by @rtschutter IIRC.
I don't know if there's anything special about Portraits - if you've some issue regarding it, just post snippet of your code.
5.
What is that even..? ConsoleSkinCacheFrame is different thing. It appears to be used as a preview frame within BattleUI (game menu) - Collections/Consoles. It has no influence on actual ConsolePanel present in game.
Since introduction of custom Console skins from Blizzard there was small overhaul in regards to how Console panels are applied, but you can still change the default model the same way as it was done in the past - by modifying model links within Assets.txt.
All you need to do is create custom Assets.txt that would override pathes above and place it in Base.SC2Data/GameData in your map.
6.
Nope. Models can indeed be loaded at any stage within game, without preloading. But regardless to that they do need to be actually downloaded.
This is something Blizzard can do, thanks to CASC, but that tech is not accessible to modders/arcade games.
And frankly 650 MB is madness - I wasn't aware you could even upload map as huge as this... I don't know what you're developing but I cannot thing of anything that could justify the size. Keep in mind that not everyone lives in places where high speed connections are easily accessible. Take me as an example, currently I'm stuck with ~6Mbit DL. Which means I need like 15 minutes to download something as big as this. I'd consider 100MB to be a borderline. Once you hit that limit, you need to take a closer look at your assets and how can you reduce the final size of an map.
There are of course some big projects such as Dead Zone ( http://www.moddb.com/mods/dead-zone-hope-lost ) with high amount of custom high quality textures and other assets - where it is inevitable to end up with largely sized maps.
But if you're not developing something like in case above, it's mostly likely effect of bad optimizations on your end. Disabled MPQ compression? Oversized textures? Soundtracks with too high bitrate? etc.
I gotta ask you something: have you considered making separate thread for every seperate issue you're dealing with? Because you're mixing various topics, that are often hardly related within a single thread. By a result you're limiting yourself to help from people who are capable of keeping up with it - apparently only DSE.
Not to mention in future other people might encounter same problems. When they'll attempt at looking up some info about it, they'll either not find it, as posts are not indexed as good as threads - title is always most important keyword. Or they'll have to crawle through all the irrelevant stuff before getting to the actual answer.
Although if goal of this thread is some kind exclusive mentorship between you and DSE, then I guess that's okayish - assuming he's fine with doing so.
(Also these are not even triggers questions, but Layouts / UI.)
2.
Anchors control position, and can also control width/height, if these are not set explicitly. It is in fact covered in tutorial you've linked. For more detailed explanation lookup this document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cs6hjFKgf9xKO_d-zAPwGgRzOZpwLkAqUw5Zbte7Tdk/edit
It might be also in the Wiki, bout couldn't find it - this was provided by @rtschutter IIRC.
I don't know if there's anything special about Portraits - if you've some issue regarding it, just post snippet of your code.
5.
What is that even..? ConsoleSkinCacheFrame is different thing. It appears to be used as a preview frame within BattleUI (game menu) - Collections/Consoles. It has no influence on actual ConsolePanel present in game.
Since introduction of custom Console skins from Blizzard there was small overhaul in regards to how Console panels are applied, but you can still change the default model the same way as it was done in the past - by modifying model links within Assets.txt.
This is default Console definition within data:
@@UI/ConsoleModelMinimapPanel means that model link will be lookedup in Assets.txt with race id as postfix:
All you need to do is create custom Assets.txt that would override pathes above and place it in Base.SC2Data/GameData in your map.
6.
Nope. Models can indeed be loaded at any stage within game, without preloading. But regardless to that they do need to be actually downloaded.
This is something Blizzard can do, thanks to CASC, but that tech is not accessible to modders/arcade games.
And frankly 650 MB is madness - I wasn't aware you could even upload map as huge as this... I don't know what you're developing but I cannot thing of anything that could justify the size. Keep in mind that not everyone lives in places where high speed connections are easily accessible. Take me as an example, currently I'm stuck with ~6Mbit DL. Which means I need like 15 minutes to download something as big as this.
I'd consider 100MB to be a borderline. Once you hit that limit, you need to take a closer look at your assets and how can you reduce the final size of an map.
There are of course some big projects such as Dead Zone ( http://www.moddb.com/mods/dead-zone-hope-lost ) with high amount of custom high quality textures and other assets - where it is inevitable to end up with largely sized maps.
But if you're not developing something like in case above, it's mostly likely effect of bad optimizations on your end. Disabled MPQ compression? Oversized textures? Soundtracks with too high bitrate? etc.
Previously known as: SomeoneTookMyNameTT