Wonderful! Excitement worthy news, I'm glad I stayed around =D
Also, does this mean that when designing any sort of competitive map you should take in consideration that teams might have map hackers, since now there is really no a way to ban them?
People still need a Battle-net account, and it's not all fun to create a new one too often. Don't think you have to worry about it, if it's going to be a real problem for maps, I'm sure Blizzard figures something :)
Just like in the campaign, simply going from one map to another with all players. Also linking to the same map will simply restart the game. (Optimize this function for better loading-time as well. This would make it much easier for people to rematch).
2. Different modes for controlling lag:
In melee games this makes sense, but for so many other genres, like a MOBA or an RPG, it shouldn't pause the game, or make everyone else lag. Just stop all inputs from that player while everyone else can play on. When the player reconnects, give him control back. Also a few trigger-events to go with this: "Player Disconnect", you could then make his hero be controlled by the AI until "Player Reconnects".
3. Optimize the game for something other than the default camera-view.
It is perfectly legitimate to not optimizing your game for anything but the way it can be played, but you obviously knew that custom maps where not all going to use the standard view. I am not entirely sure what it is that is hitting performance so badly when you rotate the pitch slightly upwards, but it's really bad. This combined with how the lag-system works makes any form of first-person to third-person view impossible to play online. I know this is possible to fix, but might be hard to implement if all your graphics-engine guys are working on something else now. Just reduce the quality of the terrain further away from the camera as well as not rendering small doodads before it is in near range.
Please link Blizzard to this thread. There's a lot of good suggestions here.
Truely amazing work, but I cant help to wonder why you would pick SC2 to do a 2D platformer game. The same thing could've been done in a much more simplistic engine with better performance, or even as a browser-game.
I guess it's for the challenge and for the achievement of doing it - I can relate to that.
So I have this RPG map on the arcade called Corruption RPG; go ahead, try it out or look it up ;)
While boss-battles are not exactly something people are complaining directly about, I think a lot of the features people are asking for (more interesting end-game, more side-quests etc.) could really be helped along by some better boss-battles, and frankly the current ones are not my best work.
What I am looking for is something like the bosses in the HotS campaign, but of cause unique. You can come with your own ideas or seek guidance from me, it's up to you.
The map will see a major update with a lot of HotS stuff I have added as well as the improved bosses when you have finished them. You will receive credits as deserved and wanted. The map itself has a good rating and is released already, so your work WILL see the day of light unlike some other projects. The map has been quite popular and has a small fan-base, and (don't tell) Blizzard wants to feature it when I feel ready for it.
We are talking 3-4 Boss-battles at about the same level of quality seen in the HotS campaign. Here is a list of them:
- Ultralisk: Only needs a little work, a charge ability will be enough.
- Stone Zealot: This is an optional boss-battles, so you decide the quality of it.
- Icarus (Hybrid-Destroyer): This already has some functionality to it, might only require some touch-ups, but again, you decide if you want to do a touch-up or revamp.
- Icarus Second Battle: This is the final boss-battle, and I would like to see a full revamp of this battle with multiple phases and abilities.
If anyone is interested in this position or wants to hear more info, please reply here or send me a PM.
Some mini-game if I remember correctly, Blizzards judges thought it had a good finish and had what it needed to become a popular map. It was played for about a week after that, most people played it once and that was it. I don't even think it's on Battle-net anymore.
Something as unique as clicking on units to kill them before they reached your nexus.
I'm not bitter, but I would have liked to have seen something else than "what can you accomplish in 2 weeks, it has to be completed//no beta/no proof of concept". So the custom-maps could be more than just simple minigames that's seen hundreds of times before.
I guess it's not worth it for me to use a few HotS assets for my map then - unless there are some reeeealy cool ones ;). I rather keep the map available for the poor people who doesn't have HotS preordered :p
EDIT: by the way, during the beta I tried to add the HotS dependecies to my map, but the editor froze up, and I had to close it after it stood there for about 10 minutes. Never got it to work, so either I screwed up somehow, or it is not that simple to add dependencies to a current map.
@Taintedwisp: I am on the team of "Project X" and I am no dick as far as I am aware. To anyone interested, before or after Taintedwisp's post, don't worry about the people on the team. Everyone on the team are purely friendly and welcoming people, but with a sense of professionalism you won't find many other places on the internet. If you want to learn some very valuable leasons about how a profesional game-development team is working together on a major project, this is definitely the right team to join.
If you think you have the skills, talent and time required for a larger team-based project, please send ETW your application. I cant wait to have one of you onboard the project soon! :)
I am looking for this as well. It seems like 2.0.4 have added a few functions regarding achievements, but I am yet to figure out how to use them.. Maybe someone can throw some light on this? Anyone got some achievements to work?
You sir, have done an amazing job with this! If you were just to tell me about the idea of the map, I would've been a bit skeptical that anyone would really use it over normal overlays, but after seeing it, I have changed my mind.. This is absolutely perfectly executed!, hat off to you.
I cant imagine people won't start using this over the old overlays. otherwise they're foolish
One question though: when playing as one of the players, are there any difference from normal melee maps visual wise after the game has been setup and starting? Or is the extra stuff (decals and stuff) only visible to the broadcaster?
No, unless you recreate them in 3Ds-MAX. You just have to wait a little longer for the full release, and you can be sure there will be even more awesome jungle-doodads to choose from in the full release of Heart of the Swarm.
It always depends on the situation. Sometimes, if there's a unit you use very often, you can simply save it's index in the array in another variable, sometimes it makes sense to store the index on the unit using custom values or alike. Sometimes running through the whole array is the way to go. This is something people use years of education to master.
I think it's good you care about performance, but with my example of a 1000 elements I made up some untrue numbers to make my point more clear. Running through a thousand elemets, and checking if it's the right one doesn't take miliseconds, but rather a few nano-seconds at top. It's good to keep performance in mind, but when you're not working with the graphics of the game, you can take it easy about performance. Unless you make some kind of memory leak or too many periodic events it's very unlikely that you run into performance problems, even with thousands of variables.
Thought I contribute with some terrans crash-landing a zerg party in the mids of the jungle.
Also, for those who does not have the editor, the beta-editor showcased thus far doesn't have that many new doodads, and 90% of those that are in the editor are placeholders (black-white spheres). So when the full version comes out, there's no doubt we can all do some much greater terrains :)
The amount alone does not mean much, even if you're using a lot. Parsing through them ineffeciently might though. For example, if you have an array of a thousand elements. Storinging it in memory only takes a few miliseconds, so doing this once will only cause the game to freeze for a frame or two, or causing the loading of your map to take a few miliseconds longer if done at map-initialization.
Now say you want to find an unit inside this array, but you dont know at which index it is at, so you have to loop through the full index to find that unit, then afterwads you want to remove that unit from the array, but you dont want to have a null-pointer in the middle of your array as that might cause an overflow later, so you have to loop through your array again to move all units one index down. That's two calls with conditions and actions and you might want to do a lot more calculations, this takes time and will cause lag if done too many places.
The variables themselves stored in memory doesn't cost performance, adding them, removing them and doing calculations on them does cost performance though.
Also all heavy variables like "Unit" is only a reference, not a complete copy of that unit, so each variable which a few excetions can only take up a few bytes each. A quick estimate of 10.000 variables of 48bit each equals only 58 kilobytes total.
0
People still need a Battle-net account, and it's not all fun to create a new one too often. Don't think you have to worry about it, if it's going to be a real problem for maps, I'm sure Blizzard figures something :)
0
1. Linking Maps:
Just like in the campaign, simply going from one map to another with all players. Also linking to the same map will simply restart the game. (Optimize this function for better loading-time as well. This would make it much easier for people to rematch).
2. Different modes for controlling lag:
In melee games this makes sense, but for so many other genres, like a MOBA or an RPG, it shouldn't pause the game, or make everyone else lag. Just stop all inputs from that player while everyone else can play on. When the player reconnects, give him control back. Also a few trigger-events to go with this: "Player Disconnect", you could then make his hero be controlled by the AI until "Player Reconnects".
3. Optimize the game for something other than the default camera-view.
It is perfectly legitimate to not optimizing your game for anything but the way it can be played, but you obviously knew that custom maps where not all going to use the standard view. I am not entirely sure what it is that is hitting performance so badly when you rotate the pitch slightly upwards, but it's really bad. This combined with how the lag-system works makes any form of first-person to third-person view impossible to play online. I know this is possible to fix, but might be hard to implement if all your graphics-engine guys are working on something else now. Just reduce the quality of the terrain further away from the camera as well as not rendering small doodads before it is in near range.
Please link Blizzard to this thread. There's a lot of good suggestions here.
0
Truely amazing work, but I cant help to wonder why you would pick SC2 to do a 2D platformer game. The same thing could've been done in a much more simplistic engine with better performance, or even as a browser-game.
I guess it's for the challenge and for the achievement of doing it - I can relate to that.
In SC2 or not, it still looks great :)
0
So I have this RPG map on the arcade called Corruption RPG; go ahead, try it out or look it up ;)
While boss-battles are not exactly something people are complaining directly about, I think a lot of the features people are asking for (more interesting end-game, more side-quests etc.) could really be helped along by some better boss-battles, and frankly the current ones are not my best work.
What I am looking for is something like the bosses in the HotS campaign, but of cause unique. You can come with your own ideas or seek guidance from me, it's up to you.
The map will see a major update with a lot of HotS stuff I have added as well as the improved bosses when you have finished them. You will receive credits as deserved and wanted. The map itself has a good rating and is released already, so your work WILL see the day of light unlike some other projects. The map has been quite popular and has a small fan-base, and (don't tell) Blizzard wants to feature it when I feel ready for it.
We are talking 3-4 Boss-battles at about the same level of quality seen in the HotS campaign. Here is a list of them: - Ultralisk: Only needs a little work, a charge ability will be enough. - Stone Zealot: This is an optional boss-battles, so you decide the quality of it. - Icarus (Hybrid-Destroyer): This already has some functionality to it, might only require some touch-ups, but again, you decide if you want to do a touch-up or revamp. - Icarus Second Battle: This is the final boss-battle, and I would like to see a full revamp of this battle with multiple phases and abilities.
If anyone is interested in this position or wants to hear more info, please reply here or send me a PM.
0
@Zolden:
Some mini-game if I remember correctly, Blizzards judges thought it had a good finish and had what it needed to become a popular map. It was played for about a week after that, most people played it once and that was it. I don't even think it's on Battle-net anymore.
Something as unique as clicking on units to kill them before they reached your nexus.
I'm not bitter, but I would have liked to have seen something else than "what can you accomplish in 2 weeks, it has to be completed//no beta/no proof of concept". So the custom-maps could be more than just simple minigames that's seen hundreds of times before.
0
I think it is called "Zerus - Log Bridge" if I recall correctly. It's a doodads, not an unit.
Remember to import both dependencies "Swarm - Multi" and "Swarm - Campaign"
0
I guess it's not worth it for me to use a few HotS assets for my map then - unless there are some reeeealy cool ones ;). I rather keep the map available for the poor people who doesn't have HotS preordered :p
EDIT: by the way, during the beta I tried to add the HotS dependecies to my map, but the editor froze up, and I had to close it after it stood there for about 10 minutes. Never got it to work, so either I screwed up somehow, or it is not that simple to add dependencies to a current map.
0
@Taintedwisp: I am on the team of "Project X" and I am no dick as far as I am aware. To anyone interested, before or after Taintedwisp's post, don't worry about the people on the team. Everyone on the team are purely friendly and welcoming people, but with a sense of professionalism you won't find many other places on the internet. If you want to learn some very valuable leasons about how a profesional game-development team is working together on a major project, this is definitely the right team to join.
If you think you have the skills, talent and time required for a larger team-based project, please send ETW your application. I cant wait to have one of you onboard the project soon! :)
0
I am looking for this as well. It seems like 2.0.4 have added a few functions regarding achievements, but I am yet to figure out how to use them.. Maybe someone can throw some light on this? Anyone got some achievements to work?
0
Third-party tools that have to run on the players/clients computers doesn't normally get used a whole lot.
0
You sir, have done an amazing job with this! If you were just to tell me about the idea of the map, I would've been a bit skeptical that anyone would really use it over normal overlays, but after seeing it, I have changed my mind.. This is absolutely perfectly executed!, hat off to you.
I cant imagine people won't start using this over the old overlays. otherwise they're foolish
One question though: when playing as one of the players, are there any difference from normal melee maps visual wise after the game has been setup and starting? Or is the extra stuff (decals and stuff) only visible to the broadcaster?
0
No, unless you recreate them in 3Ds-MAX. You just have to wait a little longer for the full release, and you can be sure there will be even more awesome jungle-doodads to choose from in the full release of Heart of the Swarm.
0
It always depends on the situation. Sometimes, if there's a unit you use very often, you can simply save it's index in the array in another variable, sometimes it makes sense to store the index on the unit using custom values or alike. Sometimes running through the whole array is the way to go. This is something people use years of education to master.
I think it's good you care about performance, but with my example of a 1000 elements I made up some untrue numbers to make my point more clear. Running through a thousand elemets, and checking if it's the right one doesn't take miliseconds, but rather a few nano-seconds at top. It's good to keep performance in mind, but when you're not working with the graphics of the game, you can take it easy about performance. Unless you make some kind of memory leak or too many periodic events it's very unlikely that you run into performance problems, even with thousands of variables.
0
Thought I contribute with some terrans crash-landing a zerg party in the mids of the jungle.
Also, for those who does not have the editor, the beta-editor showcased thus far doesn't have that many new doodads, and 90% of those that are in the editor are placeholders (black-white spheres). So when the full version comes out, there's no doubt we can all do some much greater terrains :)
0
The amount alone does not mean much, even if you're using a lot. Parsing through them ineffeciently might though. For example, if you have an array of a thousand elements. Storinging it in memory only takes a few miliseconds, so doing this once will only cause the game to freeze for a frame or two, or causing the loading of your map to take a few miliseconds longer if done at map-initialization.
Now say you want to find an unit inside this array, but you dont know at which index it is at, so you have to loop through the full index to find that unit, then afterwads you want to remove that unit from the array, but you dont want to have a null-pointer in the middle of your array as that might cause an overflow later, so you have to loop through your array again to move all units one index down. That's two calls with conditions and actions and you might want to do a lot more calculations, this takes time and will cause lag if done too many places.
The variables themselves stored in memory doesn't cost performance, adding them, removing them and doing calculations on them does cost performance though.
Also all heavy variables like "Unit" is only a reference, not a complete copy of that unit, so each variable which a few excetions can only take up a few bytes each. A quick estimate of 10.000 variables of 48bit each equals only 58 kilobytes total.