Specifically, the allied commanders mod has trigger that handle the checks for the current commander level and with that, applies the various upgrades to unlock the various abilities/upgrades and so forth for each commander.
Although this may not be what you need currently, you CAN make your own GUI stuff that maps directly to your own custom script.
You would write your own library in script, and do the usual coding things. Then, in GUI, you can create Actions, and mark them as Native. This indicate that the Action is a GUI stub, the code is already written. The signatures must match (action id, its parameter types, etc.). It is analogous to a header declaration for the GUI. This would allow you to write custom script routines in native scripting code, while still providing your friend the ability to use it in the GUI.
I don't have the editor handy at the moment, but I can explain further if you need.
Background: I'm a professional software developer and did mapmaking as a way to get experience coding and it helped me get my current job.
1) I use GUI, because GUI is something that I wish more coding tools had. GUI is simply an abstraction, a visual way to express code. It has its limits, but within the context of SC2 mapmaking and the bulk of what you are doing, it is more then sufficient. Furthermore, I VERY much appreciate that it guarantees my code doesn't have stupid syntax errors, and allows me to focus on the logic, instead of remembering "Did I type that keyword correctly?"
2) The editor is pretty powerful and comes with a great deal of built in assets and logic. If you check out other development tools, they often either have harder to use interfaces or none at all, have to borrow/buy/craft their own assets, or code entire base systems.
3) The editor does a good job of modularizing and gives a pretty good path on how development SHOULD be done. IT forces you to consider your UI, your data, your logic, and your gameworld separetly, something that coders ROUTINELY screw up and pay for later.
4) Mapmaking is a great hobby, to test ideas, to learn new technical skills (the editor incorporates 5 different programming paradigms, each is useful and the most hated one is arguably VERY important now a days, Actors).
Deepmind will be used solely offline to start. However, since it is an deep learning system, you could set it up and specify the "goal" of your arcade map, and thus have it learn and play it. However, that is massively oversimplifying the problem.
As for the C++, the API is NOT in C++, it is being done in a very system independent way. The actual communication is done via Protocol Buffers (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/), which allow almost any language to have a compatible library. The actual communication will probably be done over a local websocket.
Do note that this is not meant to provide you with an exceptional AI player for your games. This is a research project to evolve AI systems to handle situations in real time that involve imperfect information, forcing the AI to either store previous knowledge and also use interpolation/extrapolation in a non predetermined scenario.
What the AI probably can help with for Arcade developers is balancing, because if you correctly set the goal, the AI may discover edge/corner/unique cases that could break your games balance, for it may consider a much wider range of tactics or combos that humans discard out of the normal social processes (bias, peer pressure, etc.).
Sounds like there's more control than I had initially assumed. Thanks for the tips.
I would love to have certain doodads animate only when players enter a certain region around them, but my issue is that I don't think that's possible for some of the models I'm using. For example, the lights don't have variations where they are identical except for the light being turned off, so I don't think I could have that sort of mechanic in place for the map. Another cool thing would be to have some of the sewer floodlight assets only turn when player units are nearby, having them return to their default facing direction when the player's units leave the radius, but that probably wouldn't work because modifying the angle of that doodad would also modify the direction of its base and not just the light on top.
Should still be possible. I wrote a tutorial on the subject, but the short version is that there are actors designed specifically for this. The Region type actors are actors that configured to do searches for other actors, and then, using Query Response actors, direct actor messages at the actors that are found.
For example, this is how the Nuke makes trees light on fire. It create a Circle region actor and does a query, which filters only for doodad type actors, and also ones with the _Tree alias. It then sends the Death message, which triggers them to play their burn death animation.
So in the case of the light, you could do creative messages that shrink or have the model play its off animation (if it has one).
As for the lights bending and facing towards the player: This MIGHT be doable, but it does require to learn how something works that I have not yet learned, which is how the game procedurally redoes a model's bones to track to another actor, which is how the Spine Crawlers work. The actual spine crawler attack missile is invisible, but its location is used to pull the spine crawler head.
As for animating when a player unit approaches, you would basically filter for 2 things, that it is a Unit type actor, and also based on alliance state. Also, all region actors provide the capability to have messages be sent when an actor enters the region, exits the region, becomes the closest to the center, stops being the closest to center. And these all can be independent of each other. This mostly comes from the Query Persistent, which makes it an ongoing query of the region, which can move since you can just host it on another actor. In my tutorial I made all the tree doodads around a marine increase in size when it got close, and turn pink if it was the closest to the marine.
Also, there are many other actors that can be used to be used to manage other actors. Monitor actors basically check actor terms every so often (you control how often) and based on which one is true, can shift states. The shifting states can then be used to dispatch messages. This is how fires/smoke appear on terran buildings, it has 4 states that are each running a validator based on the build health. Based on the state, it destroys the old smoke/fire and creates the new ones.
In regard to foliage, the procedural generation can be controlled/manipulated.
In the data editor, under Terrain Data -> Terrain Textures, you can specify what model appears for foliage generation, as well as the probability and the placement radius. You can specify any number of models, and this is per texture, so you can have a great deal of control of where, and what foliage can appear.
Also, I presume you are focused on the static presentation of the terrain? I ask because I believe a lot of terrain can be made more effective with adding and controlling actor events in relation to the doodads (lights turning on or off at random intervals, various animations only playing in the presence of units, and so forth).
The dependencies are online. Your friend probably locked them, so you are unable to load them, since locked dependencies are only viewable to the publisher, not anyone else.
You have 2 solutions
1) Have your friend give you the dependencies, and put them in your Starcraft II/Mods folder, and then add them as the local version of the dependencies. You would go to File->Dependencies. Select each one, double click, then go to eh Local Files tab, and select the dependency file.
Note, this is the main map files, you will need to coop mod to have the actual mechanics in many cases. All the mutators are in the libraries as well.
Also, it would be interesting to see how much the coding had to change between the campaign version and the coop version. I would assume much of the coding remains the same.
Also, on one hand, most of them are now documented.
However, due to how SC2 does its tooltips, they are basically unreadable, all 450 events tooltips are displayed when hovering over the events drop down.
Should the official tooltip be put under each event, or would that just bloat the Actor Events page beyond anything sane?
Correction, the actor messages are all documented, but many correspond to sent messages that are also events.
I also don't believe the 50,000,000 people who voted for him are racists and bigots, They see problems with other aspects of America, for example the economy.
No, but if those who are not bigots do NOT speak out against it, they are tacitly endorsing it. By saying nothing, you indicate to bigots that there are no consequences to acting out, so they will continue to do so. To draw the extreme parallel, how many Germans endorsed the Final Solution? Probably VERY few. But how many spoke out against it? Also VERY few, so thus genocide was permitted to occur.
This is also not an isolated event but part of a trend visible in Brexit in the UK, Marie Le Pen in France, the german anti-immigrant movement etc.
I think this is more or less about all the things people felt unheard about. Middle eastern wars, growing financial inequality and more. People are past demonstrations, letters, etc. Now they rather vote for uncertainties than a certain continuation of the present.
I believe this is true. These are not demonstrations of power, these are desperate cries for help.
I would think of this as an earthquake. It is also somewhat scary to think about what will happen if this doesn't provide relief of tension at all and the true quake is still about to happen. And that is what I would be more concerned about with Trump.
Unfortunately, this will not provide relief. The nature of our current economic system will continue to marginalize a large number these people.
Those who are wishing for economic return of work will be very disappointed, those jobs have been automated out of existence.
Those who wish to promote bigotry and hatred will find that it has economic limits.
Those who wish to halt free trade will find it is painful to do so.
Those who wish to examine whether the current political relationships between nations is acceptable or not have a much stronger point, and that may be undertaken quite a bit more. But the economic relationships are going to be difficult to unwind.
Bluntly put, the bar is being raised to be economically viable/competitive and by definition, an ever increasing amount of the existing and future population will not be (from a strictly economic point of view) worth anything, quite possible net negative.
On the upside, population control has already been discovered and implemented, namely A) Birth Control and B) Educating people. As a result, nearly the entire western world has a native population decline, with immigration outpacing it for now, in places that allow it. Japan, last I checked, was on a path to extinction in about a century (1.2 births on average, almost half the replacement rate).
0
Specifically, the allied commanders mod has trigger that handle the checks for the current commander level and with that, applies the various upgrades to unlock the various abilities/upgrades and so forth for each commander.
0
Although this may not be what you need currently, you CAN make your own GUI stuff that maps directly to your own custom script.
You would write your own library in script, and do the usual coding things. Then, in GUI, you can create Actions, and mark them as Native. This indicate that the Action is a GUI stub, the code is already written. The signatures must match (action id, its parameter types, etc.). It is analogous to a header declaration for the GUI. This would allow you to write custom script routines in native scripting code, while still providing your friend the ability to use it in the GUI.
I don't have the editor handy at the moment, but I can explain further if you need.
0
All good, we were all noobs once :D
0
Interesting, thanks!
0
If possible, see if you can provide a dark mode as an alternative to the white color scheme.
0
Hello
Yes, it is worth it to continue.
Background: I'm a professional software developer and did mapmaking as a way to get experience coding and it helped me get my current job.
1) I use GUI, because GUI is something that I wish more coding tools had. GUI is simply an abstraction, a visual way to express code. It has its limits, but within the context of SC2 mapmaking and the bulk of what you are doing, it is more then sufficient. Furthermore, I VERY much appreciate that it guarantees my code doesn't have stupid syntax errors, and allows me to focus on the logic, instead of remembering "Did I type that keyword correctly?"
2) The editor is pretty powerful and comes with a great deal of built in assets and logic. If you check out other development tools, they often either have harder to use interfaces or none at all, have to borrow/buy/craft their own assets, or code entire base systems.
3) The editor does a good job of modularizing and gives a pretty good path on how development SHOULD be done. IT forces you to consider your UI, your data, your logic, and your gameworld separetly, something that coders ROUTINELY screw up and pay for later.
4) Mapmaking is a great hobby, to test ideas, to learn new technical skills (the editor incorporates 5 different programming paradigms, each is useful and the most hated one is arguably VERY important now a days, Actors).
So in short: Yes it is worth it.
0
@killduk: Go
Deepmind will be used solely offline to start. However, since it is an deep learning system, you could set it up and specify the "goal" of your arcade map, and thus have it learn and play it. However, that is massively oversimplifying the problem.
As for the C++, the API is NOT in C++, it is being done in a very system independent way. The actual communication is done via Protocol Buffers (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/), which allow almost any language to have a compatible library. The actual communication will probably be done over a local websocket.
Do note that this is not meant to provide you with an exceptional AI player for your games. This is a research project to evolve AI systems to handle situations in real time that involve imperfect information, forcing the AI to either store previous knowledge and also use interpolation/extrapolation in a non predetermined scenario.
What the AI probably can help with for Arcade developers is balancing, because if you correctly set the goal, the AI may discover edge/corner/unique cases that could break your games balance, for it may consider a much wider range of tactics or combos that humans discard out of the normal social processes (bias, peer pressure, etc.).
0
Use a Rotate Kinetic. Those are specifically for rotating a unit.
0
Should still be possible. I wrote a tutorial on the subject, but the short version is that there are actors designed specifically for this. The Region type actors are actors that configured to do searches for other actors, and then, using Query Response actors, direct actor messages at the actors that are found.
For example, this is how the Nuke makes trees light on fire. It create a Circle region actor and does a query, which filters only for doodad type actors, and also ones with the _Tree alias. It then sends the Death message, which triggers them to play their burn death animation.
So in the case of the light, you could do creative messages that shrink or have the model play its off animation (if it has one).
As for the lights bending and facing towards the player: This MIGHT be doable, but it does require to learn how something works that I have not yet learned, which is how the game procedurally redoes a model's bones to track to another actor, which is how the Spine Crawlers work. The actual spine crawler attack missile is invisible, but its location is used to pull the spine crawler head.
As for animating when a player unit approaches, you would basically filter for 2 things, that it is a Unit type actor, and also based on alliance state. Also, all region actors provide the capability to have messages be sent when an actor enters the region, exits the region, becomes the closest to the center, stops being the closest to center. And these all can be independent of each other. This mostly comes from the Query Persistent, which makes it an ongoing query of the region, which can move since you can just host it on another actor. In my tutorial I made all the tree doodads around a marine increase in size when it got close, and turn pink if it was the closest to the marine.
Also, there are many other actors that can be used to be used to manage other actors. Monitor actors basically check actor terms every so often (you control how often) and based on which one is true, can shift states. The shifting states can then be used to dispatch messages. This is how fires/smoke appear on terran buildings, it has 4 states that are each running a validator based on the build health. Based on the state, it destroys the old smoke/fire and creates the new ones.
0
Its in the dropdown, when you hover over the drop down for messages that can be sent
0
In regard to foliage, the procedural generation can be controlled/manipulated.
In the data editor, under Terrain Data -> Terrain Textures, you can specify what model appears for foliage generation, as well as the probability and the placement radius. You can specify any number of models, and this is per texture, so you can have a great deal of control of where, and what foliage can appear.
Also, I presume you are focused on the static presentation of the terrain? I ask because I believe a lot of terrain can be made more effective with adding and controlling actor events in relation to the doodads (lights turning on or off at random intervals, various animations only playing in the presence of units, and so forth).
0
@JEGCPR: Go
The dependencies are online. Your friend probably locked them, so you are unable to load them, since locked dependencies are only viewable to the publisher, not anyone else.
You have 2 solutions
1) Have your friend give you the dependencies, and put them in your Starcraft II/Mods folder, and then add them as the local version of the dependencies. You would go to File->Dependencies. Select each one, double click, then go to eh Local Files tab, and select the dependency file.
0
Note, this is the main map files, you will need to coop mod to have the actual mechanics in many cases. All the mutators are in the libraries as well.
Also, it would be interesting to see how much the coding had to change between the campaign version and the coop version. I would assume much of the coding remains the same.
0
Also, on one hand, most of them are now documented.
However, due to how SC2 does its tooltips, they are basically unreadable, all 450 events tooltips are displayed when hovering over the events drop down.
Should the official tooltip be put under each event, or would that just bloat the Actor Events page beyond anything sane?
Correction, the actor messages are all documented, but many correspond to sent messages that are also events.
0
No, but if those who are not bigots do NOT speak out against it, they are tacitly endorsing it. By saying nothing, you indicate to bigots that there are no consequences to acting out, so they will continue to do so. To draw the extreme parallel, how many Germans endorsed the Final Solution? Probably VERY few. But how many spoke out against it? Also VERY few, so thus genocide was permitted to occur.
I believe this is true. These are not demonstrations of power, these are desperate cries for help.
Unfortunately, this will not provide relief. The nature of our current economic system will continue to marginalize a large number these people.
Those who are wishing for economic return of work will be very disappointed, those jobs have been automated out of existence. Those who wish to promote bigotry and hatred will find that it has economic limits. Those who wish to halt free trade will find it is painful to do so.
Those who wish to examine whether the current political relationships between nations is acceptable or not have a much stronger point, and that may be undertaken quite a bit more. But the economic relationships are going to be difficult to unwind.
Bluntly put, the bar is being raised to be economically viable/competitive and by definition, an ever increasing amount of the existing and future population will not be (from a strictly economic point of view) worth anything, quite possible net negative.
On the upside, population control has already been discovered and implemented, namely A) Birth Control and B) Educating people. As a result, nearly the entire western world has a native population decline, with immigration outpacing it for now, in places that allow it. Japan, last I checked, was on a path to extinction in about a century (1.2 births on average, almost half the replacement rate).