I have a sound track, and its sound object has 3 audio files. I am using this sound track for my games music, but I do not want there to be music playing constantly. The music plays constantly, when one track ends the next one begin, I have enable continuous music unchecked in the menu options by the way. I would like it to play a song once every several minutes or so. Is there any clean way to do this?
Eh dont feel too bad if no one volunteers to help. Most of the time if you want to make a map you just have to make it yourself. If you dont wanna do that then dont make it.
I like the idea of adding eco component to moba genre. Also its medievalish style. And terrain looks good.
But I have a couple of notes.
Use D3 models, dude. Look how shitty those wow ones look even with huge zoom. It will be unplayable with them.
Also, don't rely on other people. If you can create this alone, do it alone, if you can't, just drop the idea. Other people will be nothing but delaying burden.
And make more bridges, one well defended bridge will limit tactics.
I do not know if you are referring to the fact that WOW models are tall and thin and therefore are difficult to see from a zoomed out real time strategy standpoint. If you are, Daara could possibly do what I have done when working with WoW models, simply change the art scale on the model so that they are much thicker looking. Just increase the X and Y and leave the Z the same, and you will have bulky RTS looking units that show up well from a zoomed out RTS standpoint. I also made the weapons thicker in 3ds max to make those stand out more, as something like the shaft of a spear is especially difficult to see well.
Adding my tutorial as the answer to this question. When I was searching for how to do this, this was the first result that showed up so I am posting this for future reference in case anyone else comes along searching for this.
These are the tutorial videos that you viewed in the campaign mode, assuming you played that. These are videos that show up in the help menu that show you how to do things. It is often helpful to have a visual aid to see what you need to do, and that is what these are for.
Reason for Creation
After coming to the conclusion that my game was too complicated for any player to understand on the first try, I realized that I needed to add some sort of help/tutorial information to the game other than just text tips which in my map making experience almost no one reads. One idea I had was to use in game tutorial videos, this is what is done in the SC2 campaign so I would assume players would be accustomed to this. So I went and found the trigger for creating an In-Game tutorial with a video, I imported my own video, and tested the map. The video did not work, so I went to mapster and the internet to find out how to get it to work. Surprisingly SC2 has been out 5 years and after searching it would seem no one has ever posted anything on how to make these videos works, assuming anyone outside of Blizzard knows. So after some reverse engineering I figured it out, and now I am posting this tutorial because, as I said, the solution to this problem does not seem to exist on the internet as of now.
Disclaimer
Before we get started know that I just figured this out and there may be some steps that are unnecessary. I have neither the time nor desire to dig into this further to find out more, all I know right now is that I have a working method. Also as far as I know the software I recommended, that being Bandicam, ffmpeg, and VLC Media Player are spyware free.
How to Create an In-Game Tutorial Video
Recording the Video
Use whatever recording software you want, bandicam is free and works although it produces a watermark if you don't pay for it. Cam studio is free and I don think it has a watermark but I am not sure of the quality and im pretty sure it tries to install 3rd party junkware. At any rate record your video in 1280x720 resolution. I do not know if there are resolutions that are required, although there are two resolutions that almost all of blizzards videos are in and 1280x720 is the high-quality wide screen resolution that they use and it fits nicely in the help window. Record the video in the .avi format.
Now that you have your video, if you try to load it into Starcraft 2 the video will not be useable. There are a few things you must do first. First you must download a tool called ffmpeg. It is an open source piece of software used to do video conversion type stuff. You need to download a static build, 64 bit if you have a 64 bit OS and 32 bit if you have a 32 bit OS. Unzip the folder into any location you want. You then Want to go to your enviornment variables and add the path to the bin folder to your path variable. You can then open up a command prompt and use ffmpeg. I would strongly recommend using ffmpeg instead of something else, as it seems blizzard used an offshoot of this tool to do their video conversions so the codecs and what not are very similar. This youtube video is helpful for doing the setup.
Open up a command prompt. Then navigate to the location of your videos, in my case I went to C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\Bandicam as this is where my recorded Bandicam videos are. Copy this path and change directory in your command prompt by typing: cd C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\Bandicam. Now that you are in your videos directory, you need to run two commands. First you must remove the audio stream from your .avi video. When you record your video it will automatically generate an audio stream, and if your video has an audio stream it will not work In-Game. The command you type is: ffmpeg -i theTest.avi -map 0:0 -vcodec copy theTestOut.avi. This takes the video stream only and copys it into a new video file, that being "theTestOut.avi".
Now we need to run a second command, that being: ffmpeg -i theTestOut.avi -vcodec libtheora output.ogv. This will convert the .avi video you just made to .ogv format. This is important because the In-Game tutorial video trigger only recognizes .ogv videos, so it wont even be able to find the video if the video is not in the .ogv format. You can add an option to the command like so: ffmpeg -i theTestOut.avi -c:v libtheora -q:v 6 output.ogv. This option determines video quality which in turn affects video size. You can pick -1 to 10, I have 6 here. The higher the number the better the quality. I would also reccomend downloading VLC media player, becuase it can view .ogv files, wereas windows media player cannot. If you go under tools->codec information you can also get useful information about a video like its resolution, codec, and encoder. You can also see the streams in the video, so you can verify that the audio stream has been removed.
Import your video into the game like you would any other asset. In this case our video is "output.ogv". Go into the trigger editor, find the action "Create Tutorial" and add that. I put this action into a trigger that is run when a user types something but you can trigger this action however you want. Fill in the trigger with everything, including your imported .ogv video. Go into the game and after you trigger the action that creates the tutorial, click on the help "?" button and then click the tutorials button. Click watch movie and you should see your movie play.
This screenshot shows the in-game video I made, output.ogv. Its just me moving around the folder that contains my bandicam movie files. This was done without using the video quality option in the ffmpeg command, giving the default quality which as you can see is not very good.
There is a trigger that allows you to create a tutorial tip and you must specify a video for the tutorial tip to play. I recorded a .ogv video, imported it, and selected it but the video is just frozen on the first frame and does not play. Is there a video resolution requirement or something that these videos must abide by. If so what is that? If not I may be able to find out If I can locate the videos, which seem to be stored somewhere under assets/textures.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.
Edit: I have found the videos blizzard uses and they are 1280x720. I made my video same resolution but still no luck. The only difference I am seeing is a I used a different encoder which should not matter, and I have an audio stream in the video wereas blizz's videos do not.
I removed the audio stream and used a virtually identical peice of software as blizzard used to do the conversion and the video works now.
Yes this is the team recruitment forum. People come here to form map making/development teams, these people are recruiting for a video game playing clan. These are clearly two different things. If you want to recruit people for your world of warcraft clan, do it on the world of warcraft forums.
@BloodstrikeR1: Go
Below is the mushroom imported into 3ds max. You see in the schematic view you have teh mushrooms sphere, and the two bones which are connected in the diagram with the green arrow. The item on the far right is the mesh. You want to delete the sphere and the bones and not the mesh, this way you still have the mushroom model.
After doing the deletions we now import the tree model. We want to delete the two parts of the tree mesh, which are on teh far right. We want to keep the tree sphere and the tree bones, which you can see in the schematic view are connected with the green arrow.
After deleting the tree mesh we are left with the mushroom mesh on the far left of the schematic view, the tree sphere in green, and the two tree bones that again are connected by the green arrow. The mushroom model is difficult to see in the picture but its there around where the bottom bone is. At this point you can export the model, this is what I did. If you use it as an actor it should scale down to a smaller size than it would otherwise.
In this particular case I noticed that if i scaled actors down too much then they would not show up in game. I came up with hypothesis as to why this could be and tested them to see if the hypothesis was right. In this case I was thinking that the game was using the models bones to determine if the model was too small, so I tried to replace the mushrooms bones with much larger bones, in this case tree bones, and it worked. Its possible the sphere being larger had something to do with it as well but I dont know, in fact it could be soley because of the sphere and the bones might not have had anything to do with it, but I didnt test that.
Some stuff I on learn on mapster, other stuff I just figure out. The more you learn about something the easier and easier it gets to figure out new things about it on your own.
Hi, I have imported wow tree models into SC2, and I am able to set actor models to these tree models and spawn the actors. But for some reason when I do the same with things like grass and mushrooms also from wow, it doesnt work and nothing is spawned. I can spawn the model of the actor in the triggers, but not the actor itself. Also when I try to set a doodads model like auir debris to the tree or mushroom model the editor gives an error saying cant create model: <modelName>_001, 002, etc.
Does anyone know why this is, are there points I am supposed to add in 3ds max or something? thanks.
Edit:
Just compared the tree and mushroom models in 3ds max and they appear to be structurally the same. Strange.
Edit: Also found an error "Cannot create CActorUnit outside of an underlying Cunits CActorsScpe. Try creating the actor inside of a live units CActorScope or create a SCactorModel instead."
I had been doing what the error suggested before, creating the actor model instead but that doesnt suit my purposes.
Edit:
I exported a new mushroom model without "Export animation" checked, and when the scale was set to .3 or above it shows up as its supposed to, any lower than that and its invisible. This is strange given I also made the model very large so its not like its too small to see.
OK:
So I decreased the size of the tree that had been working and I see when i reduce the scale from .22 to .1 the tree is invivisible like the mushrooms. So I guess that leads to another question. Do actors have to be a minimum physical size to show up, and if so can that be altered in the data editor? Thanks.
Solution:
A workaround solution I found was to import the mushroom model in 3ds max, then import the tree model. I removed the mushroom bones and sphere, and kept the tree bones and sphere while removing the tree mesh/polygons. I exported this into sc2 and now it seems I can scale down the actors to a small enough size that I can use them.
Hi, I am trying to make an ability that increases structure health for player. It will be used as an upgrade so if player 1 buys the upgrade his command center will have 1k more health. If player 1 builds another command center later then that command center will also have 1k more health because the upgrade had been purchased already. Is this even possible? Or would I have to make a new unit with 1k more health and do a morph ability to that unit? Thanks.
I see SOpAttachHarness under launch Site Ops. I am not sure how to add what you said to add, in part because the GUI for adding this stuff seems to be messed up. Whenever I try to add an item it does not show up.
0
@joey101d: Go If I do that then the unit cannot attack enemy structures. So that does not work.
0
How is this done, assuming its possible.
Thanks.
0
Hi,
I have a sound track, and its sound object has 3 audio files. I am using this sound track for my games music, but I do not want there to be music playing constantly. The music plays constantly, when one track ends the next one begin, I have enable continuous music unchecked in the menu options by the way. I would like it to play a song once every several minutes or so. Is there any clean way to do this?
thanks.
0
Eh dont feel too bad if no one volunteers to help. Most of the time if you want to make a map you just have to make it yourself. If you dont wanna do that then dont make it.
0
I do not know if you are referring to the fact that WOW models are tall and thin and therefore are difficult to see from a zoomed out real time strategy standpoint. If you are, Daara could possibly do what I have done when working with WoW models, simply change the art scale on the model so that they are much thicker looking. Just increase the X and Y and leave the Z the same, and you will have bulky RTS looking units that show up well from a zoomed out RTS standpoint. I also made the weapons thicker in 3ds max to make those stand out more, as something like the shaft of a spear is especially difficult to see well.
0
@malkavianVision: Go
Adding my tutorial as the answer to this question. When I was searching for how to do this, this was the first result that showed up so I am posting this for future reference in case anyone else comes along searching for this.
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179362-trigger-ui-in-game-tutorial-videos
0
What is an In-Game Tutorial Video?
These are the tutorial videos that you viewed in the campaign mode, assuming you played that. These are videos that show up in the help menu that show you how to do things. It is often helpful to have a visual aid to see what you need to do, and that is what these are for.
Reason for Creation
After coming to the conclusion that my game was too complicated for any player to understand on the first try, I realized that I needed to add some sort of help/tutorial information to the game other than just text tips which in my map making experience almost no one reads. One idea I had was to use in game tutorial videos, this is what is done in the SC2 campaign so I would assume players would be accustomed to this. So I went and found the trigger for creating an In-Game tutorial with a video, I imported my own video, and tested the map. The video did not work, so I went to mapster and the internet to find out how to get it to work. Surprisingly SC2 has been out 5 years and after searching it would seem no one has ever posted anything on how to make these videos works, assuming anyone outside of Blizzard knows. So after some reverse engineering I figured it out, and now I am posting this tutorial because, as I said, the solution to this problem does not seem to exist on the internet as of now.
Disclaimer
Before we get started know that I just figured this out and there may be some steps that are unnecessary. I have neither the time nor desire to dig into this further to find out more, all I know right now is that I have a working method. Also as far as I know the software I recommended, that being Bandicam, ffmpeg, and VLC Media Player are spyware free.
How to Create an In-Game Tutorial Video
Recording the Video
Use whatever recording software you want, bandicam is free and works although it produces a watermark if you don't pay for it. Cam studio is free and I don think it has a watermark but I am not sure of the quality and im pretty sure it tries to install 3rd party junkware. At any rate record your video in 1280x720 resolution. I do not know if there are resolutions that are required, although there are two resolutions that almost all of blizzards videos are in and 1280x720 is the high-quality wide screen resolution that they use and it fits nicely in the help window. Record the video in the .avi format.
Bandicam Website: http://www.bandicam.com/downloads/
Converting the Video to a Usable Format
Setting up ffmpeg
Now that you have your video, if you try to load it into Starcraft 2 the video will not be useable. There are a few things you must do first. First you must download a tool called ffmpeg. It is an open source piece of software used to do video conversion type stuff. You need to download a static build, 64 bit if you have a 64 bit OS and 32 bit if you have a 32 bit OS. Unzip the folder into any location you want. You then Want to go to your enviornment variables and add the path to the bin folder to your path variable. You can then open up a command prompt and use ffmpeg. I would strongly recommend using ffmpeg instead of something else, as it seems blizzard used an offshoot of this tool to do their video conversions so the codecs and what not are very similar. This youtube video is helpful for doing the setup.
Youtube video showing ffmpeg setup:
ffmpeg: http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
Using ffmpeg
Open up a command prompt. Then navigate to the location of your videos, in my case I went to C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\Bandicam as this is where my recorded Bandicam videos are. Copy this path and change directory in your command prompt by typing: cd C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\Bandicam. Now that you are in your videos directory, you need to run two commands. First you must remove the audio stream from your .avi video. When you record your video it will automatically generate an audio stream, and if your video has an audio stream it will not work In-Game. The command you type is: ffmpeg -i theTest.avi -map 0:0 -vcodec copy theTestOut.avi. This takes the video stream only and copys it into a new video file, that being "theTestOut.avi".
Now we need to run a second command, that being: ffmpeg -i theTestOut.avi -vcodec libtheora output.ogv. This will convert the .avi video you just made to .ogv format. This is important because the In-Game tutorial video trigger only recognizes .ogv videos, so it wont even be able to find the video if the video is not in the .ogv format. You can add an option to the command like so: ffmpeg -i theTestOut.avi -c:v libtheora -q:v 6 output.ogv. This option determines video quality which in turn affects video size. You can pick -1 to 10, I have 6 here. The higher the number the better the quality. I would also reccomend downloading VLC media player, becuase it can view .ogv files, wereas windows media player cannot. If you go under tools->codec information you can also get useful information about a video like its resolution, codec, and encoder. You can also see the streams in the video, so you can verify that the audio stream has been removed.
VLC Media Player: http://www.videolan.org/
Using the Video in Game
Import your video into the game like you would any other asset. In this case our video is "output.ogv". Go into the trigger editor, find the action "Create Tutorial" and add that. I put this action into a trigger that is run when a user types something but you can trigger this action however you want. Fill in the trigger with everything, including your imported .ogv video. Go into the game and after you trigger the action that creates the tutorial, click on the help "?" button and then click the tutorials button. Click watch movie and you should see your movie play.
This screenshot shows the in-game video I made, output.ogv. Its just me moving around the folder that contains my bandicam movie files. This was done without using the video quality option in the ffmpeg command, giving the default quality which as you can see is not very good.
0
Hi,
There is a trigger that allows you to create a tutorial tip and you must specify a video for the tutorial tip to play. I recorded a .ogv video, imported it, and selected it but the video is just frozen on the first frame and does not play. Is there a video resolution requirement or something that these videos must abide by. If so what is that? If not I may be able to find out If I can locate the videos, which seem to be stored somewhere under assets/textures.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
Edit: I have found the videos blizzard uses and they are 1280x720. I made my video same resolution but still no luck. The only difference I am seeing is a I used a different encoder which should not matter, and I have an audio stream in the video wereas blizz's videos do not.
I removed the audio stream and used a virtually identical peice of software as blizzard used to do the conversion and the video works now.
0
Hi,
I want to change the cutscene editor background to black to make some art assets. I cant seem to find out where I do that, its just the standard blue.
Edit: Nevermind, just used a shape model and tinted it black.
thanks.
0
@MaskedImposter: Go
Yes this is the team recruitment forum. People come here to form map making/development teams, these people are recruiting for a video game playing clan. These are clearly two different things. If you want to recruit people for your world of warcraft clan, do it on the world of warcraft forums.
0
@BloodstrikeR1: Go Below is the mushroom imported into 3ds max. You see in the schematic view you have teh mushrooms sphere, and the two bones which are connected in the diagram with the green arrow. The item on the far right is the mesh. You want to delete the sphere and the bones and not the mesh, this way you still have the mushroom model.
After doing the deletions we now import the tree model. We want to delete the two parts of the tree mesh, which are on teh far right. We want to keep the tree sphere and the tree bones, which you can see in the schematic view are connected with the green arrow.
After deleting the tree mesh we are left with the mushroom mesh on the far left of the schematic view, the tree sphere in green, and the two tree bones that again are connected by the green arrow. The mushroom model is difficult to see in the picture but its there around where the bottom bone is. At this point you can export the model, this is what I did. If you use it as an actor it should scale down to a smaller size than it would otherwise.
In this particular case I noticed that if i scaled actors down too much then they would not show up in game. I came up with hypothesis as to why this could be and tested them to see if the hypothesis was right. In this case I was thinking that the game was using the models bones to determine if the model was too small, so I tried to replace the mushrooms bones with much larger bones, in this case tree bones, and it worked. Its possible the sphere being larger had something to do with it as well but I dont know, in fact it could be soley because of the sphere and the bones might not have had anything to do with it, but I didnt test that.
Some stuff I on learn on mapster, other stuff I just figure out. The more you learn about something the easier and easier it gets to figure out new things about it on your own.
0
Hi, I have imported wow tree models into SC2, and I am able to set actor models to these tree models and spawn the actors. But for some reason when I do the same with things like grass and mushrooms also from wow, it doesnt work and nothing is spawned. I can spawn the model of the actor in the triggers, but not the actor itself. Also when I try to set a doodads model like auir debris to the tree or mushroom model the editor gives an error saying cant create model: <modelName>_001, 002, etc.
Does anyone know why this is, are there points I am supposed to add in 3ds max or something? thanks.
Edit: Just compared the tree and mushroom models in 3ds max and they appear to be structurally the same. Strange.
Edit: Also found an error "Cannot create CActorUnit outside of an underlying Cunits CActorsScpe. Try creating the actor inside of a live units CActorScope or create a SCactorModel instead."
I had been doing what the error suggested before, creating the actor model instead but that doesnt suit my purposes.
Edit: I exported a new mushroom model without "Export animation" checked, and when the scale was set to .3 or above it shows up as its supposed to, any lower than that and its invisible. This is strange given I also made the model very large so its not like its too small to see.
OK: So I decreased the size of the tree that had been working and I see when i reduce the scale from .22 to .1 the tree is invivisible like the mushrooms. So I guess that leads to another question. Do actors have to be a minimum physical size to show up, and if so can that be altered in the data editor? Thanks.
Solution: A workaround solution I found was to import the mushroom model in 3ds max, then import the tree model. I removed the mushroom bones and sphere, and kept the tree bones and sphere while removing the tree mesh/polygons. I exported this into sc2 and now it seems I can scale down the actors to a small enough size that I can use them.
0
Hi, I am trying to make an ability that increases structure health for player. It will be used as an upgrade so if player 1 buys the upgrade his command center will have 1k more health. If player 1 builds another command center later then that command center will also have 1k more health because the upgrade had been purchased already. Is this even possible? Or would I have to make a new unit with 1k more health and do a morph ability to that unit? Thanks.
0
@TyaArcade: Go I meant the UI itself is bugged.
Thanks for the help though, assuming this gets fixed I should be able to do what you said.
0
@TyaArcade: Go
I see SOpAttachHarness under launch Site Ops. I am not sure how to add what you said to add, in part because the GUI for adding this stuff seems to be messed up. Whenever I try to add an item it does not show up.