There is a potential exploit in SCBW right now that allows executing other applications. They might fix that, but I kind of hope not as the mechanic behind it is good for SCBW mapping, similar to EUDactions before Blizzard patched them out of the game. Also, the bnet UI is horribly broken on modern OS and performance might be poor without these windowed launcher things fixing stuff.
AfaIk, D2 doesn't run too well without a 3rd party glidewrapper. But I have no idea what they could do to WC3.
Pitfall: Texture entities in the data module do not work if they refer to image files within the root folder. The displayed error in the game/debugger is "Could not find texture with id *ENTITY_ID*."
Solution: Move image files into some folder and make the entities refer to updated path.
Pitfall: Narud's 2D portrait image shows a Hybrid instead of a humanoid with white hair.
Pitfall: Get Player Handle trigger function throws an error for unused slots (e.g. "2", if only player "1" is playing) instead of returning an empty string.
It will take a performance toll, but I think it is doable under certain requirements.
It really depends on the rest of your map, which doodads you are using and how many units you are planning to be alive on your map at the same time.
If possible, hide the actors of doodads that are not required to reduce their performance costs. Hidden actors use little to no performance while visible actors, even offscreen ones like structure images in the fog, eat a lot of performance.
As a benchmark, Heroes of the Storm has 3221 doodads placed in their Garden of Terror map.
Or sc2mapster does a smarter thing and makes people that report a lot of spam, which was not deleted fast, to moderators, so they can delete spam themselves instead of reporting.
Or even better, they try to improve the anti-bot registration measures, so sc2mapster does not see bot posts all the time. On SEN, we rarely had bot problems in the past which makes me wonder why sc2mapster is so ineffective.
One thing to note, that makes much of the "big changes" more realistic, is that the SC2 team is not going anywhere, so what else would they work on? The campaign is complete, automated tournaments are more or less done. From what I understand, the Storm team is its own separate team and SC2 people will not be shifted over to it (they have identical positions open for both teams, last I looked). Allied Commanders is a thing, but I don't see that consuming all their resources. So what else other than Arcade changes and B.net changes could they work on?
[...]
I would say, at the current time, the SC2 tools are superior to DotA 2 tools in usability (DotA 2 has no GUI for data or scripting, so pretty much the domain of programmers), and power (DotA 2 was very much hardcoded for DotA, you can not create new heroes, you can only override existing ones), and in stability (DotA 2 reborn is suffering some pretty epic bugs, like being unable to necessarily target anything with abilities). DotA 2 has a superior interface (mostly, it incorporates what are regarded as some of SC2 failings, like a popularity listing, but it has named lobbies, and a more prominent open games list, along with more filtering and as far as I can tell, more effective interface overall). So it comes down to who fixes their thing first, Valve and their engine/tools or Blizzard and the interface/UI?
I have the feeling my 30-minute-notes arcade feedback from 1.5 years ago is finally becoming important after LotV release (link). For example, fan-made campaigns were pretty much non existent on their radar back then, same as making single player games brow-sable (the latter is confirmed in LotV due to ArcanePariah's data-mining, I believe).
To be honest, I hope they talk to a lot of mappers all over the world and maybe even bring the people, e.g. within US in to really discuss things like ratings (optional out, updates making old ratings less important, etc). I hope we will in theory be able to put campaigns online which can potentially match Blizz's quality (= connected maps, no lobby hosting hell), too.
In Heroes' strings, I saw already some improvements regarding team projects, e.g. they have clusters of authors which all might be able to update a map instead of having a single person only. So, I expect multi-person hosting to come to LotV.
So, something we can do while waiting is to come up with stuff we would like to see. How would the ideal bnet look like and which aspects can be realistically added. (E.g. auto-matchmaking would be something I don't expect them to ever implement for user-made arcade maps as the player base might be too small sometimes to create good matches. Even in Heroes, players complain about it all the time and that would just become worse with a smaller pool of players.)
Btw, I don't know how the dota2 arcade-like system works. Anyone got a link that documents all of its features? I currently do not have the means to just download dota2 and look at it myself. :D
You know how in scm draft (BW) triggers, you had drop down list of CONDITIONS and ACTIONS triggers. If someone can make template triggers for each of those conditions/actions triggers that would be great contributions. After all not everyone is familiar with coding jargon, some people need dumbed-down version of trigger that would be great.
The problem is that the triggers in BW work a lot different than SC2 triggers.
In BW, every single trigger was checked periodically. In SC2, the triggers are event based and are only checked when their event occurs.
-> Forget what you have learned in BW triggers.
Learn that things in SC2 start with generic things happening like a unit enters a region, a unit dies, etc.
Once you are able to think in that way and know which events exist, then you can create a correct solution for SC2.
If you would want to recreate BW's trigger system fundamentals in SC2, you would have a single trigger containing a lot of if-then which would be executed periodically.
If you have questions how to port over a few aspects of BW to SC2, just create a thread and ask. :)
For example, the switches in BW are now global variables of the type boolean. They can be true/false and you can use a function that returns a random value. So, most of the time, you simply just use a random value. Btw, global variables are created in the left panel where you can create new triggers and they can be used in all triggers. Opposing to that, there are local variables defined within triggers which are only accessible within the same trigger and its instance.
I noticed that the hotkeys are bound to the visibility of the LeaderPanel and not the dropdown. That's why it seems to be impossible to disable them while being able to have its contained frames to be visible.
So, you might want to rebuild the leaderpanel with UI frames. Everything but the comparison bars (spending, apm, ...) should be re-producible with enough effort. The comparison bars would require trigger code to update the size.
But SCBW? Really? BW mapper scene is completely dead 10 years ago in China, I'm wondering how in western that it can still be more popular than sc2? What are you people doing with that poor editor?
I am still a member on the English-speaking mapping community (staredit.net) for SCBW UMS-mapmaking and there it is fairly dead, too. But there were some new discoveries made (e.g. it is possible to write in RAM again... (last time such a possibility has been discovered, Blizzard patched it being afraid of maps distributing malware) SCV shooting Wrath's lazer ) and a new map editor is being worked on, too.
Btw, LotV seems to bring a lot of improvements to the editor: new possibilities, data wizards, tons of tooltips. Releasing a new expansion/game should bring some more momentum to the Arcade, too.
I agree with njordy's and EivindL's statements that the campaign scene is growing and in a good position right now. Also EivindL's statement that it's only the data editor which slows most people down. I use it a lot but to this day I haven't really understood the concept of Actors besides being a connector for other object types (and a way to manipulate visuals for objects).
Actors act like the logic layer combining and controlling sounds, models and animations. It is quite important to have that, else you wouldn't be able to edit a lot.
You only have to create an image frame within the status bar.
You should anchor it to the health bar and alter the anchor's offsets and the width and height properties.
Eventually, you need to alter the RenderPriority to a value higher or lower than 512 to make it appear above/below the health bar. Its property is: <RenderPriority val="520"/>
You should not be able to get the actor type per unit actor as you could potentially create situations that would cause the game to desync. Imagine player 1 has actor A, player 2 has actor B instead and the code creates 50 marines when the actor is A. The game could end up being different on both players' computers, if that situation would exist. Thus retrieving information from actor instances usable in code is impossible.
For the icon, you can either use a workaround with just building a string containing the unit ID and hoping for the best (that's what GameHeart did) or you figure out a way scanning the actor catalog data for suitable actors for the unit.
0
I assume they will fix problems with modern OS.
There is a potential exploit in SCBW right now that allows executing other applications. They might fix that, but I kind of hope not as the mechanic behind it is good for SCBW mapping, similar to EUDactions before Blizzard patched them out of the game. Also, the bnet UI is horribly broken on modern OS and performance might be poor without these windowed launcher things fixing stuff.
AfaIk, D2 doesn't run too well without a 3rd party glidewrapper. But I have no idea what they could do to WC3.
0
Can you try to disable the spell checking in the editor settings? Blizz added spell checking in 3.0.
0
Wasn't there a Narud static image in WoL? I use him as a human and usually humans don't have glowing eyes.
edit: The image you posted is still in the game.
I found this image googling the name: http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/15/155745/2263989-portrait_narud_full.jpg
If resized to 152x232 and converted to dds, it seems fine.
0
Pitfall: Texture entities in the data module do not work if they refer to image files within the root folder. The displayed error in the game/debugger is "Could not find texture with id *ENTITY_ID*."
Solution: Move image files into some folder and make the entities refer to updated path.
Pitfall: Narud's 2D portrait image shows a Hybrid instead of a humanoid with white hair.
Solution: Wait till Blizz fixes that or make your own 2D static portrait from a screenshot of the 3D model.
Alternatively, I found this image googling the name: http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/15/155745/2263989-portrait_narud_full.jpg
If resized to 152x232 and converted to dds, it seems fine.
0
Pitfall: Get Player Handle trigger function throws an error for unused slots (e.g. "2", if only player "1" is playing) instead of returning an empty string.
Solution: add checks, if the player is playing
0
It will take a performance toll, but I think it is doable under certain requirements.
It really depends on the rest of your map, which doodads you are using and how many units you are planning to be alive on your map at the same time.
If possible, hide the actors of doodads that are not required to reduce their performance costs. Hidden actors use little to no performance while visible actors, even offscreen ones like structure images in the fog, eat a lot of performance.
As a benchmark, Heroes of the Storm has 3221 doodads placed in their Garden of Terror map.
0
Or sc2mapster does a smarter thing and makes people that report a lot of spam, which was not deleted fast, to moderators, so they can delete spam themselves instead of reporting.
Or even better, they try to improve the anti-bot registration measures, so sc2mapster does not see bot posts all the time. On SEN, we rarely had bot problems in the past which makes me wonder why sc2mapster is so ineffective.
0
I have the feeling my 30-minute-notes arcade feedback from 1.5 years ago is finally becoming important after LotV release (link). For example, fan-made campaigns were pretty much non existent on their radar back then, same as making single player games brow-sable (the latter is confirmed in LotV due to ArcanePariah's data-mining, I believe).
To be honest, I hope they talk to a lot of mappers all over the world and maybe even bring the people, e.g. within US in to really discuss things like ratings (optional out, updates making old ratings less important, etc). I hope we will in theory be able to put campaigns online which can potentially match Blizz's quality (= connected maps, no lobby hosting hell), too.
In Heroes' strings, I saw already some improvements regarding team projects, e.g. they have clusters of authors which all might be able to update a map instead of having a single person only. So, I expect multi-person hosting to come to LotV.
So, something we can do while waiting is to come up with stuff we would like to see. How would the ideal bnet look like and which aspects can be realistically added. (E.g. auto-matchmaking would be something I don't expect them to ever implement for user-made arcade maps as the player base might be too small sometimes to create good matches. Even in Heroes, players complain about it all the time and that would just become worse with a smaller pool of players.)
Btw, I don't know how the dota2 arcade-like system works. Anyone got a link that documents all of its features? I currently do not have the means to just download dota2 and look at it myself. :D
0
The problem is that the triggers in BW work a lot different than SC2 triggers.
In BW, every single trigger was checked periodically. In SC2, the triggers are event based and are only checked when their event occurs.
-> Forget what you have learned in BW triggers.
Learn that things in SC2 start with generic things happening like a unit enters a region, a unit dies, etc.
Once you are able to think in that way and know which events exist, then you can create a correct solution for SC2.
If you would want to recreate BW's trigger system fundamentals in SC2, you would have a single trigger containing a lot of if-then which would be executed periodically.
If you have questions how to port over a few aspects of BW to SC2, just create a thread and ask. :)
For example, the switches in BW are now global variables of the type boolean. They can be true/false and you can use a function that returns a random value. So, most of the time, you simply just use a random value. Btw, global variables are created in the left panel where you can create new triggers and they can be used in all triggers. Opposing to that, there are local variables defined within triggers which are only accessible within the same trigger and its instance.
0
I tried to do this, too. But I failed.
I noticed that the hotkeys are bound to the visibility of the LeaderPanel and not the dropdown. That's why it seems to be impossible to disable them while being able to have its contained frames to be visible.
So, you might want to rebuild the leaderpanel with UI frames. Everything but the comparison bars (spending, apm, ...) should be re-producible with enough effort. The comparison bars would require trigger code to update the size.
Maybe someone else has an idea.
0
I am still a member on the English-speaking mapping community (staredit.net) for SCBW UMS-mapmaking and there it is fairly dead, too. But there were some new discoveries made (e.g. it is possible to write in RAM again... (last time such a possibility has been discovered, Blizzard patched it being afraid of maps distributing malware) SCV shooting Wrath's lazer ) and a new map editor is being worked on, too.
Btw, LotV seems to bring a lot of improvements to the editor: new possibilities, data wizards, tons of tooltips. Releasing a new expansion/game should bring some more momentum to the Arcade, too.
Actors act like the logic layer combining and controlling sounds, models and animations. It is quite important to have that, else you wouldn't be able to edit a lot.
0
You only have to create an image frame within the status bar.
You should anchor it to the health bar and alter the anchor's offsets and the width and height properties.
Eventually, you need to alter the RenderPriority to a value higher or lower than 512 to make it appear above/below the health bar. Its property is: <RenderPriority val="520"/>
0
You should not be able to get the actor type per unit actor as you could potentially create situations that would cause the game to desync. Imagine player 1 has actor A, player 2 has actor B instead and the code creates 50 marines when the actor is A. The game could end up being different on both players' computers, if that situation would exist. Thus retrieving information from actor instances usable in code is impossible.
For the icon, you can either use a workaround with just building a string containing the unit ID and hoping for the best (that's what GameHeart did) or you figure out a way scanning the actor catalog data for suitable actors for the unit.
0
I assume a few weeks before LotV release similar to HotS' engine upgrade patch.
0
Since Blizzard leaks its own things already: I can tell you that it will be properly announced super-duper-soon.
Unfortunately, there is no way that I can participate this year. :(