In my honest opinion the following are three glaring issues that have halted my personal development for Starcraft 2 and would be among the top issues other developers have quit or are on hiatus.
Custom Map Size Limit - Please either set this to a reasonable limit (1gb minimum), or allow for developers to buy additional storage space at reasonable rates.
Custom Map List - Please add an option to display custom maps similar to that seen in Warcraft 3, it is the one true unbiased "popularity" system, the only tweaks needed are filters so that players may only see genres they might be interested in playing, and maybe add some kind of map report feature to prevent spam and abuse. If for whatever reason this goes against some modern "design philosophy", at least add a category for viewing newly uploaded maps so they at least have some sort of fighting chance.
Bank Manipulation - Please add some kind of solution that makes the existence of banks viable, data that needs to be stored in banks is usually important, and the ability to edit that data at a whim completely destroys it's integrity and the integrity of the map it is used for. For example, how many player's would play World of Warcraft (or at least for how LONG would players play) if they could open a file in notepad and give themselves whatever level or items they wanted. With the power that the Galaxy editor brings, it is immensely disappointing that there is yet a big void to be filled.
Blizzard wouldn't do anything so drastic, all of that legal fine-print is essentially cookie cutter for contests like this, so in the event that Blizzard does showcase your work and use it for any kind of promotional or other uses you don't turn around and claim that they had no right to do so. All of those intense words are just them covering all possible and unforeseeable bases.
One of the mandatory checkboxes you have to tick says the following; By submitting this map I am granting licensing rights to Blizzard Entertainment, and will not display, post, or share it until after the contest closes on September 11, 2010.*
The full explanation of licensing rights is,
Sponsor Use of Entries. You hereby agree that in consideration of your being allowed the chance to enter the Contest, you hereby grant Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license and right to utilize the entry materials that you submit to Sponsor in connection with the Contest (collectively, "Entry Materials"). The Entry Materials will not be returned to any entrant. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, you acknowledge that Sponsor shall have the right to use, modify, reproduce, publish, perform, display on all forms of media, distribute, make derivative works of and otherwise commercially and noncommercially exploit the Entry Materials in perpetuity and throughout the universe, in any manner or medium now existing or hereafter developed, without separate compensation to you or any other person or entity. You agree to take, at Sponsor's expense, any further action (including, without limitation, execution of affidavits and other documents) reasonably requested by Sponsor to effect, perfect or confirm Sponsor's rights as set forth above in this paragraph 7.
I'm pretty sure that the guys posting such an important piece of information wouldn't just make it up, and some extra looking around proved that right.
Does this mean we can publish our maps to different regions ourselves? (Even though we can't play them) Or will the login required stop us from using different gateways.
If you try to name a unit in the data editor using the list view, it will let you name it, but the name won't update in the unit list, so you won't be able to select the unit in any lists, or the unit layer. However if you switch to table view, you can name the unit just fine and it will update itself accordingly.
My understanding of this contest is to further the knowledge of what kind of interface elements are possible to create, and as an interface element, it has to look good first hand to the information it might provide because an interface is the front end to the behind the scenes of how that information is maintained.
Unless I misunderstood the objective, it's not the goal to just display/interact with useful raw data , but to show creative ways of doing so (Not just wrapping everything into a generic dialog box with nothing in it). So I don't get where you're coming from because my menu shows an animated dialog which isn't seen very often.
I'm also not sure if you were alluding to my menu being useless in your post, but I have to make the strong argument that it's a menu with no specific objective other then displaying information, which can be used in any number of ways. Although I will agree with you on a panel rather then a popular vote or maybe a cross between the two because there's no way to present each entry fairly (Order of appearance, etc).
Here's my submission, a Collapsable Animated Dialog Menu using UI Images, a Button, and some Text Labels [Roughly 5 hours of work, 95% of that was planning, adjusting, and sifting through UI images]->
Please play the map for yourself, the menu looks much much prettier in-game than with the ugly resolution on the youtube video.
(The unit has nothing to do with it, I just found out about his cool ability and thought if more people saw it they might find a very creative use for it :P)
I'm mainly worried about some sort of retaliation from Blizzard, they have already been reported to completely remove publishing rights from people for the dumbest of infractions.
I game with my laptop, not because laptops are preferable for gaming, but because this laptop is more powerful then my current pc, and I have a nice external mouse. :)
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Nice tutorials, they do a very good job introducing the concepts for creating a third person map, and the new layout feature!
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In my honest opinion the following are three glaring issues that have halted my personal development for Starcraft 2 and would be among the top issues other developers have quit or are on hiatus.
Custom Map Size Limit - Please either set this to a reasonable limit (1gb minimum), or allow for developers to buy additional storage space at reasonable rates.
Custom Map List - Please add an option to display custom maps similar to that seen in Warcraft 3, it is the one true unbiased "popularity" system, the only tweaks needed are filters so that players may only see genres they might be interested in playing, and maybe add some kind of map report feature to prevent spam and abuse. If for whatever reason this goes against some modern "design philosophy", at least add a category for viewing newly uploaded maps so they at least have some sort of fighting chance.
Bank Manipulation - Please add some kind of solution that makes the existence of banks viable, data that needs to be stored in banks is usually important, and the ability to edit that data at a whim completely destroys it's integrity and the integrity of the map it is used for. For example, how many player's would play World of Warcraft (or at least for how LONG would players play) if they could open a file in notepad and give themselves whatever level or items they wanted. With the power that the Galaxy editor brings, it is immensely disappointing that there is yet a big void to be filled.
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@RodrigoAlves: Go
Blizzard wouldn't do anything so drastic, all of that legal fine-print is essentially cookie cutter for contests like this, so in the event that Blizzard does showcase your work and use it for any kind of promotional or other uses you don't turn around and claim that they had no right to do so. All of those intense words are just them covering all possible and unforeseeable bases.
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First of all, it is real, if you go through the process of trying to submit a map at
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/community/contests/form/sc2map.html
One of the mandatory checkboxes you have to tick says the following; By submitting this map I am granting licensing rights to Blizzard Entertainment, and will not display, post, or share it until after the contest closes on September 11, 2010.*
The full explanation of licensing rights is,
Sponsor Use of Entries. You hereby agree that in consideration of your being allowed the chance to enter the Contest, you hereby grant Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license and right to utilize the entry materials that you submit to Sponsor in connection with the Contest (collectively, "Entry Materials"). The Entry Materials will not be returned to any entrant. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, you acknowledge that Sponsor shall have the right to use, modify, reproduce, publish, perform, display on all forms of media, distribute, make derivative works of and otherwise commercially and noncommercially exploit the Entry Materials in perpetuity and throughout the universe, in any manner or medium now existing or hereafter developed, without separate compensation to you or any other person or entity. You agree to take, at Sponsor's expense, any further action (including, without limitation, execution of affidavits and other documents) reasonably requested by Sponsor to effect, perfect or confirm Sponsor's rights as set forth above in this paragraph 7.
I'm pretty sure that the guys posting such an important piece of information wouldn't just make it up, and some extra looking around proved that right.
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@Sixen: Go
Does this mean we can publish our maps to different regions ourselves? (Even though we can't play them) Or will the login required stop us from using different gateways.
0
If you try to name a unit in the data editor using the list view, it will let you name it, but the name won't update in the unit list, so you won't be able to select the unit in any lists, or the unit layer. However if you switch to table view, you can name the unit just fine and it will update itself accordingly.
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@progammer: Go
-jawdrop-
That's amazing :O
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@DarkRevenantX: Go
My understanding of this contest is to further the knowledge of what kind of interface elements are possible to create, and as an interface element, it has to look good first hand to the information it might provide because an interface is the front end to the behind the scenes of how that information is maintained.
Unless I misunderstood the objective, it's not the goal to just display/interact with useful raw data , but to show creative ways of doing so (Not just wrapping everything into a generic dialog box with nothing in it). So I don't get where you're coming from because my menu shows an animated dialog which isn't seen very often.
I'm also not sure if you were alluding to my menu being useless in your post, but I have to make the strong argument that it's a menu with no specific objective other then displaying information, which can be used in any number of ways. Although I will agree with you on a panel rather then a popular vote or maybe a cross between the two because there's no way to present each entry fairly (Order of appearance, etc).
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Here's my submission, a Collapsable Animated Dialog Menu using UI Images, a Button, and some Text Labels [Roughly 5 hours of work, 95% of that was planning, adjusting, and sifting through UI images]->
Please play the map for yourself, the menu looks much much prettier in-game than with the ugly resolution on the youtube video.
(The unit has nothing to do with it, I just found out about his cool ability and thought if more people saw it they might find a very creative use for it :P)
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That was a joke map made by a SC2Mapster member to demonstrate how faulty the popularity system is.
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http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/248107291
My post is #26
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@Kanaru: Go
I think you would have definitely won haha
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I'm mainly worried about some sort of retaliation from Blizzard, they have already been reported to completely remove publishing rights from people for the dumbest of infractions.
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I game with my laptop, not because laptops are preferable for gaming, but because this laptop is more powerful then my current pc, and I have a nice external mouse. :)
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Don't remember my account name for wc3c but I used to make a lot of war3 tutorials and cinematics for that site before their database was wiped.