@DeltaCadimus: Go
I think the reason we didn't see more fancy CGI is because of BlizzCon this year. I suspect since SC2 now can do in-game cutscenes that look pretty good, they cut down a bit on the CGI for HotS and used more of it for other project. After all they no longer have 10 years, but 2 years between stuff for the most part. I suspect they finally unveil Titan at BC2013 with a really long and fancy CGI trailer. Or they should at least, because people stop caring about their expansion packs.
So I guess they invested more time into finishing that to blow people away.
Some of the critic isn't well researched, as you did in fact not take into account that Blizzard has this wonderful stupid idea of telling half their plots and lore in books, which answers a lot of the problems of HotS. What we can blame them for though if bad writing there, because they did not even once bring this up at all in any detail, so if you didn't read the specific books, you don't get jack shit.
But even if you do, the writing is awful and incohesive. This is the same Blizzard that actually went and made their Panda aprils joke into a race for WoW. Nothing is holy anymore there. I suspect anyone with some kind of work ethic either left years ago, sold them for the millions they make or is on Titan with some luck. While the campaign itself was pretty good gameplay wise and I felt quite a bit sad for poor Sarah when she can't reach Jim, I also pretty much could see the entire plot unfold. Blizzard doesn't kill their Main Characters anymore. Not since Grom. Okay, this did kill off whatshisface Cairne in WoW after he became forgotten by everyone, but still. The only way to get yourself killed in a Blizz game is to become corrupted and the evil guy.
Mengsk was the one cunning bastard they had left of all their antagonists and they went and wrote him so badly compared to books like "I, Mengsk" that it's just awful. Though he did prepare Korhal quite a bit for the Zerg, but Blizz had to Plotarmor the Swarm due to Primals.
Overall Blizzard was never really good at writing. If you go back to WC3 or SC1, you will notice the same cheesy stuff. I think the problem is that Blizz hasn't grown out of their bad writing as others did and we are just used to better written plots at our current ages.
Duran's end makes somewhat sense, since there is a entire ZERG FLEET in orbit. Seriously, even that guy can't fight of a couple of thousand mutalisks (oh btw anyone else noticed that in SC1 any zerg air unit was in space, in HotS it suddenly is just the Leviathan). So there is some sense there. Aaaaaand Blizz thought he served his purpose with the book before HotS.
Amon always makes me think of this. And I personally never cared for the big evil megadude in the back. This Amon/Dark Voice smells so much of Sargeras it's not even funny.
There is other things I could comment on, but basically while I was somewhat emotional about Kerrigan and clapped my hands in joy when I infested a Protoss Ship, I didn't feel it did the game series any justice.
Warcraft - dead, Diablo - dead, Starcraft - nearly burried, add some LotV sand to finish.
Let's hope Titan isn't a mess. But it probably will be.
@Dragoneles: Go
Ye, the waterfall assets in SC2 are awful. The problem here is that I did not notice it until afterwards myself :P The water is actually adjusted to be whitish and fit the waterfall, but due to the fog it suddenly became green again. I corrected it later, but it's not in the video as well, so I left it as is for the sake of the video.
Also this only took 1 hour and was just for shit and giggle because I had an idea. If this was actually a product to sell (or hosted on bnet) I would actually spend 3 months on it and work as much detail into it as possible in multiple passings of the terrain.
But for the sake of it, here is a green one. You will notice that it's actually worse for the entire picture. Because there is no contrast. I really wanted the waterfall and river to be a different color for the sake of composition here ;)
@Mozared: Go
I will try to reupload it as soon as possible. The bunny can stay at the very end as a treat for watching. So it's not removed and you are in no dilemma! :P
Figured I should give it it's own thread, instead of putting it into the WTE, since it's somewhat helpful in general for people who are interested in Terrain work. Since I didn't really do any decent commentary on it at all, I don't want to put it into the Tutorial section. This really is something for advanced people who understand what is going on, not beginners :)
Just to give you a quick idea of the workflow I used here:
Defined a POI from the idea I had and set up a camera for the specific view I wanted. In this case the giant Zerg in a cave, with a giant tree log next to it. While it creates some problems with scale between the other trees and this one, it still works pretty well for this picture. I could've added a giant tree or two to fix this though, but ultimately decided not to do it, as it would reduce the unique visuals.
I began blocking out the basic mountainside behind the cavern and started to mess around with ideas on what I could do with the area in general (waterfall and river next to the cave, as a source of water) and added the cliffside assets
Spend over 20m building a god damn waterfall
After finsihing up the waterfall and river, as well as doing a quick retexture of the area, I began hiding potential problematic visuals (2d sprite plants from the cave)
Adding the basic trees, adjusting textures and such for the top of the mountain. While you don't see much of it, it still decided to give it a bit more attention in case I moved the camera around. Also fixed the flat area on the ground.
I added a tree in the lower corner of the screen according to the camera to give it more depth and the illusion that there is some more forest around it, before doing a retexture of the ground and doing a lot of the more basic detailwork like vines.
From here it's a ton of detail work with asset. Thankfully Zerus isn't very stressful with this, as you can pretty much random everything together due to complimentary colors and asset structures.
I decided to put one more small detail before the cave and added the backdrop behind the tree before doing some small final corrections with weather and some small details that didn't seem quite right.
And finally here is the video to go along with all this text. It might have some pixel issues sometimes for quick movement, I went back and reduced it to 4 Bit instead of 16 Bit. But it cut the size by 1/4th so the upload didn't take 5h again. Sound issues around 15-17m, prepare your ears for it.
I hope this was somewhat helpful for a few of you for future works. I might do another video or two regarding other terrain sets and types of terrain works and workflows and this time include what I do in the editor instead of being a idiot that has fraps set only to recording the editor view.
And as a reward for watching/reading, here is a baby bunny!
With all this discussion about lag-free WASD-movement and such, I would like to point out that even if these particular things should not be possible, it is still a great idea and would allow map-makers to become creative in new ways. I - for example - dream of an economy-orientated map in which you could trade ressources between all players on all maps globally! please make it happen :)
There is other options too. Like you could probably simulate something along the lines of a universe in which each player has his own planet and you can send a fleet to attack someone near you, make alliances, trade on a global market, etc.
Something akin to a Browsergame or EVE would become possible here, though obviously both sides shouldn't be able to control their fleet. That wouldn't work out so well I fear for the invader which would've to rely on the AI.
Trial and error. Just don't pick something ultra complex as a theme early on and you should be set. Simple themes like "Firefight" or "Flightdeck" should work :)
@Crainy: Go
We just tried it and the delay still is there. It's as little as it has always been after they halved the sync timer.
But the sync timer exists for their normal matchmaking, so I really doubt that it is gone.
It's the same delay we had months ago for our mod and the only way to get rid of it would be if the sync was disabled and it could be done locally.
Do you use any different solution from trigger button press reading? Like abilities or something (Bounty liked to do that).
How come did Jim Raynor have a gun in his cell? The explanation is brutally simple: in rear with the gear!
Raynor is actually a mage from WoW. He conjured the gun.
I actually spend over 20m checking the cinematic bit by bit. It's a magic gun. Raynor doesn't have it. Kerrigan doesn't have it either. It just ... appears. It must be the manifestation of Raynor's anger or something. Scary.
@Enexy: Go
Well a example is that you can create infinite teleportation of unit spawns between 2 zones, if done right, it will utterly break SC2 and any weaker PC. There is other things as well, but that one even a complete idiot can do.
So if someone made use of code injection in that way, he could ruin the games of anyone subbed to that map if there is a hole you overlooked. In case of a really popular map this could be thousands of people at once. And guess who gets the complaints? Not you at first ;)
Obviously code injection would be one of the most needed features if you really want to make dynamic content. Otherwise you might as well run a random trigger that picks from 100 dynamic events already set up.
This is just one of the concerns I'd have as a Dev with a fan-program. If you wanna try and run this by Blizzard for approval, you should make sure you have all your bases covered for questions like this.
I hope you get a stamp of approval though, which is why I brought this stuff up. This could be really good stuff if it's not eaten alive by a cease and desist answer. But for the love of god don't post it on the official forums as a question, go through our Blizzard contact for this.
There is a lot of very stupid idiots out there that would love to ruin the day of a lot of people at once and your program might be an angle of approach for them if it gets popular.
One more thing that came up in my head just now: How much will this be secured from shenanigans by malicious intent? I mean we managed to produce instagib maps back in WC3 that overloaded PCs easily. SC2 can do the same funny enough. So how do you intend to circumvent that?
This is probably also something Blizz would want to know, aside from the obvious checking if this impacts BNet security (I doubt it, but those are concerns for such a big company).
It's not the first time the map making community uses 3rd party tools. Reinvent the Craft back in WC3 allowed WASD + Mouse stuff already. And DotA had it's Blacklist and Hosting Bots. But that was a different time.
0
@FruitNinjazz: Go Foliage only displays on higher settings as I recall. So if you use that to fill, it won't lag much for them hopefully.
0
@Gradius12: Go I said a lot, not all of them.
0
@DeltaCadimus: Go I think the reason we didn't see more fancy CGI is because of BlizzCon this year. I suspect since SC2 now can do in-game cutscenes that look pretty good, they cut down a bit on the CGI for HotS and used more of it for other project. After all they no longer have 10 years, but 2 years between stuff for the most part. I suspect they finally unveil Titan at BC2013 with a really long and fancy CGI trailer. Or they should at least, because people stop caring about their expansion packs.
So I guess they invested more time into finishing that to blow people away.
0
Some of the critic isn't well researched, as you did in fact not take into account that Blizzard has this wonderful stupid idea of telling half their plots and lore in books, which answers a lot of the problems of HotS. What we can blame them for though if bad writing there, because they did not even once bring this up at all in any detail, so if you didn't read the specific books, you don't get jack shit.
But even if you do, the writing is awful and incohesive. This is the same Blizzard that actually went and made their Panda aprils joke into a race for WoW. Nothing is holy anymore there. I suspect anyone with some kind of work ethic either left years ago, sold them for the millions they make or is on Titan with some luck. While the campaign itself was pretty good gameplay wise and I felt quite a bit sad for poor Sarah when she can't reach Jim, I also pretty much could see the entire plot unfold. Blizzard doesn't kill their Main Characters anymore. Not since Grom. Okay, this did kill off whatshisface Cairne in WoW after he became forgotten by everyone, but still. The only way to get yourself killed in a Blizz game is to become corrupted and the evil guy.
Mengsk was the one cunning bastard they had left of all their antagonists and they went and wrote him so badly compared to books like "I, Mengsk" that it's just awful. Though he did prepare Korhal quite a bit for the Zerg, but Blizz had to Plotarmor the Swarm due to Primals.
Overall Blizzard was never really good at writing. If you go back to WC3 or SC1, you will notice the same cheesy stuff. I think the problem is that Blizz hasn't grown out of their bad writing as others did and we are just used to better written plots at our current ages.
Duran's end makes somewhat sense, since there is a entire ZERG FLEET in orbit. Seriously, even that guy can't fight of a couple of thousand mutalisks (oh btw anyone else noticed that in SC1 any zerg air unit was in space, in HotS it suddenly is just the Leviathan). So there is some sense there. Aaaaaand Blizz thought he served his purpose with the book before HotS.
Amon always makes me think of this. And I personally never cared for the big evil megadude in the back. This Amon/Dark Voice smells so much of Sargeras it's not even funny.
There is other things I could comment on, but basically while I was somewhat emotional about Kerrigan and clapped my hands in joy when I infested a Protoss Ship, I didn't feel it did the game series any justice.
Warcraft - dead, Diablo - dead, Starcraft - nearly burried, add some LotV sand to finish.
Let's hope Titan isn't a mess. But it probably will be.
0
@Dragoneles: Go Ye, the waterfall assets in SC2 are awful. The problem here is that I did not notice it until afterwards myself :P The water is actually adjusted to be whitish and fit the waterfall, but due to the fog it suddenly became green again. I corrected it later, but it's not in the video as well, so I left it as is for the sake of the video.
Also this only took 1 hour and was just for shit and giggle because I had an idea. If this was actually a product to sell (or hosted on bnet) I would actually spend 3 months on it and work as much detail into it as possible in multiple passings of the terrain.
But for the sake of it, here is a green one. You will notice that it's actually worse for the entire picture. Because there is no contrast. I really wanted the waterfall and river to be a different color for the sake of composition here ;)
@Mozared: Go I will try to reupload it as soon as possible. The bunny can stay at the very end as a treat for watching. So it's not removed and you are in no dilemma! :P
0
Uploaded the whole thing, put it over here: http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/development/terrain/50109-the-sleeping-beast-timelapse-video-workflow-from-wte/
0
Figured I should give it it's own thread, instead of putting it into the WTE, since it's somewhat helpful in general for people who are interested in Terrain work. Since I didn't really do any decent commentary on it at all, I don't want to put it into the Tutorial section. This really is something for advanced people who understand what is going on, not beginners :)
Just to give you a quick idea of the workflow I used here:
And finally here is the video to go along with all this text. It might have some pixel issues sometimes for quick movement, I went back and reduced it to 4 Bit instead of 16 Bit. But it cut the size by 1/4th so the upload didn't take 5h again. Sound issues around 15-17m, prepare your ears for it.
I hope this was somewhat helpful for a few of you for future works. I might do another video or two regarding other terrain sets and types of terrain works and workflows and this time include what I do in the editor instead of being a idiot that has fraps set only to recording the editor view.
And as a reward for watching/reading, here is a baby bunny!
0
Haven't gotten around to messing with the new walls yet, though I was happy to see them in the editor while checking new assets.
Made this forever ago, but I shall still leave it here :P
0
There is other options too. Like you could probably simulate something along the lines of a universe in which each player has his own planet and you can send a fleet to attack someone near you, make alliances, trade on a global market, etc.
Something akin to a Browsergame or EVE would become possible here, though obviously both sides shouldn't be able to control their fleet. That wouldn't work out so well I fear for the invader which would've to rely on the AI.
0
@JacktheArcher: Go
Trial and error. Just don't pick something ultra complex as a theme early on and you should be set. Simple themes like "Firefight" or "Flightdeck" should work :)
0
@Crainy: Go We just tried it and the delay still is there. It's as little as it has always been after they halved the sync timer.
But the sync timer exists for their normal matchmaking, so I really doubt that it is gone.
It's the same delay we had months ago for our mod and the only way to get rid of it would be if the sync was disabled and it could be done locally.
Do you use any different solution from trigger button press reading? Like abilities or something (Bounty liked to do that).
0
Raynor is actually a mage from WoW. He conjured the gun.
I actually spend over 20m checking the cinematic bit by bit. It's a magic gun. Raynor doesn't have it. Kerrigan doesn't have it either. It just ... appears. It must be the manifestation of Raynor's anger or something. Scary.
0
@Enexy: Go Well, here is hoping for a positive one!
0
@Enexy: Go Well a example is that you can create infinite teleportation of unit spawns between 2 zones, if done right, it will utterly break SC2 and any weaker PC. There is other things as well, but that one even a complete idiot can do.
So if someone made use of code injection in that way, he could ruin the games of anyone subbed to that map if there is a hole you overlooked. In case of a really popular map this could be thousands of people at once. And guess who gets the complaints? Not you at first ;)
Obviously code injection would be one of the most needed features if you really want to make dynamic content. Otherwise you might as well run a random trigger that picks from 100 dynamic events already set up.
This is just one of the concerns I'd have as a Dev with a fan-program. If you wanna try and run this by Blizzard for approval, you should make sure you have all your bases covered for questions like this.
I hope you get a stamp of approval though, which is why I brought this stuff up. This could be really good stuff if it's not eaten alive by a cease and desist answer. But for the love of god don't post it on the official forums as a question, go through our Blizzard contact for this.
There is a lot of very stupid idiots out there that would love to ruin the day of a lot of people at once and your program might be an angle of approach for them if it gets popular.
0
@Enexy: Go Ye that should work.
One more thing that came up in my head just now: How much will this be secured from shenanigans by malicious intent? I mean we managed to produce instagib maps back in WC3 that overloaded PCs easily. SC2 can do the same funny enough. So how do you intend to circumvent that?
This is probably also something Blizz would want to know, aside from the obvious checking if this impacts BNet security (I doubt it, but those are concerns for such a big company).
It's not the first time the map making community uses 3rd party tools. Reinvent the Craft back in WC3 allowed WASD + Mouse stuff already. And DotA had it's Blacklist and Hosting Bots. But that was a different time.