Just wanted to say thanks for the review and I'm glad you liked it. The criticisms are extremely helpful as well, in fact I already took your advice and changed "Undo" to "Reset" :)
The counterintuitiveness is a big problem for me personally because I've joined lots of random games where players have no idea what to do and die in a couple of rounds. I am welcoming any suggestions on how to make the map more intuitive and newb-friendly without necessarily requiring people to read all the tips in the help menu.
Random Q: Did I inspire the pathing markers at all? Just curious; would be awesome if so...
Sort of. I had a rudimentary implementation for debugging purposes (they looked way uglier) but the positive reception to your video made me decide to put them in as a real feature and make them look nicer. So thanks for that!
I'm curious if we both arrived at the same implementation independently. My technique is to spawn an invisible runner who has a behavior that periodically creates marker units. I order him to run the maze and self-destruct at the end of it. It's almost entirely data driven except for the trigger that creates the runner and sends him on his way.
The pulsating added in the latest version is a very simple effect, I just use timers in the actor event to periodically modify the scale and tint colors.
This is basically the 1.3 update that I reverted a couple of days ago but with the stuck bug fixed and the Unstuck ability added. Feedback about the adjusted difficulty levels and whether or not the CTDs are reduced is greatly appreciated, thanks.
It's pretty clear that Sixen feels that mapmakers should have no choice in how other people use their work, is entirely unsympathetic to the inevitability of people getting their maps stolen and lives in a fantasy where he has no responsibility for the content posted on his own website. Fair enough. It's been swell.
You would think so but really there's no built in way of doing this. When a SC2 unit acquires an attack target it will always continue to attack that target as long as its available. You've already found the workaround, but the main difficulty is setting it up so if you give it an attack order it will stay on target while if it auto-acquires a target then it'll re-acquire after every shot. This is a PITA but I'm sure it's possible.
So the problem is that people can unlock maps, which means their problem is with Blizzard. There's not much I can do about that. I can't stop people from unlocking maps and I certainly can't hide it.
You can't stop people from pirating SC2 either, but would you allow links to torrents to be posted in the forum? If the game is hacked so people can play on battle.net without buying a copy of the game, would you news a step by step guide on how to do so?
Exampe: Having all range and melee damage reduced by x/(x+100); where x is the target's resistance attribute (custom attribute). Matter of fact, modifying incoming damage in-general is ridiculously complicating. Or at least it's very obscure as to how you're supposed to go about it.
It's not that complicated. You create a buff behavior and adjust the Damage Response to modify the incoming damage value. Limited, yes, highly so.
To answer the OP, the data editor has some hard limits to it, but it's also quite flexible. For example, if you want each point in an attribute to increase spell damage by a %, or by a fixed amount, or both, you can do that. But if you want it to increase quadratically, you're out of luck and will need to use triggers as a workaround, because there's no way of entering equations in the data editor.
Because you can't enter equations in the data editor, it's a little tricky using attributes for value calculations. You can't for example specify you want the damage to be the hero's strength * 2.5, but you could set the base damage to 2.5 and then make each point of the Strength attribute increase spell damage done by 100%. Unfortunately there are only four damage types to work with (ranged, melee, spell, and splash) so if you're creating many abilities you start to run against limitations.
The best advice I can give is to work within the limitations of the data editor. Find a more easily implemented way of scaling damage, for example.
I don't think it'll all fit so just paste as much as can fit (the most relevant details are on top anyway.) From other crash reports I've determined that the crashing is not occuring while triggers are running which means there isn't much info I can glean from the crash reports, but my hope is that enough of them post will get someone from Blizzard to take a quick look and maybe fix the bug that's behind them.
In the meantime I've been tweaking things with every version to try to come up with a workaround. Unfortunately it doesn't crash on my computer so it's really difficult to isolate the problem. Sorry that it's been unplayable for you, and hopefully I have a version soon that finally puts the CTD issue to rest.
You know what's really funny is if you try to post a map project here there are tons of warnings on how you can only post it if you're the map's creator or you have their express permission.
But apparently posting an unlocked map on the forums is OK and even encouraged by some of the mods, and will only be taken down if the map's original author somehow finds out about it and then asks that it's taken down.
I'm losing interest in sticking around here. Clearly the site runners are more interested in the extra traffic that'll be gathered by posting controversial things like cracking guides and unlocked versions of popular maps than creating a resource that's friendly to map authors.
On a side note if your map is causing a lot of crash for users blizzard might take it down. You should take this more seriously and investigate the problem
I'm offended by the suggestion that I haven't.
Maybe you'd like to look through the 100+ crash reports that I have and try to find the common thread.
Can you guys upload some screenshots of how units are getting stuck? It honestly should not even be possible, but the pathfinding code might be a little wonky for non-colliding units.
I would have never learned to make program, years ago, if I didn't open up some source code of another app and see how they did certain things. If someone wants to steal a map, there's nothing stopping them. That is not what I am talking about though. The point here is to learn from others.
You didn't learn to program by reverse engineering someone else's software. You learned by looking at source code that someone released to the public in order to help other people learn. The point is that the person who wrote that source code chose to do so. I'm all for open source, and if not for Blizzard's popularity system being incredibly vulnerable to map stealing I'd release my unlocked map in a heartbeat (in fact I still plan to eventually.) But forcing people to make their maps open is not cool; the author should have some choice in the matter.
As for the other argument (security) - yes, map locking is not secure; at best, it is security through obscurity. If your intention is to show that maps can be unlocked in order to force Blizzard to design a better locking scheme then just post a demo map that you locked and then broke as a proof of concept that it can be done and Blizzard needs to get on it. Unlike software which can be patched for vulnerabilities, even if Blizzard in the next patch were to implement a more secure locking scheme, existing copies of maps would still be vulnerable.
Anyway it's coming down to this: you can either come down on the side of the people who are actually creating popular, finished maps, or you can come down on the side of people who want to use other people's work without authorization. Some of them will use it purely for learning purposes but many will simply steal parts wholesale without any credit given, and a few will steal maps outright, exploiting the popularity system. Do you really want your website to be on the side of those people? As someone who has spent a lot of time here, virtually all of it trying to be as helpful as possible, I am not sure that I would want to continue to post here if I didn't feel that the owners of this site respected my wishes and those of other established members of the community who have produced the majority of popular and well-received SC2 maps enough to stay at the very least neutral on this issue.
edit: To clarify I don't think this thread should be deleted and I don't even mind discussion on how to unlock maps and how the locking system could be improved. I just think 1) publishing an unlocked version of someone else's map should be a bannable offense (fine with giving this guy a warning, just for the future) and 2) mods should not news or go out of their way to publicize any step-by-step guides on how to break the locking scheme.
0
Just wanted to say thanks for the review and I'm glad you liked it. The criticisms are extremely helpful as well, in fact I already took your advice and changed "Undo" to "Reset" :)
The counterintuitiveness is a big problem for me personally because I've joined lots of random games where players have no idea what to do and die in a couple of rounds. I am welcoming any suggestions on how to make the map more intuitive and newb-friendly without necessarily requiring people to read all the tips in the help menu.
0
Sort of. I had a rudimentary implementation for debugging purposes (they looked way uglier) but the positive reception to your video made me decide to put them in as a real feature and make them look nicer. So thanks for that!
I'm curious if we both arrived at the same implementation independently. My technique is to spawn an invisible runner who has a behavior that periodically creates marker units. I order him to run the maze and self-destruct at the end of it. It's almost entirely data driven except for the trigger that creates the runner and sends him on his way.
The pulsating added in the latest version is a very simple effect, I just use timers in the actor event to periodically modify the scale and tint colors.
0
New version posted on US (EU tomorrow hopefully.)
This is basically the 1.3 update that I reverted a couple of days ago but with the stuck bug fixed and the Unstuck ability added. Feedback about the adjusted difficulty levels and whether or not the CTDs are reduced is greatly appreciated, thanks.
0
It's pretty clear that Sixen feels that mapmakers should have no choice in how other people use their work, is entirely unsympathetic to the inevitability of people getting their maps stolen and lives in a fantasy where he has no responsibility for the content posted on his own website. Fair enough. It's been swell.
0
No it won't. Input will still be delayed by, at a MINIMUM, the round trip time between you and the server. Nothing they do is going to change this.
0
You would think so but really there's no built in way of doing this. When a SC2 unit acquires an attack target it will always continue to attack that target as long as its available. You've already found the workaround, but the main difficulty is setting it up so if you give it an attack order it will stay on target while if it auto-acquires a target then it'll re-acquire after every shot. This is a PITA but I'm sure it's possible.
0
You can't stop people from pirating SC2 either, but would you allow links to torrents to be posted in the forum? If the game is hacked so people can play on battle.net without buying a copy of the game, would you news a step by step guide on how to do so?
0
You need to convert the portrait from a game link to a string.
0
It's not that complicated. You create a buff behavior and adjust the Damage Response to modify the incoming damage value. Limited, yes, highly so.
To answer the OP, the data editor has some hard limits to it, but it's also quite flexible. For example, if you want each point in an attribute to increase spell damage by a %, or by a fixed amount, or both, you can do that. But if you want it to increase quadratically, you're out of luck and will need to use triggers as a workaround, because there's no way of entering equations in the data editor.
Because you can't enter equations in the data editor, it's a little tricky using attributes for value calculations. You can't for example specify you want the damage to be the hero's strength * 2.5, but you could set the base damage to 2.5 and then make each point of the Strength attribute increase spell damage done by 100%. Unfortunately there are only four damage types to work with (ranged, melee, spell, and splash) so if you're creating many abilities you start to run against limitations.
The best advice I can give is to work within the limitations of the data editor. Find a more easily implemented way of scaling damage, for example.
0
The text in that window is the crash report. If you want to do me a huge favor then c&p it into this thread:
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/832173739
I don't think it'll all fit so just paste as much as can fit (the most relevant details are on top anyway.) From other crash reports I've determined that the crashing is not occuring while triggers are running which means there isn't much info I can glean from the crash reports, but my hope is that enough of them post will get someone from Blizzard to take a quick look and maybe fix the bug that's behind them.
In the meantime I've been tweaking things with every version to try to come up with a workaround. Unfortunately it doesn't crash on my computer so it's really difficult to isolate the problem. Sorry that it's been unplayable for you, and hopefully I have a version soon that finally puts the CTD issue to rest.
0
You know what's really funny is if you try to post a map project here there are tons of warnings on how you can only post it if you're the map's creator or you have their express permission.
But apparently posting an unlocked map on the forums is OK and even encouraged by some of the mods, and will only be taken down if the map's original author somehow finds out about it and then asks that it's taken down.
I'm losing interest in sticking around here. Clearly the site runners are more interested in the extra traffic that'll be gathered by posting controversial things like cracking guides and unlocked versions of popular maps than creating a resource that's friendly to map authors.
0
If they don't want it to crash they should fix their fucking buggy engine. Custom maps should not be able to cause CTDs.
edit: I reverted the US version to 1.2 to fix the stuck creep bug. Still have no idea what was causing it, but it was only happening online.
0
I'm offended by the suggestion that I haven't.
Maybe you'd like to look through the 100+ crash reports that I have and try to find the common thread.
0
@Colawaffle: Go
Can you guys upload some screenshots of how units are getting stuck? It honestly should not even be possible, but the pathfinding code might be a little wonky for non-colliding units.
0
You didn't learn to program by reverse engineering someone else's software. You learned by looking at source code that someone released to the public in order to help other people learn. The point is that the person who wrote that source code chose to do so. I'm all for open source, and if not for Blizzard's popularity system being incredibly vulnerable to map stealing I'd release my unlocked map in a heartbeat (in fact I still plan to eventually.) But forcing people to make their maps open is not cool; the author should have some choice in the matter.
As for the other argument (security) - yes, map locking is not secure; at best, it is security through obscurity. If your intention is to show that maps can be unlocked in order to force Blizzard to design a better locking scheme then just post a demo map that you locked and then broke as a proof of concept that it can be done and Blizzard needs to get on it. Unlike software which can be patched for vulnerabilities, even if Blizzard in the next patch were to implement a more secure locking scheme, existing copies of maps would still be vulnerable.
Anyway it's coming down to this: you can either come down on the side of the people who are actually creating popular, finished maps, or you can come down on the side of people who want to use other people's work without authorization. Some of them will use it purely for learning purposes but many will simply steal parts wholesale without any credit given, and a few will steal maps outright, exploiting the popularity system. Do you really want your website to be on the side of those people? As someone who has spent a lot of time here, virtually all of it trying to be as helpful as possible, I am not sure that I would want to continue to post here if I didn't feel that the owners of this site respected my wishes and those of other established members of the community who have produced the majority of popular and well-received SC2 maps enough to stay at the very least neutral on this issue.
edit: To clarify I don't think this thread should be deleted and I don't even mind discussion on how to unlock maps and how the locking system could be improved. I just think 1) publishing an unlocked version of someone else's map should be a bannable offense (fine with giving this guy a warning, just for the future) and 2) mods should not news or go out of their way to publicize any step-by-step guides on how to break the locking scheme.