This was the same in Warcraft 3. All custom map content was property of Blizzard. You can read it up in the editor's TOS/EULA. Nobody cared, because nobody knew.
It’s not that nobody cared, it was the fact that custom games weren’t expected to be a big part of the game. Chris Sigaty has said that interviews regarding learning “the hard way”
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You're talking about "taking control", but in the end it's still your decision. They could take your map and do whatever they want with it, but they won't because that'd be more than just bad publicity.
I don’t think the issue around control is so that they grab it and do whatever they want it’s more the fact that they can take any map down for any reasons they have. You could say that this was in War3 as well but no maps were taken down because of that in this time.
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The 10MB is a hard limitation, granted. They did say they're working on it, though. So I believe we'll be granted more as the development goes along.
However, I don't think that space is the actual problem. Much more it's bandwidth.
If you allowed a map to be 100MB then it would not only put enormous stress on the battlenet servers and slow down everything else.
The users would also need a very long time to download it, overcrowding game slots, increasing lobby time for everyone.
Agreed which is why this system will be very hard to work in the long run. If custom games go big one day will Blizzard have the capacity of sustain them?
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Having a centralized server system bring a lot of disadvantages, but it also has it's good sides.
Indeed, hence why I said no easy solutions.
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You could also give other stuff to them, like a couple of their map making tools. As I said, everyone will cry how unfair this is, but it might be a really good idea.
Quite so but you got to realize for some people especially underage spending additional income on games isn’t viable for them. Or maybe people can afford it but when they thnk: “Spending more money on this game just for that, forget it” Sure the dedicated people might remain but this could potentially draw away many people.
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Being able to rate maps ingame won't help much also - every mapmaker will rate his map 5/5 to get it up the ladder, so you need to take the number of votes into consideration. 4.5/5 (50 Votes) needs to be higher up than 5/5 (2 Votes)
Quite right, I forgot to mention that but it would be a simple weighed sum. Perhaps using a cumulative normal distribution so that new maps can have a little help and strong, already popular maps can’t climb that easily.
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I don't think they've added a lot of stuff to "impress" us, instead I think they just didn't get finished. It feels like they released Sc2 although they weren't quite done with everything.
Of course that’s another way of putting it. As pretty much every other Blizzard game, it was this way because SC2 was rushed to release . However, think of the implications: you are at blizzcon and you have to show something that have to make me excited on some game. It makes perfect sense marketing wise.
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And don't underestimate a tool like the Galaxy Editor. It is a damn load of work to create such a thing, and it's even more work to make it function 100% correctly.
I don’t think I stated I underestimate it. Quite the contrary personally I admire how much work got into it to make things like the ones they showed at blizzcons. The Hero system however is something that was expected and they’ve also confirmed more than 1 year before the game’s release and guess what it is unfinished. Why is it unfinished? Is it because it is hard? No, the community can do it thru really painful process. The chief engineer probably said “stop, we’ll get back to this later”.
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I think with Blizzard DotA they don't really want to do anything spectaculary new, they named it DotA for a reason. They want a good and solid game that everyone knows and everyone loves, to start said bonfire.
Of course you are comparing gameplay elements of an FPS to an RTS which isn’t good for comparision but let me go on and do the following comparison.. Perhaps you will see the picture this way: What ths difference between SC and WAR3?
Heroes with levels, Spell System, Items, Day/Night Cycle, Inventories, Shops, Interactive doodads (destroyables). All of these are gameplay elements. Think of it as an Horizontal expansion. Of course there are new units with better graphics and those would be vertical expansion.
Now compare the following WAR3 to SC2. Ladder-wise none of the elements exist, just interactive doodads in the form of watchtowers. It does have a better graphics, and more units, much like your comparison between Unreal.
Going strictly this way into game design really doesn’t offer much. There was a game that took this concept and failed, its called Empire Earth (lots of units, better graphics, lots of ages).
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Left2Die is an RTS, isn't it? If I remember correctly they said it's basically the zombie-at-night killer mission from the campaign, just designed for Coop.
And why are you making an AoS then? I wouldn't call it the pinn
acle of RTS, y'know :3
Yea, I forgot to remove Left2Die when I was writing this.
While it doesn’t have any macro elements, it does have all the micro elements. SC2 as it is probably 50% micro and 50% macro (people at TL could probably argue here). WAR3 was probably 80% micro and 20% macro. Any AoS is simply a different proportion of these elements that do fall into the category of an RTS. It might not be a pinnacle of skill but that’s a different thing.
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Personally I love that they try to broaden the use of the Editor. We've always tried to surpass the limits of the Wc3 editor, because it just wasn't enough to create our ideas. Every ounce of features the editor has is another potential genre.
So do I but not in this direction. I’d take a better Hero System over a rainbow colored units anyday.
I really had a 3 page essay regarding why this post should be deleted but I didn't want to bother into another endless debate. All I'm going to say right now is this:
Even if you were in for making maps safer and better protected why do you specifically allow that second attachment. Sure it is an example of how to unprotect a map but that is a complete disrespect your site is showing towards the maker of that map, unless of course he is allowing it to be there.
You want to have your little discussion on open source that's fine. You want to have a specific protected map along with your open source discussion. That isn't right.**
Before starting this small wall of text I’d like to state this is to be considered constructive criticism. If I felt this wouldn’t help anything at all I wouldn’t have bother writing this. If you know who I am you’d know I care for the direction of this company and I hope they properly address some of these issues. While the real reasons of how they do and make decisions are unknown to the community the consensus is pretty strong on the current state in some areas of the development.
Personally, I been feeling the direction of the map-making department to be misguided, inefficient and of mediocre performance. I am referring to the level design team (the map-makers) after SC2 release. These are strong words so I’ll go on and elaborate:
StarCraft 2 approach to map-making
I understand this isn’t the same gaming industry it was 10 years ago and that nowadays gaming companies must take bigger measures to ensure that fan made content is in full compliance with their EULA and TOS. Having a copyrighted song in a fan made map or having “bad words” in it could bring up consequences in the form of lawsuits, disputes and other troubling matters that would irrevocably cost money.
Any map made by the GE is entirely the property of Blizzard Entertainment, according to their EULA. I believe this goes too far. Of course I don’t believe it should be the opposite scenario with everyone simply taking SC2 assets and engine to make their own games and selling them. However there is no in between. Let’s take for instance Epic Games, another really successful gaming company. Epic games made the Unreal Engine a very powerful tool that allows the creation of entire different games. However unlike the Galaxy Editor, you are able to license their engine. This obviously creates profit for both the licensor and the licensee. At the moment there is absolutely no way of doing this with the Galaxy Editor. However, Blizzard has stated they plan to release the Marketplace. Popular maps could be submitted and should they be considered as a premium map, Blizzard will award some sort of “economic incentive” to the map-maker. In other words they are taking complete control of what you make and will give you parts of their profits. Furthermore, the map or level you make can only be hosted on the battle.net service. This basically gives the developers all bargaining power with regards to hosting, publishing and control. I’m not saying this isn’t the case with other companies or engines but making some level or map with the Galaxy Editor certainly does not provide you with some freedom in terms of what you do once your map or level is made compared to other companies.
The maximum filesize in megabytes a map can have to be published in battle.net is 10.5. Sure you are allowed 5 map slots but no map can go higher than that. Map-makers know that this is nothing especially in terms of SC2. In WarCraft III you were allowed up to 4MB and later on to 8MB. This forced map-makers to: reduce quality of custom models, reduce quality of custom sounds, reduce quality or removing the Loading Screen Image or to remove custom music (if any). This was WarCraft III. In SC2, models are bigger in filesize and the standard map size is bigger even after all the compressions GE does. This clearly does not compensate for the extra 2.5 MB allowed space. This gives the community a really tight spot to maneuver in. Furthermore they give this option to everyone which is both inefficient and ineffective. What percentage of players intend to publish maps? What percentage of players have even opened the editor? What percentage of players even know an editor exists? I wouldn’t think this number to be huge. It is a reality that those percentages won’t be high and thus the space allocated for publishing in their servers will never get to their supposedly max capacity of around 200TB (do the math, number of players who have purchased the game X (10.5) X 5). Allocation of publishing space is therefore inefficient because it gives the same space to everyone regardless of who you are and ineffective since you are really in a tight spot given the 10.5MB restriction.
I started brainstorming some possible solutions and this is what I got: How about give 50MB to people who really want to go into map-making? Then the matter would be to identify the proper people involved. How about giving the space upon request? Well this system could be abused. Here’s one better how about giving 100MB to everyone and deleting maps that don’t make a certain popularity cut let’s say every 3 months? This also raises problems since good potential maps might never make it and the system could also be abused (still I would think to be something better than the current situation). There is no easy solution, only hard choices. The reason they are at this predicament is because of a design flaw of “takeover and do everything yourself” instead of the server based method that has been used in many FPS games and even in WarCraft III. They’ve decided to take over most aspects of publishing. I recall downloading around 100MB per map when I played UT2K4 6 years ago and it never seemed a problem. Quite the contrary when I was downloading so much content I usually had nice expectations of the map I was about to play so personally it was never a problem for me.
The popularity system has received some improvement but it still has a lot to wish for. Getting your map to be played has to rely on external promotion. “So not only do I have to make a really good map to be popular, I have also to work extensively on promoting it” Go to sites, make videos or trailers and gather people to just try to distribute your map. Of course there is not much the dev team can do when there are thousands of people trying to make their maps popular.
So again I started thinking about what could be done. Maybe how about putting someone of your staff to rate and provide comments some submitted maps. This wouldn’t be objective or cheap. I would still think it would be better than the current state. How about a rating system? Allow players to rate maps once (account based to avoid abuse) to provide something like this:
Map Name: Siege Room Wars 4.5/5 Rating with 50 votes.
I believe that would be a start in the right direction. Not just a popularity system based on how many people play a map or how new it is. Still it wouldn’t do much as the current interface for map selection is limited and the filters don’t do a good job to sort games. In essence it can be hard to distribute a map when there are one hundred other maps around. It’s not like before when you hosted your map and your game showed up at a list that was constantly refreshing.
My next point is the Galaxy Editor itself. The GE has received some work since release but still there are fundamental issues that aren’t given much importance. Certainly the community can agree that the GE can do pretty much about everything except some stuff the WE (World Editor) was able to do just fine. They way water works on a hardcoded #x# footprint, the height limitations and the asymmetrical terrain tools. All these features are features the World Editor had but are absent in the Galaxy Editor. Of course Blizzard has said that some of these features they will add “if they have time”. Furthermore, there is a lot of stuff that existed in the WE that the GE can do but it is incredebily harder with the current Blizzard system. Hero creation, leveling, spell leveling, hero revival for instance are gameplay elements that could be setup in the WE relatively fast. I understand we are talking about different games but we are talking about the same genre, RTS.
Then there is also the issue the GE has a 0-5% chance of crashing every time you load up art or sound assets. Of course there are ways around this (setup frequent saves when necessary) but still it is an issue that hasn’t been properly addressed. This is completely personal but I believe there might be a positive correlation between % of GE crashing and % of people abandoning their work because they won’t be too happy about having to redo their work.
Now instead of discussing the obvious solutions here, I’d like to brainstorm on why something like this happened. It really seems the dev team hired new people to engineer the galaxy editor and asked them to do stuff that was incredibly crazy and amazing. They did this in order for designers to show some of these features at BlizzCons like the 3rd person shooter Dustin Browder showed at 2009 Blizzcon or the rainbow archon at past BlizzCon. However it seems these people that were hired didn’t know the WE that well as they clearly forgot some of the tools the community wanted.
Custom Maps made by Blizzard
Blizz Dota: Of course the map hasn’t been released so you part of these arguments can be considered speculation but it is indeed a credible trend based on the evidence provided so far on Blizzcon. I believe the dev team main purpose of recreating this map is as a last resort to start fire in the bonfire. They looked at a map that is obviously popular and know that could be played by a large part of the community. They’ll probably add shiny effects and other model assets (which I think they look really good, don’t get me wrong) to make it look better. However I believe in terms of new things I don’t think it will deliver. If we take away the art assets and models, what would be the difference between this map and WarCraft III DotA, or HoN, or LoL or Valve’s Dota2? A few more spells, more heroes? This would be good for a fanmade map but we are talking about the professional map-making team. The overall performance of the professional map developing department is therefore mediocre. I clearly believe the level design team can achieve a lot more.
The fact this map would be open sourced makes me wonder if SC2 will eventually turn out to have similar issues as with WAR3. I am personally working on an AoS (with many different considerations and variants) and I know, independently there are a few other people working on similar projects and then there is of course the existing DotA substitute for SC2. All these makes me think. Is this the future of RTS? Is this where it will all end? DotA type of maps? I believe throughout my gaming time I’ve seen many genres that are fun to me and to others but lack the popularity to becomes good maps. I’m all for having more maps (as it might create some interesting competition) but I think Blizz is going too far with supporting one particular RTS genre. And by the way, I’ve made other non AoS maps.
Burning Tide: This is one of the first attempts by the dev team to spur hype on map-making. While it is a nice alternative from a melee game, it offers nothing in terms of new content. The only significant difference is that the terrain is different to accommodate 2 forces of players. I personally didn’t dislike it but I just felt it is nothing but a melee map with one extra variant. The team claims this was one of the most popular missions according to fans.
Surely the map offers new potential tactics to employ but it also reduces the number of semi-optimal strategies and this creates imbalance. Consequently this map isn’t going to be considered for competitive gaming much less E-SPORTS. While the map is regarded ok by the community I think it is a poor map based on the fact that the professional map-making team made a map that a regular fan could make in a week (or in my case a couple of days). It’s a regular map, with 1 trigger that toggles the lava up with a little transmission and another trigger that toggles the lava down with another transmission.
Left2Die & Starjeweled: Really they sound like they might be “fun”. Of course I would best do by playing before judging so I’ll reserve my comments to my general impression of this map. On the good side, I’m sure the map will show again one of the strengths of the Galaxy Editor and will probably further incentivize more people to get on it. However I didn’t buy SC2 to play these types of maps. I bought SC2 to play RTS type maps. If I wanted to play Mario Party type of games I’d go purchase it and play them. I think you should play to your strengths even as a game designer. If you going to make the best RTS game there is then stick to that and make sure you accomplish that, I wouldn’t try to add other genres to the game. I remember when Dustin Browder showed that the GE was able to create 3rd person shooters and everyone was excited including me. Then later we all found out this wasn’t viable for multiplayer because of the network lag restrictions. Consequently I say the team needs to focus on developing RTS based maps and not adapt other genres into RTS.
Don't need to know everything about it, just Actors, Effects, Abilities , Validators and Requirements for a AoS type project involving a lot of ability work. More information will be provided upon request.
Knowledge on spell/ability creation. Anything else is a plus but need specific knowledge on that area.
Title says it all please PM or mail me at [email protected]
Sorry to jump in the conversation but this is something I have to speak my mind. Also I have no idea how curse's quoting system works so it really bothers you just PM on how to do it and I'll be sure to take into account for my next post.
“Oi. . . I'm about to lose a lot of popularity, but a lot of you need to hear this: you're all a bunch of greedy idiots. “
Umm I'm sorry can you address who are you talking to? Are you calling the community a bunch of greedy idiots? Even if they were and I'm not saying they are this is totally unprofessional by your part. Keep your cool.
“I beg to differ. I learned how to use the editor by downloading existing maps, piecing through them and editing them to see what the resulting change was. The reason for this being that it's 10x faster to take an existing map and alter fields than it is to stumble through a blank map trying to make something successfully and THEN tweak it to see the results. You cut out the hours of "I fail at life" and get straight to the "so THIS is how it works." You don't learn how to play an instrument by writing your own music to discover music theory. You learn by playing music written by other people. “
From a creative side point of view. You can learn a few concepts from playing music written by other people but your composing abilities probably won't be any good if you didn’t bother to learn the theory behind it. If anything it will just be some crappy improv based on the music you copied and of course that is a rather optimistic way of seeing it as most map-makers will simply just make a couple of modifications and take full credit. That is the reality. People will type in google “Map Deprotectors” and with some luck they’ll be pointed here.
“This kind of mentality is just selfish. You come to a site that is full of helpful information and people willing to bend over backwards walking you through anything from the most basic of mind-numbingly easy steps to advanced concepts. Yet you seem to expect that you can take this knowledge you've taken from others and then hide it in your map because you don't want to share? Why would I want to support this at all? “
At your questions regarding sharing, this happens all the time in the world. It's called copyright infringement of course here we aren't making money and we aren't on our own engines and assets. Of course you could argue that science itself is better off with everyone sharing knowledge to everyone. However just as there is a big incentive to create there is also a less ethical incentive to copy, destroy and take credit. That is the issue and not copyright infringement.
How can they be so selifish? I don't think they are selfish at all, they are cautious. If you make a map from scratch, a big map, not just a minigame map and made every single line of code, placed every single doodad, worked countless hours in data editor and bother to make it good looking and balanced (this might take years) and you want to share that with everyone else, I think that is something honorable and I would admire you for that but it’s your choice. When you try to put your preferences on the rest then that wouldn’t be good would it? Choice is the only true freedom there is as Gabriel Tosh said =) (at least if you decided to stick with him instead of Nova).
I agree understanding hacking is good for better protect data but I don't agree in distributing the information to everyone in the world. Think of this analogy: understanding nuclear fission technology is good for the general welfare of society, given that knowledge to everyone around the world would be the complete opposite.
"Simply put, if I write a guide that claims I can teach you how to break into ANY car with certain locking method, efforts would be taken to develop a new method that was more secure. "
Distribute that information to the general public, and you’ll go to jail in my country of course I’m not talking about the US but even shortly after 9/11 there was a citizen that was able to manage to get combustible materials on a plane to prove that security inspections at airport weren’t good enough. He was taken into custody and went to trail (I believe he settled instead of going to prison but still) His intentions as good as they were, were at the wrong channels.
“Personally, I think it's just plain foolish to want to be able to use a program you didn't develop that comes with a game you didn't make to create maps using assets that don't belong to you. . . and then expect to have all the rights associated with the people who DO own all of the above. Now if you had created custom models, textures etc and imported them I completely support the protection of these kinds of assets. Unfortunately this isn't the case.”
That is BE decision not yours or anyone’s here and they’ve decided to add locking mechanisms for users to use in their maps. Does that tell you anything?
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@s3rius: Go
It’s not that nobody cared, it was the fact that custom games weren’t expected to be a big part of the game. Chris Sigaty has said that interviews regarding learning “the hard way”
I don’t think the issue around control is so that they grab it and do whatever they want it’s more the fact that they can take any map down for any reasons they have. You could say that this was in War3 as well but no maps were taken down because of that in this time.
Agreed which is why this system will be very hard to work in the long run. If custom games go big one day will Blizzard have the capacity of sustain them?
Indeed, hence why I said no easy solutions.
Quite so but you got to realize for some people especially underage spending additional income on games isn’t viable for them. Or maybe people can afford it but when they thnk: “Spending more money on this game just for that, forget it” Sure the dedicated people might remain but this could potentially draw away many people.
Quite right, I forgot to mention that but it would be a simple weighed sum. Perhaps using a cumulative normal distribution so that new maps can have a little help and strong, already popular maps can’t climb that easily.
Of course that’s another way of putting it. As pretty much every other Blizzard game, it was this way because SC2 was rushed to release . However, think of the implications: you are at blizzcon and you have to show something that have to make me excited on some game. It makes perfect sense marketing wise.
I don’t think I stated I underestimate it. Quite the contrary personally I admire how much work got into it to make things like the ones they showed at blizzcons. The Hero system however is something that was expected and they’ve also confirmed more than 1 year before the game’s release and guess what it is unfinished. Why is it unfinished? Is it because it is hard? No, the community can do it thru really painful process. The chief engineer probably said “stop, we’ll get back to this later”.
Of course you are comparing gameplay elements of an FPS to an RTS which isn’t good for comparision but let me go on and do the following comparison.. Perhaps you will see the picture this way: What ths difference between SC and WAR3?
Heroes with levels, Spell System, Items, Day/Night Cycle, Inventories, Shops, Interactive doodads (destroyables). All of these are gameplay elements. Think of it as an Horizontal expansion. Of course there are new units with better graphics and those would be vertical expansion.
Now compare the following WAR3 to SC2. Ladder-wise none of the elements exist, just interactive doodads in the form of watchtowers. It does have a better graphics, and more units, much like your comparison between Unreal.
Going strictly this way into game design really doesn’t offer much. There was a game that took this concept and failed, its called Empire Earth (lots of units, better graphics, lots of ages).
Yea, I forgot to remove Left2Die when I was writing this.
While it doesn’t have any macro elements, it does have all the micro elements. SC2 as it is probably 50% micro and 50% macro (people at TL could probably argue here). WAR3 was probably 80% micro and 20% macro. Any AoS is simply a different proportion of these elements that do fall into the category of an RTS. It might not be a pinnacle of skill but that’s a different thing.
So do I but not in this direction. I’d take a better Hero System over a rainbow colored units anyday.
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@PSGMud: Go
Sure you can get a hold of your idea but you will have to completely work on another editor which defeats the purpose of it.
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[quote=223237]
I really had a 3 page essay regarding why this post should be deleted but I didn't want to bother into another endless debate. All I'm going to say right now is this:
Even if you were in for making maps safer and better protected why do you specifically allow that second attachment. Sure it is an example of how to unprotect a map but that is a complete disrespect your site is showing towards the maker of that map, unless of course he is allowing it to be there.
You want to have your little discussion on open source that's fine. You want to have a specific protected map along with your open source discussion. That isn't right.**
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Before starting this small wall of text I’d like to state this is to be considered constructive criticism. If I felt this wouldn’t help anything at all I wouldn’t have bother writing this. If you know who I am you’d know I care for the direction of this company and I hope they properly address some of these issues. While the real reasons of how they do and make decisions are unknown to the community the consensus is pretty strong on the current state in some areas of the development.
Personally, I been feeling the direction of the map-making department to be misguided, inefficient and of mediocre performance. I am referring to the level design team (the map-makers) after SC2 release. These are strong words so I’ll go on and elaborate:
StarCraft 2 approach to map-making
I understand this isn’t the same gaming industry it was 10 years ago and that nowadays gaming companies must take bigger measures to ensure that fan made content is in full compliance with their EULA and TOS. Having a copyrighted song in a fan made map or having “bad words” in it could bring up consequences in the form of lawsuits, disputes and other troubling matters that would irrevocably cost money.
Any map made by the GE is entirely the property of Blizzard Entertainment, according to their EULA. I believe this goes too far. Of course I don’t believe it should be the opposite scenario with everyone simply taking SC2 assets and engine to make their own games and selling them. However there is no in between. Let’s take for instance Epic Games, another really successful gaming company. Epic games made the Unreal Engine a very powerful tool that allows the creation of entire different games. However unlike the Galaxy Editor, you are able to license their engine. This obviously creates profit for both the licensor and the licensee. At the moment there is absolutely no way of doing this with the Galaxy Editor. However, Blizzard has stated they plan to release the Marketplace. Popular maps could be submitted and should they be considered as a premium map, Blizzard will award some sort of “economic incentive” to the map-maker. In other words they are taking complete control of what you make and will give you parts of their profits. Furthermore, the map or level you make can only be hosted on the battle.net service. This basically gives the developers all bargaining power with regards to hosting, publishing and control. I’m not saying this isn’t the case with other companies or engines but making some level or map with the Galaxy Editor certainly does not provide you with some freedom in terms of what you do once your map or level is made compared to other companies.
The maximum filesize in megabytes a map can have to be published in battle.net is 10.5. Sure you are allowed 5 map slots but no map can go higher than that. Map-makers know that this is nothing especially in terms of SC2. In WarCraft III you were allowed up to 4MB and later on to 8MB. This forced map-makers to: reduce quality of custom models, reduce quality of custom sounds, reduce quality or removing the Loading Screen Image or to remove custom music (if any). This was WarCraft III. In SC2, models are bigger in filesize and the standard map size is bigger even after all the compressions GE does. This clearly does not compensate for the extra 2.5 MB allowed space. This gives the community a really tight spot to maneuver in. Furthermore they give this option to everyone which is both inefficient and ineffective. What percentage of players intend to publish maps? What percentage of players have even opened the editor? What percentage of players even know an editor exists? I wouldn’t think this number to be huge. It is a reality that those percentages won’t be high and thus the space allocated for publishing in their servers will never get to their supposedly max capacity of around 200TB (do the math, number of players who have purchased the game X (10.5) X 5). Allocation of publishing space is therefore inefficient because it gives the same space to everyone regardless of who you are and ineffective since you are really in a tight spot given the 10.5MB restriction.
I started brainstorming some possible solutions and this is what I got: How about give 50MB to people who really want to go into map-making? Then the matter would be to identify the proper people involved. How about giving the space upon request? Well this system could be abused. Here’s one better how about giving 100MB to everyone and deleting maps that don’t make a certain popularity cut let’s say every 3 months? This also raises problems since good potential maps might never make it and the system could also be abused (still I would think to be something better than the current situation). There is no easy solution, only hard choices. The reason they are at this predicament is because of a design flaw of “takeover and do everything yourself” instead of the server based method that has been used in many FPS games and even in WarCraft III. They’ve decided to take over most aspects of publishing. I recall downloading around 100MB per map when I played UT2K4 6 years ago and it never seemed a problem. Quite the contrary when I was downloading so much content I usually had nice expectations of the map I was about to play so personally it was never a problem for me.
The popularity system has received some improvement but it still has a lot to wish for. Getting your map to be played has to rely on external promotion. “So not only do I have to make a really good map to be popular, I have also to work extensively on promoting it” Go to sites, make videos or trailers and gather people to just try to distribute your map. Of course there is not much the dev team can do when there are thousands of people trying to make their maps popular.
So again I started thinking about what could be done. Maybe how about putting someone of your staff to rate and provide comments some submitted maps. This wouldn’t be objective or cheap. I would still think it would be better than the current state. How about a rating system? Allow players to rate maps once (account based to avoid abuse) to provide something like this:
Map Name: Siege Room Wars 4.5/5 Rating with 50 votes.
I believe that would be a start in the right direction. Not just a popularity system based on how many people play a map or how new it is. Still it wouldn’t do much as the current interface for map selection is limited and the filters don’t do a good job to sort games. In essence it can be hard to distribute a map when there are one hundred other maps around. It’s not like before when you hosted your map and your game showed up at a list that was constantly refreshing.
My next point is the Galaxy Editor itself. The GE has received some work since release but still there are fundamental issues that aren’t given much importance. Certainly the community can agree that the GE can do pretty much about everything except some stuff the WE (World Editor) was able to do just fine. They way water works on a hardcoded #x# footprint, the height limitations and the asymmetrical terrain tools. All these features are features the World Editor had but are absent in the Galaxy Editor. Of course Blizzard has said that some of these features they will add “if they have time”. Furthermore, there is a lot of stuff that existed in the WE that the GE can do but it is incredebily harder with the current Blizzard system. Hero creation, leveling, spell leveling, hero revival for instance are gameplay elements that could be setup in the WE relatively fast. I understand we are talking about different games but we are talking about the same genre, RTS.
Then there is also the issue the GE has a 0-5% chance of crashing every time you load up art or sound assets. Of course there are ways around this (setup frequent saves when necessary) but still it is an issue that hasn’t been properly addressed. This is completely personal but I believe there might be a positive correlation between % of GE crashing and % of people abandoning their work because they won’t be too happy about having to redo their work.
Now instead of discussing the obvious solutions here, I’d like to brainstorm on why something like this happened. It really seems the dev team hired new people to engineer the galaxy editor and asked them to do stuff that was incredibly crazy and amazing. They did this in order for designers to show some of these features at BlizzCons like the 3rd person shooter Dustin Browder showed at 2009 Blizzcon or the rainbow archon at past BlizzCon. However it seems these people that were hired didn’t know the WE that well as they clearly forgot some of the tools the community wanted.
Custom Maps made by Blizzard
Blizz Dota: Of course the map hasn’t been released so you part of these arguments can be considered speculation but it is indeed a credible trend based on the evidence provided so far on Blizzcon. I believe the dev team main purpose of recreating this map is as a last resort to start fire in the bonfire. They looked at a map that is obviously popular and know that could be played by a large part of the community. They’ll probably add shiny effects and other model assets (which I think they look really good, don’t get me wrong) to make it look better. However I believe in terms of new things I don’t think it will deliver. If we take away the art assets and models, what would be the difference between this map and WarCraft III DotA, or HoN, or LoL or Valve’s Dota2? A few more spells, more heroes? This would be good for a fanmade map but we are talking about the professional map-making team. The overall performance of the professional map developing department is therefore mediocre. I clearly believe the level design team can achieve a lot more.
The fact this map would be open sourced makes me wonder if SC2 will eventually turn out to have similar issues as with WAR3. I am personally working on an AoS (with many different considerations and variants) and I know, independently there are a few other people working on similar projects and then there is of course the existing DotA substitute for SC2. All these makes me think. Is this the future of RTS? Is this where it will all end? DotA type of maps? I believe throughout my gaming time I’ve seen many genres that are fun to me and to others but lack the popularity to becomes good maps. I’m all for having more maps (as it might create some interesting competition) but I think Blizz is going too far with supporting one particular RTS genre. And by the way, I’ve made other non AoS maps.
Burning Tide: This is one of the first attempts by the dev team to spur hype on map-making. While it is a nice alternative from a melee game, it offers nothing in terms of new content. The only significant difference is that the terrain is different to accommodate 2 forces of players. I personally didn’t dislike it but I just felt it is nothing but a melee map with one extra variant. The team claims this was one of the most popular missions according to fans.
Surely the map offers new potential tactics to employ but it also reduces the number of semi-optimal strategies and this creates imbalance. Consequently this map isn’t going to be considered for competitive gaming much less E-SPORTS. While the map is regarded ok by the community I think it is a poor map based on the fact that the professional map-making team made a map that a regular fan could make in a week (or in my case a couple of days). It’s a regular map, with 1 trigger that toggles the lava up with a little transmission and another trigger that toggles the lava down with another transmission.
Left2Die & Starjeweled: Really they sound like they might be “fun”. Of course I would best do by playing before judging so I’ll reserve my comments to my general impression of this map. On the good side, I’m sure the map will show again one of the strengths of the Galaxy Editor and will probably further incentivize more people to get on it. However I didn’t buy SC2 to play these types of maps. I bought SC2 to play RTS type maps. If I wanted to play Mario Party type of games I’d go purchase it and play them. I think you should play to your strengths even as a game designer. If you going to make the best RTS game there is then stick to that and make sure you accomplish that, I wouldn’t try to add other genres to the game. I remember when Dustin Browder showed that the GE was able to create 3rd person shooters and everyone was excited including me. Then later we all found out this wasn’t viable for multiplayer because of the network lag restrictions. Consequently I say the team needs to focus on developing RTS based maps and not adapt other genres into RTS.
I put my anti-flame cloak now.
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@nevjmac: Go
This guy: http://forums.sc2mapster.com/development/editor-bugs-and-feedback/1698-its-giving-me-an-error-could-not-allocate-global-memory/
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@Underp4ntz: Go
Do you think you could make her have her hair zerg tendrils? The ones from the SC2 ending cinematic.
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@SpindleOfFate: Go
Read the title of the thread sir. It's an AoS type of map not a TD. Further info is provided upon request.
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Stick to topic or else don't bother posting. As to why this is a new thread it's for a separate project as for the other one I found someone.
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Preferably knowledgeable in the fields of custom spells and items. Dedication is the most important element.
Brief description of the project:
A note to mods: This map is not posted on SC2mapster so therefore it cannot be posted here without our approval.
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2 threads =/= a dozen. Simple math
Will keep that in mind.
@Danowl PM me plz
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Don't need to know everything about it, just Actors, Effects, Abilities , Validators and Requirements for a AoS type project involving a lot of ability work. More information will be provided upon request.
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@Genopath: Go
bump!
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your team provides me data editing help on my map.
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Knowledge on spell/ability creation. Anything else is a plus but need specific knowledge on that area. Title says it all please PM or mail me at [email protected]
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Sorry to jump in the conversation but this is something I have to speak my mind. Also I have no idea how curse's quoting system works so it really bothers you just PM on how to do it and I'll be sure to take into account for my next post.
“Oi. . . I'm about to lose a lot of popularity, but a lot of you need to hear this: you're all a bunch of greedy idiots. “
Umm I'm sorry can you address who are you talking to? Are you calling the community a bunch of greedy idiots? Even if they were and I'm not saying they are this is totally unprofessional by your part. Keep your cool.
“I beg to differ. I learned how to use the editor by downloading existing maps, piecing through them and editing them to see what the resulting change was. The reason for this being that it's 10x faster to take an existing map and alter fields than it is to stumble through a blank map trying to make something successfully and THEN tweak it to see the results. You cut out the hours of "I fail at life" and get straight to the "so THIS is how it works." You don't learn how to play an instrument by writing your own music to discover music theory. You learn by playing music written by other people. “
From a creative side point of view. You can learn a few concepts from playing music written by other people but your composing abilities probably won't be any good if you didn’t bother to learn the theory behind it. If anything it will just be some crappy improv based on the music you copied and of course that is a rather optimistic way of seeing it as most map-makers will simply just make a couple of modifications and take full credit. That is the reality. People will type in google “Map Deprotectors” and with some luck they’ll be pointed here.
“This kind of mentality is just selfish. You come to a site that is full of helpful information and people willing to bend over backwards walking you through anything from the most basic of mind-numbingly easy steps to advanced concepts. Yet you seem to expect that you can take this knowledge you've taken from others and then hide it in your map because you don't want to share? Why would I want to support this at all? “
At your questions regarding sharing, this happens all the time in the world. It's called copyright infringement of course here we aren't making money and we aren't on our own engines and assets. Of course you could argue that science itself is better off with everyone sharing knowledge to everyone. However just as there is a big incentive to create there is also a less ethical incentive to copy, destroy and take credit. That is the issue and not copyright infringement.
How can they be so selifish? I don't think they are selfish at all, they are cautious. If you make a map from scratch, a big map, not just a minigame map and made every single line of code, placed every single doodad, worked countless hours in data editor and bother to make it good looking and balanced (this might take years) and you want to share that with everyone else, I think that is something honorable and I would admire you for that but it’s your choice. When you try to put your preferences on the rest then that wouldn’t be good would it? Choice is the only true freedom there is as Gabriel Tosh said =) (at least if you decided to stick with him instead of Nova).
I agree understanding hacking is good for better protect data but I don't agree in distributing the information to everyone in the world. Think of this analogy: understanding nuclear fission technology is good for the general welfare of society, given that knowledge to everyone around the world would be the complete opposite.
"Simply put, if I write a guide that claims I can teach you how to break into ANY car with certain locking method, efforts would be taken to develop a new method that was more secure. "
Distribute that information to the general public, and you’ll go to jail in my country of course I’m not talking about the US but even shortly after 9/11 there was a citizen that was able to manage to get combustible materials on a plane to prove that security inspections at airport weren’t good enough. He was taken into custody and went to trail (I believe he settled instead of going to prison but still) His intentions as good as they were, were at the wrong channels.
“Personally, I think it's just plain foolish to want to be able to use a program you didn't develop that comes with a game you didn't make to create maps using assets that don't belong to you. . . and then expect to have all the rights associated with the people who DO own all of the above. Now if you had created custom models, textures etc and imported them I completely support the protection of these kinds of assets. Unfortunately this isn't the case.”
That is BE decision not yours or anyone’s here and they’ve decided to add locking mechanisms for users to use in their maps. Does that tell you anything?