Preface;
1) I love the editor. It's complexity does not bother me.
2) I think Blizzard have done more for the SC2 arcade than they ever did for the WC3 or SC1 scene.
3) I also think bnet 2.0 is far, far superior to the WC3 or SC1 interface.
However, the editor's complexity and unforgivingness is, in my opinion, what puts a lot of people off using it and is probably the prime reason why the SC2 custom map scene gets so much hate.
I also have no clue why the SC2 custom maps are considered inferior to WC3's. I play both, and I'd say with definitive certainty that a lot of the "best" WC3 maps would not be well received today.
1) The editor is and has always been fine, better tutorials and then some modding of it and it would be working good enough and with the Blizzard help that has now come 3 years too late it would have been flawless.
2) They have done more but that is because it was a flawed system. The system in WC3 worked perfectly for everything except for people putting cheats into maps and then trying to host it.
3) The interface is superior but the system is horrible. The game and it's parts lives or dies during the first months of existance, Blizzard massively botched that with the only way to play custom games being a popularity list and no chat channels for 10 months, oh the group clan thingy came with HotS should have been there at launch.
People gave up when they couldn't even get a single person except their friend who they had asked 10 times already to try their new alpha map with. Mapping is and always has been a social experience, if you can't get the part of it, what is the point in creating anything except for self-improvement?
The funny thing is that Sc2mapster is a barren wasteland compared to the activity on the Wc3 mapping sites 2010, the same year SC2 was launched, 8 years after WC3 was first released.
Watching WCS Season 2 finals, 80k viewers, actually these are the viewers only online and Live, people could still watch after. Fck twitch tv doesnt work but im on a public pc atm. So who fcking cares as long as there is the pro scene and very cool matches to watch??
I did not buy SC2 to watch other people play it, I bought it so I could play it myself and experience the modding scene I thought would exist. Sure I have followed the pro scene but it got so boring and repetetive that I just gave up on it years ago.
I do not like to compare the pro scene of different games but, but 80k is nothing nowadays. The International broke 1 million concurrent viewers on streams and DotaTV, this does not include TV broadcasts and so on.
Really, Fockewolf??? Have you taken part in the conspiracy b-n Blizzard and Mapster or have been like me in Hive since 2004, or maybe to favor your idea of the game too bad - that's why Hive didn't switch to it? Or anything differing from you is 'nonsense' you know-it-all? Anyone serious enough to take part in something will get over the difficulties and get used to it, live with it, forget about them.
I am not talking about Arcade but about the Editor, it is as it is, needs more to work on, but it;s fine.
I have complained like anyone about BNet features, eventually since my thing was playing I got over them and lived with it, still demanded the new features but it didn't matter any more. The editor - for the things you can do with it is going fine, simpler for what you can do with it? Not happening.
When you have a desire to do something, you will build cities, when you don't have it, you will always think of excuses.
You do not speak for all, you are not all, you are not the community, you are just you. And stop pretending everything you say is the Holy Truth.
And there I thought you were more than just a hard core QQer, nope, nothing more than that. I will just ignore your whining as well but let's make it clear - keep it here, no one is supposed to see your crying on every thread.
All the WC3 sites, including THW, tried to make the switch. Thehelper.net had their very active SC2 forum, WC3C launched SC2C and THW launched pretty much a copy of their resource system but themed for SC2. But it's hard keeping an active community when Blizzard was able to alienate the whole community within a couple of months from the release.
Sure you can get over the Battle.net 2.0 interface and live with it, but when you get over it almost everyone else has already stopped playing the arcade or uninstalled SC2 because they can't play anything else than the 10 most popular games, or stopped trying to create maps because they can't get them even beta tested online. Sure this was back in 2010 but if you can't keep the initial spike of players at release interested, then they never will be.
The sales for HotS should confirm this, the only figure released is 1.1 million copies compared to the 5 million WoL copies from August to December. I can say for myself that I choose to not buy HotS because of the ruined modding scene in WoL.
FockeWulf does not speak for the whole community, but I think we all can agree that much of what he says is correct and today we are sitting with an almost dead community, even though in reality this should be the golden age of it. Now all the tools, tutorials and resources should be mature enough to work and guide new modders. Instead we have nothing and are left to complain to Blizzard about petty issues we could have worked around ourselves.
When Blizzard killed the modding scene during the beta and the first months of WoL they made sure that the arcade or whatever the name it takes will never gain any momentum.
I was a very active member of the WC3 community during the last years and everyone was looking forward to SC2 as the game that would bring a second golden age of mapping. We knew that Blizzard would probably fuck the engine and the tools up again but since we had fixed up the WC3 tools to a workable state we would just do the same with the SC2 ones. This never happened, during the beta the WC3 communities were buzzing with activity from people releasing alpha software and trying out everything the editor could offer. We were rejoiced to hear that the data editor was saving everything in a XML structure since this meant it would be fairly easy to make our own replacement, same with the language being C based so it actually had some structure instead of the mess that was JASS. Sure we knew we would have to create something like vJASS again and many people were creating their own languages. But all of this died in alpha stages, leaving half finished tools that stopped working as Blizzard updated the game.
The true stumbling block was Battle.net 2.0, but most importantly the popularity system. As all of you should know when SC2 was released the only list for custom games was a popularity list, no open lobbies, no fun or not, nothing. Just a review system, a library and a popularity list.
This meant that if I made a map, made some core functionality and now wanted to test it to get some input and see if any bugs would arise this was impossible. My map was now sitting on page 59 of the popularity list and the only way to find players was to encourage people outside of SC2 to try to join the map through the library or click through all the pages. There wasn't even chat channels in the game were you could encourage the public to join your game. Right here almost all the modders just gave up, the smart ones didn't even try to make a map and the stupid ones never got their map played once.
Sure it is easy to complain about the editor and some stupid bugs, but that was not the thing that killed SC2, those hurdles could be overcome with time and patience, sure the quality might not have been the greatest in the beginning, but attempts at making maps and refining them would still exist and most importantly, get played.
The point I am trying to make is that many of the experienced WC3 mappers picked up other programming languages (me included) and we tried to fix the SC2 editor, but since we all realized no one would be there to use our work or play the maps created with them we gave up and left our projects to die. For examples see the external IDE Moonlite or the Andromeda progrmaming language, there's many more examples out there.
And this is where the community is still stuck today, instead of fixing the errors Blizzard make the community spends days and nights complaining about petty stuff because the people who had the knowledge to fix the errors through 3rd party tools are long gone. It is the same with documentation, WC3 never had any documentation at all, we created it through trial and error, and that was the direction this community also was headed towards during the beta with the famous youtube tutorials and the Wikis set up by almost all WC3 modding sites and SC2 mapster, but that never came to fruition because the smart people who were able to do it because of previous experience from WC3, BW and other games left too early for their work to be finished and today there's almost nothing.
Honestly, from the WC3 mapping sites Thehelper used to have the nicest community (Best moderators and admins), WC3C the most elitist with highest standards regarding submissions, and THW had the rest. Though the rest also meant that they had a huge amount of content, most of the triggering/coding and 3rd party tools on that site were garbage but it was the go to site for any art work.
The problem is that all three tried to embrace SC2 as everyone thought it would be a continuation of WC3 mapping but with fewer limitations and a new game with more players. Blizzard fucked up and pretty much the entire mapping community died and barely anyone played the maps online.
They all have SC2 forums which had a great deal of activity during the beta, but when the system was released they all died because not even the long time WC3 mappers could stand the system. We just ended up breaking stuff for a while having Blizzard to fix it.
This community can be hard to break into since it is so quiet. Less activity means less tutorials, less comprehensive knowledge. I'm amazed by what this site has to offer in that regard already.
When I first started posting, I got the help I needed, albeit curt and minimal, but as I've been around longer and learned to exercise a little patience, I've had help that goes above and beyond what would be expected from simple forum/IRC interactions. I very much appreciate that in this community because I'd have been completely stuck without it.
This site contains so many tutorials and so much knowledge because it was mostly gathered and structured by many experienced WC3 and BW mappers who tried to make the switch during the beta and the first months after release. Then the scene died due to the custom games system and lack of social interactions on Battle.net. Remember, SC2 launched without chat channels and the arcade, Up and Coming didn't even exist, it was just a list of the most popular maps.....
This is also why many tutorials and guides really aren't up to date, there just isn't enough people to update them or write new ones, and the original creators are long gone.
How to create a Wc3 style armor system? It should be quite easy through triggers using the Unit Takes Damage event but that feels like it would be ineffective, is there any other way to do it?
I have the formula, now I just need somewhere to put it.
private constant real ARMOR_REDUCTION_MULTIPLIER = 0.06
Hello, I was able to allow several units to harvest from one mineral field using the "Bypass Resource Queue" flag. The problem now is that when they are harvesting they have no collision size create which creates huge mess of units instead of spreading them out and waiting for their turn due to collision. How would it be possible to turn on collision for them?
Hello, is there any way to change player names? I just want to append a string to the name like "Gwypaas(XXXX)"
Also, is there any way to do this so team A sees everyone else in the team as "Gwypaas(XXXXX)" but for team B it will look like "Gwypaas(AAAAA)" or just "Gwypaas". This was done in WC3 using GetLocalPlayer() combined with GetPlayerName(player) and SetPlayerName(player, string) but I don't know how to do it in SC2.
Not that I know of, yet. Some people have just been opening up two GE's on separate computers, :(. You can however, compare the MapScript.galaxy files, though it's all in Galaxy.
Yes, in order to use GE when SC2 is released, you need to have purchased the game.
the installer doesn't let me choose the installing folder, and (i'm not sure about this but it seemed to me) it launches the editor after the installation even if the checkbox is not checked.
He's fixing the install folder I think. You can actually check it but it's really damn hard to see, I think there's some little blue tint on the edges when it's checked but I agree with you, it's way too hard to see.
The difference is that Sparsile attaches itself to GE, allowing functionality to be implemented into GE itself. Anything missing can be easily added, all within one Editor. Blizzard's Editor, at that.
And you don't have to believe, just wait and see.
The problem with adding missing things to GE is that you still have to work inside GE and all the limitations that measn and I've heard people that has had MASSVIE trouble just adding a drop down menu to GE. I bet it will come in the future easier ways to do it but we're not there right now as far as I know.
Just trust me on this one, coding support outside GE won't be needed. Aside from that, Sparsile should take care of anything that is missing within GE, and that won't even be needed until after release to see exactly what they have included.
Why should I trust you? The only thing we can trust is Blizzard, and that is just barely.
What is that "omg good sparsile that can fix everything that ever will happen and we ever will want to."? Why won't sparsile be needed now? Just release it now and use it as good as possible and then after Blizz releases SC2 make the necessary changes which won't be many.
You seem to have way to much belief in Blizzard right now compared to us who have followed mapping in SC2 since the first Q & As.
But the problem is, Moonlite focuses on Galaxy programming, which GE will be capable of doing.[...]
Never believe that Blizzard will add anything into SC2 until it's actually released. A tool like this is always nice, just look at Wc3 with people mapping using local files nowadays instead of the trigger editor just because they think it's more convenient, it's all a matter of preferences and everything that contributes to make things easier is good. Same as with releasing it while the game is stilll in the beta, all modding that can be done now is good modding and will help us after the beta and I'm 99% sure that Blizz won't do anything radical to the editor or the game until the game is released, maybe in the next expansion but not now.
Just look at todays modding in SC2, we've already made most of the things that took years for WC3 (JNGP), we have a preprocessor in Andromeda, we have PhynGal as injector into GE, we have this that runs Andromeda on scripts and then imports them into your map. The only thing I'm missing is right now code highlighting and code completion for Galaxy/Andromeda and an efficient function searcher integrated into that. Pretty much like TESH in WC3 but for Galaxy/Andromeda and not necessarily integrated into the Trigger Editor. I also miss 1 click save/map testing but that is because I code using andromeda + Notepad+ + and then I save everything in local files right now so I'm forced to take some extra steps to get my code into the map.
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1) The editor is and has always been fine, better tutorials and then some modding of it and it would be working good enough and with the Blizzard help that has now come 3 years too late it would have been flawless.
2) They have done more but that is because it was a flawed system. The system in WC3 worked perfectly for everything except for people putting cheats into maps and then trying to host it.
3) The interface is superior but the system is horrible. The game and it's parts lives or dies during the first months of existance, Blizzard massively botched that with the only way to play custom games being a popularity list and no chat channels for 10 months, oh the group clan thingy came with HotS should have been there at launch.
People gave up when they couldn't even get a single person except their friend who they had asked 10 times already to try their new alpha map with. Mapping is and always has been a social experience, if you can't get the part of it, what is the point in creating anything except for self-improvement?
The funny thing is that Sc2mapster is a barren wasteland compared to the activity on the Wc3 mapping sites 2010, the same year SC2 was launched, 8 years after WC3 was first released.
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I did not buy SC2 to watch other people play it, I bought it so I could play it myself and experience the modding scene I thought would exist. Sure I have followed the pro scene but it got so boring and repetetive that I just gave up on it years ago.
I do not like to compare the pro scene of different games but, but 80k is nothing nowadays. The International broke 1 million concurrent viewers on streams and DotaTV, this does not include TV broadcasts and so on.
0
All the WC3 sites, including THW, tried to make the switch. Thehelper.net had their very active SC2 forum, WC3C launched SC2C and THW launched pretty much a copy of their resource system but themed for SC2. But it's hard keeping an active community when Blizzard was able to alienate the whole community within a couple of months from the release.
Sure you can get over the Battle.net 2.0 interface and live with it, but when you get over it almost everyone else has already stopped playing the arcade or uninstalled SC2 because they can't play anything else than the 10 most popular games, or stopped trying to create maps because they can't get them even beta tested online. Sure this was back in 2010 but if you can't keep the initial spike of players at release interested, then they never will be.
The sales for HotS should confirm this, the only figure released is 1.1 million copies compared to the 5 million WoL copies from August to December. I can say for myself that I choose to not buy HotS because of the ruined modding scene in WoL.
FockeWulf does not speak for the whole community, but I think we all can agree that much of what he says is correct and today we are sitting with an almost dead community, even though in reality this should be the golden age of it. Now all the tools, tutorials and resources should be mature enough to work and guide new modders. Instead we have nothing and are left to complain to Blizzard about petty issues we could have worked around ourselves.
0
When Blizzard killed the modding scene during the beta and the first months of WoL they made sure that the arcade or whatever the name it takes will never gain any momentum.
I was a very active member of the WC3 community during the last years and everyone was looking forward to SC2 as the game that would bring a second golden age of mapping. We knew that Blizzard would probably fuck the engine and the tools up again but since we had fixed up the WC3 tools to a workable state we would just do the same with the SC2 ones. This never happened, during the beta the WC3 communities were buzzing with activity from people releasing alpha software and trying out everything the editor could offer. We were rejoiced to hear that the data editor was saving everything in a XML structure since this meant it would be fairly easy to make our own replacement, same with the language being C based so it actually had some structure instead of the mess that was JASS. Sure we knew we would have to create something like vJASS again and many people were creating their own languages. But all of this died in alpha stages, leaving half finished tools that stopped working as Blizzard updated the game.
The true stumbling block was Battle.net 2.0, but most importantly the popularity system. As all of you should know when SC2 was released the only list for custom games was a popularity list, no open lobbies, no fun or not, nothing. Just a review system, a library and a popularity list.
This meant that if I made a map, made some core functionality and now wanted to test it to get some input and see if any bugs would arise this was impossible. My map was now sitting on page 59 of the popularity list and the only way to find players was to encourage people outside of SC2 to try to join the map through the library or click through all the pages. There wasn't even chat channels in the game were you could encourage the public to join your game. Right here almost all the modders just gave up, the smart ones didn't even try to make a map and the stupid ones never got their map played once.
Sure it is easy to complain about the editor and some stupid bugs, but that was not the thing that killed SC2, those hurdles could be overcome with time and patience, sure the quality might not have been the greatest in the beginning, but attempts at making maps and refining them would still exist and most importantly, get played.
The point I am trying to make is that many of the experienced WC3 mappers picked up other programming languages (me included) and we tried to fix the SC2 editor, but since we all realized no one would be there to use our work or play the maps created with them we gave up and left our projects to die. For examples see the external IDE Moonlite or the Andromeda progrmaming language, there's many more examples out there.
And this is where the community is still stuck today, instead of fixing the errors Blizzard make the community spends days and nights complaining about petty stuff because the people who had the knowledge to fix the errors through 3rd party tools are long gone. It is the same with documentation, WC3 never had any documentation at all, we created it through trial and error, and that was the direction this community also was headed towards during the beta with the famous youtube tutorials and the Wikis set up by almost all WC3 modding sites and SC2 mapster, but that never came to fruition because the smart people who were able to do it because of previous experience from WC3, BW and other games left too early for their work to be finished and today there's almost nothing.
0
Honestly, from the WC3 mapping sites Thehelper used to have the nicest community (Best moderators and admins), WC3C the most elitist with highest standards regarding submissions, and THW had the rest. Though the rest also meant that they had a huge amount of content, most of the triggering/coding and 3rd party tools on that site were garbage but it was the go to site for any art work.
The problem is that all three tried to embrace SC2 as everyone thought it would be a continuation of WC3 mapping but with fewer limitations and a new game with more players. Blizzard fucked up and pretty much the entire mapping community died and barely anyone played the maps online.
They all have SC2 forums which had a great deal of activity during the beta, but when the system was released they all died because not even the long time WC3 mappers could stand the system. We just ended up breaking stuff for a while having Blizzard to fix it.
SC2 was released with pointers, people broke them, see http://www.thehelper.net/threads/galaxy-parser.131690/ and http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/development/galaxy-scripting-and-trigger-lib/16195-galaxy-101/ "No pointer Since patch 9, pointer were all removed. With the above lack of new or malloc, pointer were quite limited to begin with.", though that thread doesn't detail what happened it has now been lost since SC2mod is down.
The WC3 forums all tried to launch into SC2 space. WC3C had http://www.sc2c.org/index.php Thelper had a SC2 forum, a tutorials site similar to their WC3 one (http://starcraft-2-galaxy-editor-tutorials.thehelper.net/tutorials.php) THW launched pretty much of copy of their WC3 system but tailored for SC2
Gex (Made YouTD, Castle Fight) launched SC2Mod.com with his Andromeda language.
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This site contains so many tutorials and so much knowledge because it was mostly gathered and structured by many experienced WC3 and BW mappers who tried to make the switch during the beta and the first months after release. Then the scene died due to the custom games system and lack of social interactions on Battle.net. Remember, SC2 launched without chat channels and the arcade, Up and Coming didn't even exist, it was just a list of the most popular maps.....
This is also why many tutorials and guides really aren't up to date, there just isn't enough people to update them or write new ones, and the original creators are long gone.
0
@DrSuperEvil: Go
Tried the demo but the marines still have no collision...
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How to create a Wc3 style armor system? It should be quite easy through triggers using the Unit Takes Damage event but that feels like it would be ineffective, is there any other way to do it?
I have the formula, now I just need somewhere to put it.
private constant real ARMOR_REDUCTION_MULTIPLIER = 0.06
This equals amount of damage reduced
Above 0 armor baseDamage*(1.-((armor*ARMOR_REDUCTION_MULTIPLIER)/(1.+ARMOR_REDUCTION_MULTIPLIER*armor)))
Less than 0 armor baseDamage*(2.-Pow(0.94,-armor))
0
Hello, I was able to allow several units to harvest from one mineral field using the "Bypass Resource Queue" flag. The problem now is that when they are harvesting they have no collision size create which creates huge mess of units instead of spreading them out and waiting for their turn due to collision. How would it be possible to turn on collision for them?
0
No more space themed maps? Be able to easily place grass and flowers? Omg that would be amazing....
0
Hello, is there any way to change player names? I just want to append a string to the name like "Gwypaas(XXXX)"
Also, is there any way to do this so team A sees everyone else in the team as "Gwypaas(XXXXX)" but for team B it will look like "Gwypaas(AAAAA)" or just "Gwypaas". This was done in WC3 using GetLocalPlayer() combined with GetPlayerName(player) and SetPlayerName(player, string) but I don't know how to do it in SC2.
0
torrents are koo.
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He's fixing the install folder I think. You can actually check it but it's really damn hard to see, I think there's some little blue tint on the edges when it's checked but I agree with you, it's way too hard to see.
The problem with adding missing things to GE is that you still have to work inside GE and all the limitations that measn and I've heard people that has had MASSVIE trouble just adding a drop down menu to GE. I bet it will come in the future easier ways to do it but we're not there right now as far as I know.
0
Why should I trust you? The only thing we can trust is Blizzard, and that is just barely.
What is that "omg good sparsile that can fix everything that ever will happen and we ever will want to."? Why won't sparsile be needed now? Just release it now and use it as good as possible and then after Blizz releases SC2 make the necessary changes which won't be many.
You seem to have way to much belief in Blizzard right now compared to us who have followed mapping in SC2 since the first Q & As.
0
Never believe that Blizzard will add anything into SC2 until it's actually released. A tool like this is always nice, just look at Wc3 with people mapping using local files nowadays instead of the trigger editor just because they think it's more convenient, it's all a matter of preferences and everything that contributes to make things easier is good. Same as with releasing it while the game is stilll in the beta, all modding that can be done now is good modding and will help us after the beta and I'm 99% sure that Blizz won't do anything radical to the editor or the game until the game is released, maybe in the next expansion but not now.
Just look at todays modding in SC2, we've already made most of the things that took years for WC3 (JNGP), we have a preprocessor in Andromeda, we have PhynGal as injector into GE, we have this that runs Andromeda on scripts and then imports them into your map. The only thing I'm missing is right now code highlighting and code completion for Galaxy/Andromeda and an efficient function searcher integrated into that. Pretty much like TESH in WC3 but for Galaxy/Andromeda and not necessarily integrated into the Trigger Editor. I also miss 1 click save/map testing but that is because I code using andromeda + Notepad+ + and then I save everything in local files right now so I'm forced to take some extra steps to get my code into the map.