Now, if they could strike a good balance between the old system and new one, it would be perfect for everyone. How you do that? Im not entirely sure, but I'm sure Blizzard reads suggestions.
An extra list, where "games with not-full lobbies" are displayed. That way, you can see what unpopular maps have people inside, and people can see you're waiting in a lobby when they join it, without needing to spam chat channels to ask for people.
The main problem of Battle.net 2.0 is that it killed casual gaming, and that's the base for any modding community. You need people to be able to easily play any map when they want. Now you can't play what you want when you want properly. Not being able to host maps privately isn't good either. Without a website showing all maps, the community dies a bit more, being forced to either look at names and then search them ingame, or look ingame and scroll over the maps without knowing what they're about. This particular point makes me hell-angry, since Blizzard was so excited with making everything social, and they just made it autistic, forcing you to reveal your personal data if you wanted more chat features.
The official page should host a map database, with extensive descriptions and statistics, and profiles of every player should have its favorites displayed, just like achievements and leagues. And the pop sys needs an extra tab where maps with lobbies requiring people are displayed. It's as easy as that, but they haven't moved a single finger. I feel abandoned, and I feel Blizzard gives a shit about us, they just don't care about anything. What we've been asking since nearly 2 years ago is goddamn simple.
The community is already dead, and once people gets bored of laddering, SC2 will be dead, too. I'll get HotS because I love the campaign and the design of the game, but I don't think I'll stay around the system, which sucks terribly, longer than necessary. Hell, I had a clan of mappers in W3, and we were 40-50 active, making small maps and stuff. Most of them returned, but left months ago, and now I only have 2 left, that log in once a week. How doy ou want me to feel?
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working
for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is
great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely.
Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind
of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I wasn't aware that you could work "for fake." Anything you do is
entirely feasible if you are creative enough to monetize it. Most of the
YouTube stars certainly aren't doing "real" work, comedians don't have
"real" jobs, actors are just "playing" in front of a camera. . .
Everything you do is work. Whether or not you enjoy it is up to you, but
at the end of the day, what that work does for you is entirely up to
you. Anyone can make SC2 mapping a profession if they go about it
appropriately. Selling a product is obviously not the only way you can
make money.
If I really wanted to, I could probably take all of my tutorials off the
site and move them to my own website. There I could give previews of my
tutorials and "sell" them like E-Books so that anyone wanting to learn
the Data editor had to pay me to do so. Even if I charged $0.50 per
tutorial, at the 100k+ plus views, that's $50,000. . . a considerable
amount for "fake" work. I wouldn't even have to make maps at that point,
just pump out tutorial after tutorial. Eventually I could even write a
real book and sell that too! I choose not to because I don't think that
would be helpful to the community as a whole, but it's clearly one way
of making money that doesn't require making maps at all.
You don't own 100% what you make with the SC2Editor. No need to go into demagogy, I think you understood what I was talking about perfectly. It's not the same as videos, casts or tutorials.
I don't know...there's still a lot of great mappers out there and the upcoming sc universe is going to be excellent. There's no way any other rts is better in mapping than sc2. Popularity system shows off what the people want to play. It's just the way things are. : / I'd say the best you can do is play it with friends and look through the channels and try and find other people who are looking for a new game. The popularity system seems fine to me. I love sc2 mapping. I do programming myself, but sc2 mapping has prepared me for it and it seems so much easier. I'd stick with mapping until you think you actually have a chance of making money off of a game, then doing something about it. Those are my thoughts. It's all up to your opinion though. Haha, just realized I'm dominating a lot of the current threads. XD Nobody's ever on enough these days. Maybe this thread has already bandwagoned everyone away? :(
I think people is simply tired. This site in particular is problematic for forum activity, too, and discourages checking often (I don't check subforums outside general anymore, since I get tired of opening 20 subforums to find nothing new). We need a good list with the last 30 active topics, but Curse hates us :(.
And no, the pop sys isn't right; but I won't turn this thread into a discussion about that. Also, most of the problems come from above, from Battle.net 2.0 itself.
I want an "unit" that bounces at walls infinitely, and players must avoid it.
I have 2 options on how to develop this:
Move instantly: every 0.1 second move instantly to (current_pos_x + SIGN_X * SPEED_X, current_pos_y + SIGN_Y * SPEED_Y). There's regions around the area where the unit bounces, and they change SIGN_X and SIGN_Y. SPEED_X and SPEED_Y allow me to make it move faster or slower, as well as make it a bit random (SPEED_X could be SPEED_X+0.1 or -0.1 so the bounce is not 100% linear).
Unit orders: I haven't looked at this enough yet, but maybe the above could be made better with just telling the unit to patrol around, using SIGN variables to change the angle of the unit. My only problem here is that you must calculate the "go to" point for the unit.
Well, what way do you think is better? I wrote the first one in 5 mins, and works fine, though it looks a bit clumsy, using 0.1 at speed (the bigger the speed, the worse it looks). I want to get the best result possible. Maybe there's better ways to calculate collisions and bounce stuff around, but I didn't work on something similar to this before, just normal patrols.
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely. Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I don't know a lot about them, but if I had a 3d project in mind, where I would invest money, I would go in my own and forget about SC2. If they're willing to work that much, they can step a bit further and buy/develop a small/simple engine. Sometimes making from scratch is better than remaking an entire game.
And yeah, I mostly do SC2 for fun, because I like it. Personally, I think the marketplace will be an epic fail, because the mapper community is heavily injured from Blizzard's negligence, and the pop sys isn't flexible at all. Will be hard to bring back lot of the people that left (and I know a lot of particular cases of good W3 friends that make me really sad).
And no, shall I "leave", I wouldn't leave SC2; but I won't develop anything serious either. If anything, I'll try to port some mobile game ideas I have to SC2, just to see how they work, but I don't expect to work on them seriously, just fast-tests and maps made in some hours.
Thats the exact reason you dont see me doing many maps at all, and only
a tech demo here and there.
I spend my time doing web/standalone games that any user, anywhere can
enjoy while I have no limitations working on it.
Problem with sc2 it takes more work to make something that first only
people with sc2 will see, and even then its limited again.
The truth of the mater is I program for myself, and not others, but it
sure is a billion times better when others get to enjoy you what you
made out of your own enjoyment.
But Im not given up sc2 dev like you tho =P Theres room in my heart for
all forms of programming.
I feel pretty similar... The greatest factor of SC2 was that you could share your content fast with whoever you wanted, but the pop sys, regions and more make it much more limited. I don't want to be top popular, I want people to be able to play my map without needing to spam chat channels or stay in a reduced group.
Also, I don't feel SC2 is as popular regarding custom games as W3 was. Hell, 3 years ago W3 had more activity than SC2 now. Where are all those custom map lovers now? I feel the "lot of people available to play your map" factor has gone down.
Right now, I'm thinking on working with Java for Android, Blitz, Unity or Corona. I want something 2D that works on PC without emulators, so I'll probably end with Corona or Blitz, Corona probably, since they have a lot of great libraries, and you can do complicated stuff easily in a single line. It has watermark, but I can always port it or buy the license if I'm really serious. I need to research more anyway.
And yes, I was like most of you, I thought this was goddamn hard, but it's not, and even more, it may even be easier, considering all the libraries out there, that already provide the hard/engine parts. Right now, programming is pretty easy, and you only need to give the manual a read for the specific functions, like loading images and frames. Everything else, in the end, is just the same. If you want something serious, you'll need good art, but for tests you are fine with a crappy 2-frame png.
PS: I don't want to turn this into a pop-sys discussion, so sorry if it may look like that during some point.
So I've been learning how to create mobile and browser games lately, and it's much more easier than I expected: some years ago, it was awful, and you had 0 help and 0 support. Nowadays, though, there's a lot of stuff around the "genre". So I'm seriously thinking on quitting SC2Editor completely and focusing on mobile/browser games.
My first serious "I'm going to think about it" came this weekend. I attended to a nice 15 hour videogame course, where 3 young guys from a small studio on my city taught us the basics, and helped us create our own game. We didn't manage to create a "great" game, but I got a bit shocked at how "relatively" easy it was. Of course, working with SC2 gives, to start with, better visual results, and you focus your time on making a better gameplay, forgetting about basic controls and mechanics, which need to be written from scratch, and graphics, who need to be created or taken from open sources.
If you're like me and don't even think about trying, because you suspect it's too hard, don't. If you are good enough to get decent results with SC2, you will get decent ones starting from scratch. Yes, as I said, the visual result will be completely different (and let's be sincere, "worse"). In my particular case, I'm outright lazy with SC2, and have only done dozens and dozens of small mechanics, boss fights and whatever, just for fun, but no map so far. Also, I still need to learn the data editor properly, and I never feel like doing so.
So I'm making a list while I get decided, containing reasons for leaving SC2 and getting into simpler games: (I may be wrong on most of it, but that's why I'm posting it)
Freedom: the product will be yours, and you will be able to put advertisements or sell it, getting real profit (no matter it won't be too much). In SC2, you can control your product in any way. If the marketplace is as restrictive as they said, the work needed to make your map decent enough may not be worth the effort.
Portfolio: in the videogame industry, portfolios are the curriculum vitae. Showing something small made from scratch gives a better impression than showing something big made using an engine, and everyone understands pure code, while engine codes are much more complex, and people may get lost between what you have done and what you haven't; and it's usually towards the negative side. Also, effort is underestimated, mostly out of pure ignorance.
Accessibility: making a game from scratch lets everyone play it (usually). You don't need to buy a game to play the mod. With the current custom games system, this gets worse with SC2. Outside Battle.net, you can always try advertising it by yourself, while SC2 is much more restrictive regarding access by potential players.
Ideally, this would never be a issue, but I tend to overstrech myself as my mapping project grow old on me. Then I start more and more projects, with few of them actually becoming finished. So do you have any tips on how to keep interest and focus on your project, to keep it fresh?
At least one thing I've become aware of is that I should make more changes before I test the map. If you test the map for every little nitpicking change, you'll become weary of it. It's better to make alot of changes at once, and to make temporary "cheat-triggers" so that if one feature of the map doesnt work, you can test out other parts of the map without being stuck where the first feature failed.
If you have more tips, let me know :)
Same here, lol. I never finish any map.
However, I got interested people in the last one, and they usually remember me about updating it and releasing it. It makes me keep working on it.
The bug with WoW models may be in the actors or something.
Also, the char feels too slow. Let him run or walk faster. You could let the player select the speed, but reducing the light radius the faster they walk :P.
The explanation is easy: they were good before, and dumb fuck fanboys will still see them as good no matter what. Until they really ruin their own games, fanboys won't stop defending them. Fanboys and retards (those who love CoD:MW2, a "success" of a product, but a FAIL of a game) ruin the industry.
Also, they probably have some marketing bullshit behind them, telling to take x or y decision because z or w stupid reason. That's the only answer I have, because they don't look like they are mentally retarded at all. No need to be a genius to understand you're forcing bullshit into your game (I still remember the "force Real ID on forums" crap, that was just terrible, and confirmed completely how deep has fallen Blizzard).
I make an RPG with several zones, featuring levels 1-60. Experienced
players want to host 'level 40+ doing X boss run', whereas many other
players are wanting to do 'New players only < level 10' and so forth.
As a map creator I can't predict all of this with 'game modes' or
'categories'. Having players able to name their games is a solution.
Thoughts?
Make modes appear in the popularity list (I think it already does, or maybe I'm confusing it with one of the old bugs).
Same happened for me. I was more excited about the beta than getting the
game for real.
I'm still hoping for a beta key for hots and d3. I want the beta
regardless.
But the beta is only 1/3 of the first of 4 acts. So it's pretty short,
Same here.
Also, to try the game before buying it, and to know where to go in day 1 without being a noob. In Beta you can mess up your character, but it won't matter. Failing at release is failing for real.
0
I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, after all, it's just a "new" model with a new animation.
0
An extra list, where "games with not-full lobbies" are displayed. That way, you can see what unpopular maps have people inside, and people can see you're waiting in a lobby when they join it, without needing to spam chat channels to ask for people.
0
The main problem of Battle.net 2.0 is that it killed casual gaming, and that's the base for any modding community. You need people to be able to easily play any map when they want. Now you can't play what you want when you want properly. Not being able to host maps privately isn't good either. Without a website showing all maps, the community dies a bit more, being forced to either look at names and then search them ingame, or look ingame and scroll over the maps without knowing what they're about. This particular point makes me hell-angry, since Blizzard was so excited with making everything social, and they just made it autistic, forcing you to reveal your personal data if you wanted more chat features.
The official page should host a map database, with extensive descriptions and statistics, and profiles of every player should have its favorites displayed, just like achievements and leagues. And the pop sys needs an extra tab where maps with lobbies requiring people are displayed. It's as easy as that, but they haven't moved a single finger. I feel abandoned, and I feel Blizzard gives a shit about us, they just don't care about anything. What we've been asking since nearly 2 years ago is goddamn simple.
The community is already dead, and once people gets bored of laddering, SC2 will be dead, too. I'll get HotS because I love the campaign and the design of the game, but I don't think I'll stay around the system, which sucks terribly, longer than necessary. Hell, I had a clan of mappers in W3, and we were 40-50 active, making small maps and stuff. Most of them returned, but left months ago, and now I only have 2 left, that log in once a week. How doy ou want me to feel?
You don't own 100% what you make with the SC2Editor. No need to go into demagogy, I think you understood what I was talking about perfectly. It's not the same as videos, casts or tutorials.
I think people is simply tired. This site in particular is problematic for forum activity, too, and discourages checking often (I don't check subforums outside general anymore, since I get tired of opening 20 subforums to find nothing new). We need a good list with the last 30 active topics, but Curse hates us :(.
And no, the pop sys isn't right; but I won't turn this thread into a discussion about that. Also, most of the problems come from above, from Battle.net 2.0 itself.
0
Ah, blend. I knew I was missing something (the option that makes insta move smoother, nope?). Also, thanks for tip on 0.0, didn't know.
As for velocity, I may use speed as a general variable for more than one unit, so that's why I use a sign for each unit :).
0
I want an "unit" that bounces at walls infinitely, and players must avoid it.
I have 2 options on how to develop this:
Well, what way do you think is better? I wrote the first one in 5 mins, and works fine, though it looks a bit clumsy, using 0.1 at speed (the bigger the speed, the worse it looks). I want to get the best result possible. Maybe there's better ways to calculate collisions and bounce stuff around, but I didn't work on something similar to this before, just normal patrols.
0
I know SC2 has a lot of potential, but there's some point where working for real with it isn't worth, in my opinion. I think Subsistence is great, but I wouldn't invest money on something I won't own entirely. Those guys are working pretty hard, and I'm sure they expect some kind of profit once the marketplace goes live.
I don't know a lot about them, but if I had a 3d project in mind, where I would invest money, I would go in my own and forget about SC2. If they're willing to work that much, they can step a bit further and buy/develop a small/simple engine. Sometimes making from scratch is better than remaking an entire game.
And yeah, I mostly do SC2 for fun, because I like it. Personally, I think the marketplace will be an epic fail, because the mapper community is heavily injured from Blizzard's negligence, and the pop sys isn't flexible at all. Will be hard to bring back lot of the people that left (and I know a lot of particular cases of good W3 friends that make me really sad).
And no, shall I "leave", I wouldn't leave SC2; but I won't develop anything serious either. If anything, I'll try to port some mobile game ideas I have to SC2, just to see how they work, but I don't expect to work on them seriously, just fast-tests and maps made in some hours.
I feel pretty similar... The greatest factor of SC2 was that you could share your content fast with whoever you wanted, but the pop sys, regions and more make it much more limited. I don't want to be top popular, I want people to be able to play my map without needing to spam chat channels or stay in a reduced group.
Also, I don't feel SC2 is as popular regarding custom games as W3 was. Hell, 3 years ago W3 had more activity than SC2 now. Where are all those custom map lovers now? I feel the "lot of people available to play your map" factor has gone down.
Right now, I'm thinking on working with Java for Android, Blitz, Unity or Corona. I want something 2D that works on PC without emulators, so I'll probably end with Corona or Blitz, Corona probably, since they have a lot of great libraries, and you can do complicated stuff easily in a single line. It has watermark, but I can always port it or buy the license if I'm really serious. I need to research more anyway.
And yes, I was like most of you, I thought this was goddamn hard, but it's not, and even more, it may even be easier, considering all the libraries out there, that already provide the hard/engine parts. Right now, programming is pretty easy, and you only need to give the manual a read for the specific functions, like loading images and frames. Everything else, in the end, is just the same. If you want something serious, you'll need good art, but for tests you are fine with a crappy 2-frame png.
PS: I don't want to turn this into a pop-sys discussion, so sorry if it may look like that during some point.
0
So I've been learning how to create mobile and browser games lately, and it's much more easier than I expected: some years ago, it was awful, and you had 0 help and 0 support. Nowadays, though, there's a lot of stuff around the "genre". So I'm seriously thinking on quitting SC2Editor completely and focusing on mobile/browser games.
My first serious "I'm going to think about it" came this weekend. I attended to a nice 15 hour videogame course, where 3 young guys from a small studio on my city taught us the basics, and helped us create our own game. We didn't manage to create a "great" game, but I got a bit shocked at how "relatively" easy it was. Of course, working with SC2 gives, to start with, better visual results, and you focus your time on making a better gameplay, forgetting about basic controls and mechanics, which need to be written from scratch, and graphics, who need to be created or taken from open sources.
If you're like me and don't even think about trying, because you suspect it's too hard, don't. If you are good enough to get decent results with SC2, you will get decent ones starting from scratch. Yes, as I said, the visual result will be completely different (and let's be sincere, "worse"). In my particular case, I'm outright lazy with SC2, and have only done dozens and dozens of small mechanics, boss fights and whatever, just for fun, but no map so far. Also, I still need to learn the data editor properly, and I never feel like doing so.
So I'm making a list while I get decided, containing reasons for leaving SC2 and getting into simpler games: (I may be wrong on most of it, but that's why I'm posting it)
And I can't think of more right now.
Well, discussion?
0
Same here, lol. I never finish any map.
However, I got interested people in the last one, and they usually remember me about updating it and releasing it. It makes me keep working on it.
0
At least let observers in :(.
I want to scare friends online, lol.
0
I think biased people ruined this awesome project.
Whoever tries to repeat this some day, please write extensive rules about everything to avoid people forcing bullshit.
And yes, I don't see the point on using Mafia. What we need is something able to stay up, and BP was fine (we were going to bump it, remember?).
0
Looks pretty good :).
The bug with WoW models may be in the actors or something.
Also, the char feels too slow. Let him run or walk faster. You could let the player select the speed, but reducing the light radius the faster they walk :P.
Wish to see a multiplayer of this in Bnet xD.
0
The explanation is easy: they were good before, and dumb fuck fanboys will still see them as good no matter what. Until they really ruin their own games, fanboys won't stop defending them. Fanboys and retards (those who love CoD:MW2, a "success" of a product, but a FAIL of a game) ruin the industry.
Also, they probably have some marketing bullshit behind them, telling to take x or y decision because z or w stupid reason. That's the only answer I have, because they don't look like they are mentally retarded at all. No need to be a genius to understand you're forcing bullshit into your game (I still remember the "force Real ID on forums" crap, that was just terrible, and confirmed completely how deep has fallen Blizzard).
Make modes appear in the popularity list (I think it already does, or maybe I'm confusing it with one of the old bugs).
0
Terhonator = WIN.
Osama's body's next to the alien. True story.
0
They look pretty nice, good work ;).
I have thousands of saved gear combinations when I got bored and dressed orcs and stuff, lol.
0
Same here.
Also, to try the game before buying it, and to know where to go in day 1 without being a noob. In Beta you can mess up your character, but it won't matter. Failing at release is failing for real.