• Edit #1: EU servers are now UP!

Due to the EU downtime, i'll be giving the Creature Contest another short extension. The new deadline is Wednesday, July 14th - Midnight PDT (Los Angeles) [Thursday, July 15th - 9 AM GMT (Paris)].

And as always, post your Beta Username here.

Rocket Arena by Acemore aka Cromalic

Rocket Arena is a fast action-paced custom map for SC2 for up to 10 players. Go toe-to-toe in a variety of different game modes, such as FFA or Team Deathmatch! Fight alongside your friends, or launch a rocket in their face! (Note: Team vs Team only available in closed beta at this time, but it will shortly be released)

Lighting Editor Tech Demo by depthsofchaos

Here's a little demo of what the Lighting Editor can do. The trailer was actually created to show off doc's Alien VS Predator Map, but I thought his demo of the Lighting within it was interesting enough.

Items & Loot Tutorial by OneTwo

Within this tutorial, OneTwo shows how to make items, item classes, item bags/equipment, pawning items, and "mob" loot. He left out the item buying/selling process because Bifuu has already created a tutorial on that.

EDIT: I've also setup a thread for users to post their username.character code, so everyone go post your username!

Patch 16

Patch 16 has gone live and has added some interesting changes. The official patch notes can be found here, and here's some that have been found by our users. However, below are some shots of the new things in GalaxyEdit taken by XyzMuffin and Warcrime from our IRC Channel.

Jungle Terrain by Mozared

Mozared has done a ton of great terraining work recently, and this almost slipped by the cracks, somehow. He's uploaded quite a few screenshots of his awesome Jungle terrain, I recommend you check out his thread.

Stay Alive! by Hookah604

Here's a pretty interesting map... It was based off of a survival map from War3 with the same goal, Stay Alive!

3D Modeling Contest Results

I'd like to thank everyone who participated, the submissions were all done really well. Congratulations to the three winners:

• First Place: Kanaru
• Second Place: Triceron
• Third Place: Tridgit

Their submissions along with the rest of the submissions can be found in the Voting thread.

UPDATE: Patch 16 is up for download. The official patch notes can be found here, andhere's some that have been found by our users. The servers are still down.

Due to the holidays and amount of submissions, i'll be giving the Creature Contest a short extension. The new deadline is Monday, July 12th - Midnight PDT (Los Angeles) [Tuesday, July 13th - 9 AM GMT (Paris)].

Official Forums Require Real ID

This has been a huge problem for a lot of people today. The thread on the WoW forums is about to reach 700 pages and the thread has only been open for 12 hours now. Blizzard plans to give the official forums some upgrades, one of them, include the Real ID system. When posting on their official forums, you will no longer be posting with your Battle.net Username, you'll be posting with your Real ID (First and Last name) with the option to include your username as well. Clearly this has not gone over very well, but I guess we will see how it goes in the near future.

An upcoming RPG by Onetwo

The first time I watched this video, my mind was blown. All of it was taken from in-game footage, and I still cannot watch the trailer without wowwing. Onetwo did an amazing job, I encourage everyone to check out the trailer.

Dynamic In-game Text Editing by RodOfNOD

Through GalaxyEdit, you can create an EditBox Dialog Item, however it does not work at the moment. It gets completely ignored and does not return a global either. However, RodOfNOD has created an EditBox through Triggers. Basically, you can edit text dynamically!

Blizzard Advertises Mapster Again

I think the image says it all... Metal Slug map by ArcadeRenegade.

NetStorm by depthsofchaos

Ever played NetStorm before? t's basically an RTS taking place on islands in the sky. You have to build bridges to approach resources and enemies while building different kind of cannons to secure your position. The core gameplay is relatively simple but the strategies available are really complex. You can also download the original game here for free, and of course, check out doc's remake by clicking the link above.

Crush Company AI by Bibendus

This is an awesome map to check out as it's based on old arcade games of Beat'Em Up style like Golden Axe or Double Dragon. It gives you a sense of nostalgia due to the side-scroller effect. In this video, Bibendus is showing off the fully triggered AI and Abilities of the first boss.

EVE to SC2 Model Conversion by TheLaughingMan

Want to use EVE Online Models within your SC2 Maps? TLM created a nice, simple, step-by-step guide to porting them into your map. The best thing is, you don't even need to register for EvE Online! You just need to install the game so you can extract the models and that's all.

The Spell contest was really popular and I'm aggregating all the entries. Meanwhile you can start making beautiful wallpapers :)

Wallpaper Contest

This contest will be made together with Starcraft Mapping.de. The goal is to make it available for more people than just on Mapster. The same contest will be running on both websites, entries and votes will be shared in both sites.

What to do?

You have to make a wallpaper. A wallpaper here is a screenshot of a beautiful terrain, fun scene ... I'm pretty sure you will come up with great pictures.

• Only ingame screenshots are allowed
• Post-editing (Photoshop ...) NOT allowed
• You have to provide the map the screenshot has been taken from
• Submit your entries

You have 7 days to complete this contest

Reward

The main goal of the contest is to further community development within GalaxyEdit. The rewards can be see as follows:

• First: 1-year Curse Premium
• Second: 6-month Curse Premium
• Third: 3-month Curse Premium
• Everyone else: 1-month Curse Premium

Solo Maps

Today I'm going to feature maps that have no common points but being playable solo :) Do not hesitate to propose more solo maps!

• Brave Storm by vadremix: Campaign
• Orbital by Yaos01: A 25 level survival
• Hex'd by Qancakes: Hero battle with AI
• Stranded Korhal by lnsidious: Campaign
• Station Assault by ghoohg: 3rd Person Hero

MapCraft 1.5 by Motive

The recent update to MapCraft fixed a bug where users on Mac 10.5.x could not launch the map through SC2. Now everyone should be able to play without Battle.net, :).

Doodad Painting by Mokse

Mokse, Lennywing and Mozared made some pretty artistic uses of Doodads which shows the kind of things we can do in regards to terraining. Making pyramids off many rocks, burning effect using lava craters, crystals as gardians or waterfall ... If you too made clever use of doodads, feel free to show it off!

Galaxy Serialization by TheLaughingMan

This library is meant to allow you to store any type of variable into a String in such a way that it is able to be "resurrected" 100%, it is more conventional to use then simply converting the variable you want into a string. If you convert anything into a string normally there is no way to know later on what type of variable it was unless you keep up with it. Serializing the data allows you to check the variable type later on, stores every bit of data that is necessary to bring it back, and even has some built in handling for corruption issues.

Understanding the Editor tutorial by OneTwo

OneTwo has come out with yet another great tutorial! The concept of what it covers is pretty self explanatory, so check it out! There's actually 5 parts to it, the first can be seen below, the next few should be linked after the video finishes.

SC2 Dance Dance Revolution by shaotang

Remember Dance Dance Revolution? The game that many people loved in the past? This map is inspired by DDR and I thought it's quite possible to re-make it with the sc2 editor engine. It's still in an early stage, not even alpha yet. Just a peek of what the game would look like =)

AI Contest Voting

While there weren't many submissions, there were some major breakthroughs in the development of AI through GalaxyEdit and i'm really impressed. Hopefully this submission will help with the future of AI creation and open up more possibilities for whatever kind of map you're creating. I'd like to thank those of you who spent the time for this contest, it was well worth it.

I'd also like to give a big shout out to Th3LaughingMan, who created an entire framework to base your own AI off of.

{Contest Rules/Thread}

Spell Contest

Since the Clock and Cinematic Contests were a great success, we decided to start a new one. This time we want to feature the creation and customization of Spells within the GalaxyEditor.

Entries may be submitted here. You may also upload your map to our Map Database. Good luck and happy mapping!

What to do?

You can use the GalaxyEditor or anything available to you to create your own Unit Spells. That means you can use either the Data Editor, the Trigger Editor, or both. These spells can be applied to units, heroes, mob, anything you like! We just want to see the coolest (may not necessarily be the most useful) spell out there. Remember, we want to further knowledge within GE, so use your imagination and use your creativity!

Deadlines

You have 7 days to complete this contest, and then during one day a poll will be launched for you to vote and elect the winners!

• End of the submissions: Wednesday, June 16th - Midnight PDT (Los Angeles) [Thursday, June 17th - 9 AM GMT (Paris)]
• End of the votes: 3 days later

Reward

The main goal of the contest is to further community development within GalaxyEdit. The rewards can be see as follows:

• First: 1-year Curse Premium
• Second: 6-month Curse Premium
• Third: 3-month Curse Premium
• Everyone else: 1-month Curse Premium

M3 Plugins by NiNToxicated

Yes, NiNToxicated is the man. His recent update to the M3 Plugin tools includes animation support now!

Quote:

Animation support is now live!

Animations should work perfectly well. I've exported M2's, which you can see here, and they animate entirely correctly. I've also exported MD5's from Doom3 (an Imp model) which required an adjustment of the FPS, but it also has correct animations. I'm sure there will still be problems though, animations have been difficult to get working properly. Make sure you make start frame and end frame animations for your bones you're going to animate, or else you'll get weird animations.

If anyone knows of an MDX/MDL (those are Warcraft3 models) importer that WORKS for a recent version of 3ds max, please let me know. I'd like to export some wc3 models into sc2 because there's been alot of demand for it, and because it'll be fun. Even though the quality of the models will be horrendous compared to the sc2 ones :D.

At some point when I'm not so busy I'd like to do up some tutorials on how to work the tools so people aren't so lost using them. I've done my best to make them as intuitive as possible. Cheers all and enjoy ^.^

View the Animated Worgen! ...

Tristram by egodbout

All Diablo Fans will appreciate this nostalgic piece of work. egodbout decided to take a chunk of Blizzard history (Battle.net 1.0 was first released with Diablo 1!) and recreate it within SC2. I hope you all enjoy the sentimental value from this map as much as I did. He's got a bunch of cool screenshots from the SC2 look, I recommend checking it out.

The Galaxy Editor is still available to us to use, so Mapping will still go on. Since the Publishing system can no longer be used, you can continue upload maps on SC2Mapster.com for distribution.

Users looking for Melee play can download the Melee AI Maps that are currently being created, as you can see we had a contest for it that just ended today, I encourage you to check out that thread.

Although the Mac Client does not offer GalaxyEdit just yet and you cannot edit any maps, it's still possible for you Mac users to play Custom maps locally, similar to the "Test Document" GalaxyEdit Function. You can download the project here.

Update 11:55PM PDT: And they're gone now..

Quote:

The first phase of beta will be concluding at 11:00 PM PDT tonight, June 7. At that time no further logins will be possible, and anyone already in a game will have a short time before automatically logged off. Thank you once again for helping test StarCraft II! More information will be given on the official website and forums as we near beta phase two.

Edit: Servers are back up and a new patch ...

Battle.net is shutting down for a month ... But don't worry you will still be able to use the Galaxy Editor :) Check out Mapster in the following days, we will have cool thing for you not to get bored without playing :)

This post will be updated later today.

Soccer Galaxy Cup by progammer

I've been newsing for two months and there are still completly different maps popping up each day, this is quite impressive. Today I'm going to feature a soccer map. It's at the moment an early proof of concept but has a great potential. You can pass or shoot the ball depending on the power, switch player and move around with the ball. If you want to help progammer: I'm desperately need help on map terrain. If you are good at terraining, modeling and willing to help, please contact me.

TPS Battle by iWaNN

Another pretty cool concept: a battle system where you can play any unit individually in third person mode. Always dreamed to revive the Metal Gear Solid rocket controlling experience, this map is for you.

Final Disaster by flydaggar

Proof of concepts are fun but playable maps are better! I've already newsed Final Disaster, it has evolved a lot since the first release. Heroes now have fun spells, many new bosses, items ... have been added.

UPDATE: Patch 14 was released. The Map Publishing host preference has been fixed by default, so we no longer need to fix that manually. Undocumented Editor changes can be found here. You can also see the complete patch notes here.

ORPG Starcraft Universe by Mille25

Another great map with extensive use of the custom interface. He made a complete talent system and a neat character creation interface. You should definitively keep an eye on this project!

Tutorial Heros by OneTwo

Many of you want to reproduce Warcraft III heros in Starcraft II. This is not really intuitive and to help you out there are already some tutorials, here's a new one by OneTwo. With all these resources you have no more reason not to do great heros and abilities!

SC2Mapster Intro Video by GodKill3r

As you probably know we've set up some sc2mapster goodies if you want to help us out. If you are working on a map, the easiest way to help is to add your project url inside the map description like: sc2mapster.com/p/hexd. It will help getting feedbacks as people will be able to know where to contact you and give us some light :) You just released a video, you can add a sc2mapster intro. GodKill3r just made a new one that is really nice!

Please note that you are doing this for free, you will not give you any special advantage. We don't want to force you to do it but give a way to help us if you want to!

Sparsile - GalaxyEditor Extender

Sparsile is a GalaxyEditor Extender that is currently being developed by some friends of Skizot and Sixen. The easiest definition of the program: Sparsile adds functions to GalaxyEdit that are not there by default. It comes with a custom menu that will show off all of the new features it has to offer to GE. Currently, a Galaxy Scripting Editor is working and running with a full list of the Natives, Types, and Constants.

However, there are a few other things that are being planned for the project and i'm really excited about it. Sparsile should be released in the near future and will help add a whole slew of functionality that missing in GE to it without having to use another Editor, which is what is great about this program. Everything can be accessed straight through GalaxyEdit, so you don't have to mess around with several different editors.

You can think of this as a GE Extender or even a GE Expansion... Below is a screenshot of the current version. As you can see, I used it to develop my "The Dot" example Galaxy map. Stay tuned to Mapster for more information on Sparsile in the coming weeks.

3D Modeling Contest

NeoDeathXp noticed that our contests are usually geared toward Mapping itself instead of relating to assets within maps so he took it upon himself to setup a 3D Modeling Contest for his map. I've taken a small quote from his original thread to show off what to do and the awesome prizes he has up for grabs (SC2 Collector's Edition!).

Quote from NeoDeathXp:

What to Do?

Fire up your favorite 3d modeling software and Create one of the following Characters from Final Fantasy 13:

• Lightning, Sazh, Snow, Hope, Vanile, Fang, Vivi (FF9)

Deadlines

The Deadline is June 22nd (26 days from original post, was increased due to user concern) this should give you time to learn the program and create some works of art!

Whats up for grabs! (The Loot!)

• First Place - 1 Copy of Starcraft 2 Collectors edition + 1 year of Curse Premium
• Second Place - 1 Copy of Starcraft 2 Collectors edition + 6 months curse premium
• Third place - 1 Copy of Starcraft 2 + 3 months curse premium

ALL Participants will receive 1 month of curse premium!

Random Dungeon Map by Helral

I'm pretty sure you've all played Diablo and were impressed by the random generated maps. Helral took the idea and implemented it. At the moment it's using rough piles in order to do the wall but it can easily be improved. This is a really good idea to make the gameplay experience better when playing the same map multiple times!

Melee AI Contest

Since the Clock and Cinematic Contests were a great success, we decided to start a new one. This time we want to feature the creation and customization of computer AI within the GalaxyEditor and SC2. AI Scripting is an area that we have not seen much of at all, really. Hopefully this can help the community get their hands dirty in this area. Entries may be submitted here. You may also upload your map to our Map Database. Good luck and happy mapping!

What to do?

You can use the GalaxyEditor or anything available to you to create your own custom Melee AI. For those of you who wish to do this in pure Galaxy without Triggers, you may want to take a look at our old Galaxy API Docs. Otherwise, the Trigger Editor will be your friend in this contest. Any race, any level of skill, the design of the AI is completely up to you. In addition, I went ahead and uploaded all of the official Battle.net Ladder maps to our Map DB. You can either use those or you can create your own. You may also want to take a look at Blizzard's Official Galaxy Scripts as examples.

Resources

• Galaxy API Docs (Only current as of Patch 8, but there's a list of all current natives up top and some all non-AI functions are documented)
• Official Battle.net Ladder maps
• Official Blizzard Galaxy Scripts
• Galaxy Scripting Tutorials

Deadlines

You have 7 days to complete this contest, and then during one day a poll will be launched for you to vote and elect the winners!

• End of the submissions: Tuesday, June 1st - Midnight PDT (Los Angeles) [Wednesday, June 2nd - 9 AM GMT (Paris)]
• End of the votes: 3 days later

Reward

The main goal of the contest is to give the Melee players something to do while going without the beta for a month, however it's better when there's something to win :). Since the Beta is coming to a close, it doesn't make too much sense to hand out Beta Keys. However, the first place winner will get one to give out, because they can still download the game and take advantage of GalaxyEdit!

• First: 1 Beta Key + 1-year Curse Premium
• Second: 1-year Curse Premium
• Third: 6-month Curse Premium
• Everyone else: 1-month Curse Premium

Galaxy Wiki

Months ago, we were the top resource for Galaxy API Docs and we want to continue to hold this title. In order for us to be the leading resource in documentation post-GalaxyEdit, we need your help to fill out our new Galaxy Wiki. The Wiki has been structured properly, all we need is for people to help contribute by filling in the pages! Documenting everything is quite a hefty task, I agree. However, you don't need to do everything by yourself. Small contributions by all members here and there will eventually get the Wiki completely filled out and up to date. The wiki is here as a reference for you, so help us help you, :).

Those of you interested, feel free to join the #galaxywiki channel on freenode (the same server as #sc2mapster).

Stranded on Korhal by Insidious

What would a Mapster announcement be without an awesome map to check out? Here, you can play through a series of easy to medium objectives backed up by cinematics and a plotline throughout the whole map. The entire experience takes about 20-25 minutes and should entertain you at least.

Random SC2Mapster News

• We just hit the 10 000 forum posts, 500 maps and 50 assets published on Mapster. We would like to thank you all for your hard work on the mapping community!
• The Cut Scene Contest Votes are still running. I've changed the order of the submissions in order to give a boost to the one that were at the bottom.
• A new contest will begin during the week. This time your work will have a real use outside the contest :)

Custom Ground Texture by HeliosDoubleSix

HeliosDoubleSix (who runs the blog helios.mine.nu) did a really nice tutorial explaining how to create great looking terrain texture! I'm pretty sure you want to do the same looking at the picture behind!

Starcraft II Bad Apple by cq3k

You probably remember the Touhou game I newsed few weeks ago (try to represent a 2D game where you have to avoid 50000 missiles that are coming at you). There's a famous video called Bad Apple as introduction and cq3k just re-used the black and white concept for a Starcraft II cinematic. It's all done within the Galaxy Editor of course :)

Terrain Artist by TimeIbis

"Having terrain in your map is just as important as having triggers. Even if you worked months on triggering a map and have the triggers perfect, the fact is having ugly terrain can be an eye sore. As for me it is the most fun part of making a map." wrote TimeIbis ... When you look at what he is able to do, you just want to get hired to make the triggers!

World of Starcraft by slaydon

Here's slaydon's version of a World of Starcraft map, inspired by SCMapper's original idea and system. I think the map speaks for itself, so check the video out if you're interested!

Patch 13 - Map Publishing

Zarhym from Blizzard just updated the patch thread with the Patch 13 notes. It is not yet on applied on the servers but it is going to be huge for the mapping community: Map Publishing is there! We will be updating this news when it goes live!

Quote:

• Map Publishing is now enabled: Using the map editor, you can upload your custom maps to share with the Battle.net community.
• Facebook feature is integrated: Here’s a quick way to expand your social network by seeing who among your existing Facebook friends also has a Battle.net account.
• 3v3 and 4v4 formats are now enabled.
• Numerous updates have been made to the Leagues & Ladders system:
• Removed identifier from the character naming process and added the ability to refer friends for invitation into your party or lobby.
• As with previous data wipes, magic 8 ball predicts it will coincide with the release of a patch.

Read Full Patch 13 ...

Tutorial Listing

You've been writing tutorial since the Galaxy Editor release. However the forum is not really the best way to display all of them, they get lost when they are after the page 3. This is why I've made a wiki article that lists them all. You can now easily browse the 79 tutorials made so far! Thanks for everyone who did them, that's a precious resource for map makers!

Diablo 3 UI by Tehwildcard

We've seen many people use the dialog feature to make a custom UI, this time Tehwildcard made a 100% graphical interface. He choose to reproduce the mana / life display system of Diablo and even recreated a scene from the Diablo 3 first presentation.

Assault on Planetary Boss Fortress by Bounty_98

Bounty_98 made a well made 3rd person map with atypic gameplay. You have to spawn broodlings in order to take damage and backstab units to finish them. He made a video featuring the first boss but the map contains more bosses! If you are bored this week-end this is a map to test :)

UPDATE: May 19th's Beta Key Giveaway winners have been selected and notified via PM.

Terran Conflict by Skizot

Moderator Skizot has been hard at work on his Contra-style map and it looks amazing.

Lots of Tutorials by One.Too

Regular user One.Too has been hard at work creating tons of tutorials. His most recent one can be seen below, he's doing a Tower Defense tutorial.

Uberlisk Guide by mrm3fan

mrm3fan updated Hati's guide to the Uberlisk to include GalaxyEdit documentation. Hati's guide was created prior to the release of GE, so related to purely XML editing. The new guide covers how to create yourself an Uberlisk within GE, so enjoy!

Mapster Contest and Giveaway

Don't forget about the Cinematic Contest! The current submissions are looking really good, however every user that participates will receive a Beta Key! You can't miss out on that... You can post your submissions here, as well as uploading your Map to our Map DB.

The first 10 keys of the freegiveaway have been distributed. In order to get in on the beta goodness, all you have to do is post a comment in the announcement!