SC2Mapster

@s3rius: Go

I've been testing online as well, publishing maps to bnet and playing it through multiplayer custom map. Take any bank you have right now and load it up a huge comment <! 20Mb string goes here > and you'll see the map still loads even through b.net. What brought this to my attention was when adding an extra key to the bank adds at least 37 characters of xml, which you would assume would reduce the amount of savable user data by 37 characters, but it only reduced the amount of usable user data by 9 characters.

My own theory is that the file is loading to memory, ofc ignoring comments, and forming a response in a format thats more efficient than xml, perhaps json, and then measuring the size of that response in memory.

Id love to help test the limitations with multiple players but I'm in usa region. I'll probably use one of my free trials and find out the impact of 2 players.

@s3rius: Go

html formatted characters have worked fine for me so far, even the " and < characters despite what i've read here. they save to the bank html encoded (and don't take up additional space, more on that later), and they load back up just fine.

I've tested the all of the 95 printable ascii characters and they all save and load back up just fine.

When I tested the bounds of the bank and found that I could save 849 characters if you name the bank, section, and key as single characters, I did so with numeric characters.

When I discovered that some characters save in an html encoded format, I tried seeing if the extra characters used for encoding took up additional characters and they DO NOT. After that I tried making the bank file itself really large by adding a metric shitton of comments to it and it did not effect whether or not the map would load. So the whole "4k divided among all players" appears to be a bogus assumption.

So far what I've read from others about the limitations of the bank have not been very accurate. I'd doublecheck their claims before acting on them.

I'm making a library for making the bank easily accessible. I've got base 92 compression on my integer arrays and separating them with reserved characters.

I want to use starcode to compress the integer arrays even further, but I'm not sure I understand how to use it, or what the limitations are. I read a little bit into arithmatic and huffman encoding, and it just gives me a headache. xD

1) can it store negative values? 2) can it store an arbitrary amount of values, or does it need to know specifically how many values are stored within? 3) does the 'maximum' value of an integer effect the efficiency of the compression? For an arbitrary amount of values stored within, I'd have to assume the maximum and minimum possible values of every integer. 4) how is the performance of the compression and decompression? I've read in here that there are concerns of timing out during decompression on values over 100 characters? Approximately how many integers is that?

Any help is much appreciated! You guys accomplishing arithmatic encoding in such a shitty language is quite amazing, much props to you guys!

@s3rius: Go

I can't make any sense of it. If I add another key value which adds 38 characters in itself, it only reduces the amount of characters I can fit in by 9, and the size of the file grows well beyond the size of the file if I were to only have 2 keys and only add 1 more character, which breaks the map. However

2 keys = smaller file size, fewer characters, breaks the map at a lower threshold. More usable characters. 3 keys = larger file size, more characters, breaks the map at a higher threshold. Fewer usable characters.

If I add as many whitespace, tabs, comments, return characters and the game doesn't blink an eye, it just loads fine. Pushed the size of the file up to 17.9KB(18,363bytes) and 20.0KB on disk (20,480bytes on disk) with comments and the file loads. It seems as if it may be measuring the size of the file in memory perhaps? Maybe its measuring the size of the data after serialization?

I'm in EST USA btw, can we play together?

I've discovered some things that I noticed when I was not getting the 36 character limit on the second string. My first attempt to maximize characters in the file was with a file named "tacoSaveLoad.SC2Bank", section name "tacos", and the key names "taco" and "taco2". I was able to cram 827 characters total into the bank.

Curious that my total did not match your 817, I wondered if it may be a difference in our section and key names. (I was planning to see if we could exploit those names for data purposes anyways) I renamed my section name to "a" and key names to "b" and "c". I was then able to cram in 838 characters.

Still curious about whether or not the game was counting characters, or examining the size of the file, I renamed my bank to "a.SC2Bank", and was able to fit in an additional 11 characters for a total of 849 characters. The size of my file when maxxed out is 1.07KB(1,102bytes) and 4.00KB on disk (4,096bytes on disk).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Bank version="1">
    <Section name="a">
        <Key name="c">
            <Value string="w012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789"/>
        </Key>
        <Key name="b">
            <Value string="01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567"/>
        </Key>
    </Section>
</Bank>

Hey guys do you know the official amount that will load to the map? It seems like if I try to load too many variables the map wont load, but if I load too many characters, the map loads fine but the string gets cut off.

Are the 817 characters shared between all 16 players? We should be able to test this out pretty easily if any of you want to give it a go, I have a map that does nothing but -save and -load stuff. I'm Char name: Hoki Code: 118

Restarting the editor and renamed the map, that seemed to do the trick... wierd behavior though.

Even after the code has been deleted, the map still performs what the code used to do. Its like the files are caching and not updating when I save...

I was veeery dissappointed when I learned you can only store the limited and undocumented 800ish~ characters in a player's bank. :(

@s3rius: Go

Jesus christ...

They can't possibly leave the language in this state, will they? This is the least powerful language i've ever used...

@Hokibukisa: Go

string intArrayString(int[6] array, int arrayLength){
    int i = 0;
    string tArrayString = "";
    while(i < arrayLength){
        tArrayString += IntToString(i);
        if(i < (arrayLength - 1)){
            tArrayString += " ";
        }
    }
    return tArrayString;
}

lv_tempString= intArrayString(gv_globalIntArray, 6);

And I get the error: Script failed to compile: Can only pass basic types (See Trigger Editor for more details)

I know in c i could only pass pointers to arrays, but I've heard that they've removed pointers from jass...

Nuff said? I need to pass an array to a function.

Its giving me a syntax error. :(

@s3rius: Go

Good news, good news. They did something right. :P

Hey s3rius, do you know if anyone has discovered how to associate a unique player id yet?

Is there anything that protects a bank from being written to by a map that shouldn't be writing to it? Ideally, because the map is hosted by blizzard and attached to our accounts, we'd be able to authorize certain user's write access to a bank.

I can forsee some jackhole making a map that claims to be a cool new RPG with a nice graphic, that does nothing but nuke the player's banks of known popular game's bank data.

@BeLugh: Go

This is a crippling flaw. I'm amazed that they would even release something like this without giving any way to delve down into a text value.