Thanks to the generosity of Blizzard, we will be holding a free SC2 Beta key giveaway! The only requirement is for you to post some kind of comment on this announcement about anything at all! Though the amount is limited, a few beta keys will be given out on a daily basis, chosen at random based on the people commenting on this announcement. The last keys will be handed out on May 30th.

We have all worked really hard to make SC2Mapster the premier SC2 Mapping website and I believe things are paying off. We have become a very prosperous community and this is our way at giving back to you guys. Thanks for helping us grow and become the great website we have become!

Anyone interested in talking to a great portion of the Mapster Community, head over to the forums or head over to our IRC. chat.freenode.net:6667 #sc2mapster

Winners (Notified by PM)

[May 30th] This was the last of the Beta Keys. Congratulations to all the winners. For those of you who have not yet received a key, stay tuned to Mapster, we may be getting more keys for the second phase of testing, :). Be sure to watch our contests for some other cool prizes! Also, the first phase of the Beta has been extended to June 7th.

May 30th: fredericon2000

May 29th: Coloredone, dedkilly

May 28th: adagoth, paalandre92, jacksb

May 27th: mcSC, Krenon1, ZionHikari, Rathx, wagmisty, Shamenist, Wammon, Bruceyy, Motsybattlebot, ArchAngelTy

May 26th: x3ICEx, Khmersinista, Franciscoft, Cortexzg, FinalFrontier, Benzibar, Chaoswind2, hhotep202, hotgoblin, Wuzzyfuzzy

May 25th: vixxin, exiledchild, Azomatic, Mdtprodigy, madsibsen, iftachby, Darlica, Medals, windzblaze, cudgethewise

May 24th: milkcar, Greywolf171717, trigh, Omorlin, ax707, z33p, StarcraftBeta, Hawtee, Edrodamus, EmJaybrah

May 23rd: Eolly, DMCashew, lorddjt, arcadesha, Lunastar1627, Vinkreig, Hydr00, valestele, oCaTR, Aludee

May 22nd: USMCREPHER, Zukiros, mysticflamelizard, mumiyyah, Tetranis, KaelaNekosune, madpwnator, Blackoutace, fluxflashor, CALAK33F

May 21st: Kage_Shukuun, Parabolic10203040, DarkForce9999, istabedaninja, raserion, darthwispy, macas99, milkymonster92, gravitys, TroLLinYOU

May 20th: Tragatti, trunx666, M00pie, Seagale, MurderMan1, Shiyoujin, hotspice, XNubzX, Aludee, kalax574

May 19th: failrous, Vulturee, Pantteess, Saelizar, Fefo12, Calfura, KylinPan, Valtirin, sboulanger, Vlaeder

May 18th: locob, Bydrock, zylo47, Sivard96, Wyrdassil

May 17th: 1bluelizard, lolsnax, cmflavin, zyx_cm, LastDance

UPDATE: Patch 12.1 was released and the only change was to resolve a Mac-related issue introduced in patch 12, where unusually large error logs were being produced when crashes occurred. Mac crash logs can be found here: /Users/<username>/Documents/Blizzard/StarCraft II Beta/GameLogs/.

Pause of Beta: May 31

Quote:

We’d like to let all of our StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty beta test participants know that the first phase of the beta test will be coming to an end in all regions on Monday, May 31. The beta test will be unavailable for several weeks while we make some hardware and software configuration changes in preparation for the final phase of the beta test and the release of the game. We plan to bring the beta test back online for a couple of weeks prior to the game’s launch to complete our testing. We’ll have more details to share about when this final beta-testing phase will begin at a later date.

We’d like to thank all of our beta-test participants for your enthusiasm, dedication, and valuable feedback during the beta test, and we look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on the StarCraft II beta test as the game’s July 27 launch approaches.

Even with the pause of the beta, SC2Mapster will still live. The GalaxyEditor will still be available to all of us, and we can still locally test our maps. This is a great time for everyone to pick things up and get their maps ready for the reopening of the beta and the official release of the game.

Templar Arena by EphemeralNight

3 classes (Warrior, Adept and Phantom), 4 game modes (Last Man Standing, Zone Control, Factory Defense, Team Showdown) with each a different map. Templar Arena by EphemeralNight has a great potential and you can start playing the beta with your friends!

Micro Olympics by Riley

Do you want to improve your skill in Starcraft 2, you can do it with fun playing Micro Olympics. You have to complete several minigames exploiting available game mechanisms. This is pretty fun to play and make you feel skilled when you manage to complete those :)

New Design by Profet

It's been quite some time we wanted a news design and Profet started making one. At the moment it is still in development but it's advanced enough to give you a preview of how mapster is going to turn out. If you have suggestions it's the time to make them as we are still working on it :)

DeadCraft - Episode 1 by MetalheadMikecosio

MetalheadMikecosio is working on a map survival-horror serie called D-e-a-d-c-r-a-f-t, he already did a cinematic and the first episode which is a playable! I recommand you to test it out, it's a pretty nice start.

• Episode 0: The arrival - Opening cinematic
• Episode 1: Forsaken - Playable

Multithreading and AI by Thalassicus

Starcraft II maps are able to use multiple threads, it means that you can do multiple actions in parallel. In order to understand how to use it with the Galaxy Editor, Thalassicus made a great tutorial about this, and made a little Tower Defense AI using this technique.

• Tutorial: Multithreading and AI by Thalassicus

Dodge the Nuke by mikelat

This map is really simple but fun, you have to avoid nukes falling everywhere randomly on the map. It shows that only few hours are enough to make a fun map with the editor!

Cut Scene Contest

The contest is still running and so far we've got about 10 submissions. However not all the participants have good enough computers to record their cinematics. If you have some time to fraps a map or two, it would be really awesome! Thanks :).

If you want to participate in the contest yourself, entries can be submitted here. You may also upload your map to our Map Database. Keep 'em coming!

All the map with the 16 players assigned won't load. The loading screen will be the default one and the error "The game cannot load the map!" will appear. In order to fix the problem here is a simple procedure:

• Open the map
• Go to Map / Player Properties
• Select the player 14
• On the right panel set Control to None

If you changed this settings in your map, please re-upload it to mapster so users can play it right.

Thanks to Thalassicus for finding the issue.

Cut Scene Contest

Since the Clock Contest was a great success, we decided to start a new one. This time we want to feature the cinematic abilities of the Galaxy Editor.

What to do?

You have to use the Galaxy Editor to make an ingame cinematic. You are pretty much free on the theme, the goal is to show the possibilities of the editor to do machinimas. Since it only lasts a week and we want everyone to be able to join it, the length is limited to 1 minute. (This is really short, don't be afraid :))

Requirement

• Cinematic must last less that 1 minute
• Provide a youtube video: No post-editing allowed, it must be directly recorded within the game
• SC2Mapster must appear somewhere on the video. You can insert the sc2mapster intro before the cinematic, add it in the loading screen, use the ingame model ...

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: Saturday 22 May - Midnight PDT (Los Angeles) [Sunday 23 May - 9 AM GMT (Paris)]
• End of the votes: 3 days later

Reward

The main goal of the contest is the fun, however it's better when there's something to win :) We have a lot of beta keys and Curse Premium to give.

• First: 3 Starcraft II Beta Keys + 1-year Curse Premium
• Second: 2 Starcraft II Beta Keys + 1-year Curse Premium
• Third: 1 Starcraft II Beta Key + 6-month Curse Premium
• Everyone else: 1 Starcraft II Beta Key + 1-month Curse Premium

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

Laertes has been casting custom maps for a while now, check it out... Today is Map Night for US.

<center><iframe width="560" height="340" src="http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/scdebates?layout=4&amp;amp;autoplay=false" style="border:0;outline:0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><div style="font-size: 11px;padding-top:10px;text-align:center;width:560px"></center>

Patch 12 is now live! Patch 12 wasn't anything huge for the SC2 Beta. This time around, Protoss received really minor nerfs, the Terran Thor's model had some adjusting, the Zerg supply for a Roach doubled, and a crash bug was fixed.

AC130K Spaceship Gunner by malu05

Today I'm going to show off projects that are in the work and that looks promising. The first one is a Spaceship Gunner game. You are flying and have to kill all the units on the ground. The best thing of it is the ability to improve and buy weapons with a really nice UI!

Aegiss Hydra Hero by AegisRunestone

AegisRunestone is working on a campaign and made spells for his hero Kheldrun. This is not a über hero with impressive skills but more subtle and balanced abilities, they are designed to allow combo for good players. You can make an invicibility zone, use an AOE and burrow as wanted. Also an interesting thing is the possibility to revive your hero in your main building like in Warcraft III.

Promote Mapster in 3D by Skizot

Do you want to help us, what about doing something completly out of the ordinary? Skizot just used NiNToxicated M3 Exporter to insert ingame a 3D version of the mapster logo. This takes like 10 seconds to add it inside your map and will amaze your players!

Just wanted to let everyone know, there's a little less than one day left (20 hours) before the end of our Clock Contest, so get your submissions in! And again, anyone interested in working on the wiki, feel free to join us in #galaxywiki on chat.freenode.net.

Trigger Tutorial and Combat Weapons Tutorials by Beider

This is pretty self explanatory, but Mapster regular Beider has been generous enough to pump out some tutorials on basic Triggering and Combat Weapons.

NoRoos awesome untitled game by NoRoo

NoRoo's map is a four-player battle arena type map. Basically four players duke it out head to head in whichever ship they choose to use. In fact, this is one of the only maps thus far that has been used over Battle.net in one of our reviews!

Reaper Madness by rrowland

This map looks great, it includes a Custom UI and a nice Physics engine.

Patch 11 - Locale Issues Fixed

Patch 11 hit the servers this afternoon. It brought tons of nerfs for all races, some hotkey fixes, a few bug fixes, and a couple of changes to the Editor. Users no longer have to worry about locale issues with their custom maps! However, there's still no Map Publishing features... Check out the full patch notes here.

Also, check out the undocumented editor changes:

• The Editor now Auto-Generates locale so maps should work in all regions
• Seems that the Requirement field in many dialogs has been fixed to show properly
• You can no longer Edit Units and abilities of map Dependencies, now you must Copy/Duplicate them and make your own (You can overwrite them with your duplicates now it seems however)
• Some missing models have been added.

World of Starcraft by SCMapper

SCMapper has released the engine he has been using to make his map. If anyone is interested in developing ORPG's, or any type of map that could utilize Character Selection, Creation, or Banks, I urge you to check out his work.

New Mapster Staff and Wiki development

I'd like to welcome to the ranks of the Mapster Staff: Bifuu, Grum, Hati, and Skizot. They'll be helping us moderate the website in all of it's entirety, :). Welcome guys!

Also, if anyone is interested in helping work on the wiki, we're currently going through some restructuring. Currently, we're in the channel #galaxywiki on chat.freenode.net (same server as #sc2mapster). Feel free to drop by, help out, offer your two cents, whatever! Any help is appreciated.

World of Starcraft by SCMapper

We all knew it was coming, but who would've thought it would be upon us so quickly? SCMapper has been hard at work creating his rendition of a Starcraft MMO. His plans seem interesting and what he has so far seems promising.

Attack of the Xel'Naga Campaign by Volsky

Volsky has brought us the first user created campaign in history. Throughout his campaign we play as Eystanus, a deadly Dark Templar hero, as we try and survive a war against the Xel'Naga.

Tech Demo by Hybred

Curious to see some things Galaxy Editor is capable of? Hybred's been creating some cool abilities, heroes, items, and all other sorts of things to show off in his two Tech Demos.

First preview of the GalaxyEditor. You won't see this anywhere else, ;).

Come to talk about it on the forums :) There are more useful content at your disposal!

More Terraining:

Unit Base Placement:

Terraining:

Unit Placement:

The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.

Tutorial: XML Inventory, Items, Power Up - Part 1 by HPX

Do you wonder how to make inventory, items and such things. HPX has been working hard on the subject and posted a loooong tutorial about it. It is really detailed and there's even a fully documented demo map. This is the easiest way to get started working on XML stuff without the editor. I've recorded a video of what you will be able to do after reading it.

Beta Key Contest - Create a Loading Screen by Tehwildcard

Do you want to help Tehwildcard for his Run Kitty Run map? Nothing easier, just design a loading screen. If you manage to make a lovely one, you are going to get a beta key. This is probably the easiest way to get a beta key out there so don't miss the opportunity! There is only one beta key for the moment but if there are two (or more!) outstanding artworks, we (sc2mapster) are going to reward those too. Enter the contest now!.

WoW -> SC2 Models by NiNtoxicated

I'm pretty sure you want WoW models inside SC2. NiNtoxicated that did many researches on the model format is working on a WoW -> SC2 converter. Here are the first results of his work.

3D View Video by IggyHopper

As said in our last newspost, SC2Mapster regular IggyHopper was working on playing Starcraft2 in 3D. Tonight, he's released a video of his SC2-3D findings as seen below.

RTS Mathematics by Genopath

Another Mapster regular, Genopath, has written an extensive paper on RTS Mathematics. Within the paper, he analyzes the key elements of an RTS, such as balance, micro/macro regression, and micro and macromanagement. While this isn't really mapping related, it's a pretty interesting read for anyone interested in the Blizzard RTS genre. You can download it here.

Hidden Models by Renee

Renee is at it again and this time she's found and used hidden models within the game by replacing them with models of units used normally, like the Protoss Nexus. Some of the models she came across were a Xel'Naga Shrine, Zhakul'Das Shrine, Merc Compound, Valhalla Table (seen below), and a Valhalla Camera. These models can be found in Liberty.SC2Mod\base.SC2Assets\Assets\... To change the Model of a unit is pretty simple:

<CModel><Model value="path/to/model/goes/here.m3"/>

To view the original thread, see here. However, unless you can read Chinese, you'll need to see it translated to English.

Contest

A chinese guy girl called Renee on the Goblin Academy forums managed to get the inventory stuff working. However, he did not tell how he did it. The goal of this little contest is to stimulate the Mapping Community of Starcraft II with a common objective: Figure out the Inventory System!

Requirements

What you have to do:

• Make at least 2 bags appear on the screen. (Both the icon and the actual content)
• Have at least 1 item inside a bag.
• Bonus: Make the item give an actual bonus to the hero

What you have to give:

• Screenshots of the results.
• An explanation of how it works.
• A downloadable demo (either a map or a zip with the edited XML files).

Award

• 1-year Curse Premium

Note: The reward is only intended to be a stimulation. Collaboration is more than welcome in the achievement of this task. The purpose is to explore all the possibilities of the Galaxy Editor and create a strong community around it!

Good luck to everyone! Do not hesitate to post your progress on the forums :)

Model Work

Some more modeling work has been done by Kanaru, who plans on making a 3rd person shooting map in the near future. He gave us a glimpse of one of the models he plans on using and it looks amazing...

Upcoming Projects

Several users have shown interest in creating SC2 Maps, all of which are very well thought out. With this in mind, I direct you to the Project Brainstorming Forums. Feel free to comment on their ideas and help them further brainstorm their projects!

Onslaught Series by Genopath

The Onslaught Series will consist of a set of custom maps for Starcraft 2 that are revolutionary, stunning and fun. It is also worth mentioning it will be my first project for Starcraft 2.

Unreal fans will have no trouble recognizing where the name of the series comes from. Perhaps one of the most competitive First Person Shooter (FPS) in history is Unreal Tournament.

Rising of the New Agent by AegisRunestone

The setting begins on Aiur, a month after the Overmind landed there. He is creating a new agent of the Swarm. Why, especially when he created Kerrigan already? We do not know the answer yet. Regardless, he says he has a new purpose in mind ever since he landed on Aiur, and wants this new agent (a creation embodied in a Hydralisk) to be the one to carry out the Overmind's purpose. It is the reason for this Hydralisk's creation.

Yet, the Overmind is destroyed before young Kheldrun was told his purpose, and now, he is left to himself.

Demon Day by TDelamay

Players start in a central location on the map. They are surrounded by a maze of walls that form pens. The players controls a single unit called the 'engineer' which is capable of constructing buildings and barricades. The first thing to do is find a pen to defend during the game. A pen can be defended alone or in team. The player has a few minutes to move to the desired location and start building walls and defence. The wall they build is their only protection and they must keep it alive if they want to win the game. They can also build attack towers, but these have a low amount of health and cannot be used as walls. Waves of creatures will try to kill the players. The strength and abilities of the creatures will improve as the game draws to an end. If the walls are not upgraded in time, the base will fall. The game will last around 40 minutes. At the end of this timer, the players must be able to defeat the last boss within a time limit, otherwise they lose automatically.

Several others have already created Map Pages here on Mapster, which I recommend checking into as well. This is the beginning what will be coming in the very near future.

Map Dev Recap

Vjeux went ahead and outlined what we currently know/can do via Mapping, which I highly recommend checking out. For the entire thread, see here.

Galaxy Language

The Galaxy Language is really close to C. This is a good choice because everyone knows C or a language derivated from it.

• The error reporting is aweful, we only know there is an error and don't know the line. This is hopefully getting to be fixed later but we can still workaround using Lapin Syntax Validator.
  
• The language is missing a lot of needed features (for loops, dynamic allocations, etc ...). However many of those lacks can easily be fixed by Blizzard itself or using one of the many tools. (Andromeda, MilkyWay Precompiler)
  
• The language is faster than Jass but still way too slow. (Benchmark)

Galaxy API

The Galaxy API is really incomplete. At the moment, all the AI functions are there and all the strictly needed dependencies. From what we can see, it's pretty well done.

• The API is clearly object oriented but done through naming instead of relying on syntax.
  
• The API is not minimal, you can rewrite a bunch of API functions using another ones.
  
• They have many containers (UnitGroup, UnitOrder, UnitGroupFilter) but no common way to use them.

XML Data

All the data are stored in XML Files. You can customize pretty much everything using them: Units, Spells, Models, Textures, Races ...

• All the different spells are using the same basic nodes, this way it's very generic and easy to make custom spells.
  
• There is an inheritance system that allows you to make different variations of the same object in few lines.
  
• Only differences are being saved in the map, that allows small maps. However this is a bit annoying for now.
  
• Localization is really easy. All the strings are stored in a text file inside a folder for each language.
  
• At the moment, it's really painful to edit those files by hand, they are split in a lot of files and it's really missing autocompletion. The editor is going to help a lot in that area.

Interface

The game interface can be changed! It's a set of XML files that really looks like WoW Addons. However not much research has been done on this yet.

• Support relative position and parents like WoW addons
  
• Haven't found yet if it was possible to add custom interface inside the map files.

Terrain Data

The Terrain is probably the hardest thing to handle without the editor. It is stored in a very compact way as it already takes about 90% of the map size. We managed to understand how it was stored and will soon be able to draw it. However it's not something we will be able to edit manually.

Conclusion

After a month of Starcraft II maps analysis we can expect great possibilities. Everything we talked about here is going to have a polished GUI that will make edition much easier and faster. Let's hope Galaxy Editor is going to come soon!

Consistent Modding

Thanks to IggyHopper, he's come up with a very simple way to Mod the game, without the use of our own Version/Base folders. While it'll only be modding the base version of the game, basically Patch 0 to my understanding, it's easier for testing than having to recreate your own game version. If you want to mod the base version (no patches), extract all the .xml files from the original Liberty/Base.SC2Data .mpq file and place into GameData, then replace RaceData.xml with the fixed one.