I've been working the last years on Episodes from Brood War 2 (project page), a reimagine of Starcraft 2 campaigns.
I've made 3 missions public recently and people seem to like it. It has positive reviews in blizzard's arcade and the discord got more members than I would expect.
My original plan was to release the forth mission (the last of the first episode), consider the project finished and move back to work on my original coop campaign project. However, the recent events made me rethink this and now I want to finish at least the second episode.
If I keep working alone on the maps, I won't be able to deliver the next missions before the public lose their interest in them. That's why I'm looking for people willing to help me out.
I spent the last few weeks setting up a github private project and polishing the script to facilitate collaboration.
KillWithFire's already working on data, and miazmatic on terrain. I need a triggerer and a tester. It would be cool if they were lore fans, because I would like to discuss and improve the story too.
Maybe you're lucky and your editor client just changed your locale. It's configured under file/Preferences/General/Locale
Try going to Map (or mod)/Locale/Export, and check if your locale is the same in there than the one in the preferences. If not, export it and reimport it to make they match, or change the locale in the preferences.
Your project requires a better description. You can change this by clicking Settings above the description on the project page.
The project description must contain these facts: - Features offered by the project. - How those features affect a user's experience.
Be as thorough as possible, avoid vague statements, and actually try to sell your project to users.
Things which are not considered to be a valid description: - Links to demonstration videos. - Links to descriptions of your project on another site. - Names of or links to other projects. - A short story. - A question-and-answer session. - An advertisement. - A biography: "My name is X and this is my first project!"
(SC2Mapster Red tape)
I guess I'll quit uploading things in here after this one gets approved... You'll have to wait a couple extra hours, or I can send it to you via discord.
BTW, it does have the shirt and the hat, but I had to remove the particle effects.
This is not my tool. It was made by println, who worked over a xlm converter made by someone else.
I don't know it from A to Z. If I did, I would fix all the compatibility issues with blender. All the fixes that I'm sharing are workarounds for the things that happened to me at least once.
That's easy to solve. It happens because the names of the materials sometimes have some issues.
"xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 156336, column 31" means that the converter didn't understand the character 31 in the line 156.336. You can just remove it or replace it with another.
I'm planning to add tips in the launcher related with the campaign UI. I want to avoid having to work on that function again if possible.
The amount of coding and planning is infimum compared with some other projects in this page, like The Curse of Tristram or Rogue Star. Nevertheless, I've learned the hard way that if I don't build over a firm basis, the rest of the pieces will crumble. I must take all the time needed to have this working before starting.
I've been working on banking and user types structures these weeks.
User Types
I have defined 7 User types at the moment:
- Campaigns. Defines the folders where the maps are and stores the campaigns progress. - Episodes. Classifies the missions and defines the subfolders where the maps will be. - Missions. Stores the map names, paths and arcade links, and keeps track of the stats and rewards achieved in the missions. - Stats. It's a sublevel of missions. It contains most the information of the missions that I want to be tracked and retrieved by other missions. Thanks to tya, I could set a variable text describing the stats progress, allowing them to be easily mantained when editing the mod and viewed from any map that uses it. - Upgrades. It's a sublevel of campaigns. It's used to know if an upgrade was already unlocked and/or aquired when a mission is being played. - Upgrade Groups. It's going to be used to make windows for each upgrade group when purchasing them. - Achievements. It's a list of all achievements. Contains their icon and description, and an indicator that shows if they were unlocked or not.
They'll allow me check the campaign status at any moment without filling arrays. I just have to call a function that writes in those tables the player's progress stored in banks. I had to make some considerations, like how to handle the saving in replays of missions already played, missions that weren't unlocked yet or missions saved before playing other ones and continued afterwards. I've decided to directly ignore saving in missions that weren't unlocked yet, and check before ending the rest of the maps which data from other maps needs to be overwritten, which is new and which is not.
Tech Tree
After making these definitions and filling the user types with the data needed by the first missions, I stumbled with my first rock:
I asked myself "What's the easiest way to restrict and unlock progressivelythe tech tree?" The answer was "Why don't you just check how Blizzard does it?" So there I went. I've found the action "Apply Campaign Tech", which was pretty straightforward. It just disables the abilities and enables them back again if they are unlocked.
I've created a trigger removing all the unlockable abilities for all the players, and another one that checks for the upgrades that should unlock those and enable them back if it corresponds. The enemies will have their abilities unlocked manually in each map, since I want to manipulate their units and abilities compositions.
Briefing screen
I remember that I've made this briefing screen originaly for my failure coop project Exodus and iterated several times over it by adding functionality and new features. The outcome of the process is an incomprehensible code that takes hours to debug and update. I've spent 2 days adjusting it to the new initialization triggers. I like how it looks after the changes, but I feel pity for the future me that will have to add voice acting, fix it for other races or move it to the UI module.
As you can see, there's not as much text as before, and it doesn't feel as overwhelming as it did.
Banks
As I've said before, I load the banks containing the campaign progress and write their content in the editable fields of the user types when the map inits. Doing it this way, I avoid the potential lag caused by loading a lot of variables when a mission starts. There's also much less amount of code in the triggers, and the data is more organized than when I was using records.
The structure of the banks is basicaly a shorter version of the user types I've defined. It only contains their ids and the information that needs to be carried over. It also has an extra section called "slot", used to start a new campaign without losing the progress of another one.
I have to copy the load and save functions into every map for arcade compatibility reasons. If I do it that way, I can upload the mod with a different account, saving space for one more map. I remember having troubles with preloading if it was done directly from the mod, so I preload the banks in every map instead.
I've created functions to retrieve the values from these user types. Now I can check with a line of code how many credits the player has at the moment, in which order he completed the missions, when did he unlock a tech, when did he purchased it, what's his record in this or that stat, etcetera.
Take control from replay
I've been investigating how this works. It will be pretty useful for the arcade version, but I've found two issues with it: If it's used, the banks can't be saved anymore, and the actor messages sent via triggers aren't issued again. I couldn't find a workaround for the first one. I'll have to send the actor messages over and over again in a periodic event for the second.
I'm almost there. The only thing missing to start working on the actual maps is the launcher. If these implementations work fine, the story and the missions are the only things I'll have to focus in the future.
Allright, I gave the map a try. I Didn't find any gameplay bug, but I did get param/values for every line. I had to remove all the locales that weren't enUS before starting playing. Another small thing is that in the intro cinematic, while the characters are having a chat, you can hear the sound of a doodad, and it breaks a little the immersion.
On my first try, the first Reaver I saw killed Alarak. It happened in the second try, the third try and the forth try too (well, in some of those I might have reached further, but those reavers had something to do in every one).
After more retries that I would like to admit, I could finally beat it. I made only DTs and used them to clear all the sections but the bases, where I focused fire on the cannons with khalani and softened the defenses before sending the DTs to kill the reavers.
The difficulty is OK for me. I mean, I like to be challenged, but I don't know how every player would feel about that. If you watch the first try in the video, where I lose like 3 DTs against those purifier ninjas, you can say that it is my fault, and I could've done better.
But the reavers are very unforgiving, and that can become frustrating. As soon as they get in sight, they shoot you, and you can't make anything to minimize the damage you receive if you're not expecting them. They really slow down the pace of the mission too, because you have to be careful to avoid bad engages and hope for their AI to mess up. But, well... I've tested the in the hardest difficulty, so I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.
The only thing that I have to say about the boss fight is that you could see dirt textures on the highest ground level, they don't look very well.
I liked the mission overall (I wouldn't have played over and over again if not). The terrain is perfectly readable, the distance between enemies is well planned, and the flow doesn't get tedious.
I already have my own briefing and transmission functions working, but I'm not so proud about the way I'm handling the AI. I'll surely take a look at your library.
Now that I'm over the downheartness caused by my failure to reach the top 10 in the RTC contest with "Losing Memories", and my little editor vacation has ended; I'll return to spend my free time on my campaign.
I've decided to keep a log of what I'm doing and thinking while developing it. I believe that this will help me to stay focused and motivated, and it might be useful for those who are working on similar projects, to get ideas and learn from my mistakes. I'm also hoping to draw the attention of someone interested in helping me with the crafting.
My original plan is to bump this post once every one or two weeks, starting right now.
I'll begin writing about the campaign itself. The ultimate goal for it is to create a reboot of SC2, taking the best of SC1 (the immersive storytelling) and SC2 (the gameplay and the mechanic variation between missions). I'm aware that it's too pretentious. That's why I've started with a single mission (Bottleneck, here's the link of its testing thread) to see where it goes. Now that I'm a little more confident, I'm focusing on the first 4 maps with their banking and linking. If that's too much work, I'll decide to stop when they're done. If not, I'll continue with other episodes, periodically reevaluating if continuing is worth it or not.
What do I have so far?
- Lots of loose ideas, - a basic structure of the story (a ~6000 words script), - a functional map and two more in early stage of development, - an early mod with several useful functions, - a task list programmed until the end of june, and - Finally, after more than half a year without finding one, a campaign name to replace the placeholder "SC2Bis": "Starcraft: Episodes from Brood War II" (the one you see in the title). I've made the banner you're seeing at the top and an icon for the launcher too:
How do I want this to work?
The player will play an active role as a character of the campaign. He will be a young Dominion Lieutenant in the Terran episodes, a Brood Queen in the Zerg episodes, and Artanis or Zeratul in the Protoss episodes. There will be small RPG sections between missions, where the story will develop, and a SC1 style briefing before the start of each mission. I hope to come up with fresh mechanics for most of them.
Where am I going to start?
Now that I'm focusing back on this after the RTC contest, I would like to apply some things I've learned recently in the campaign mod. Specifically, I'll focus on two:
An achievement system: I was handling achievements in a very archaic way, I'll switch to user types. They're way more efficient.
A budget system: Several achievements will unlock techs. After every mission, there will be an amount of credits as reward. If the tech wasn't unlocked via achievements, it will be available to be purchased in the RPG sections. There will be hidden techs too. For example, the secret of the first mission will unlock warpigs.
Once finishing with those, I'll continue with the introductory map, which is supposed to set the mood before the campaign starts.
Well, that's all. I hope I didn't bore you... Next logs should come with more eye candy.
Blender interpolates the transformations between keyframes. You can set keyframes for lots of stuff, like the bone position/size/rotation and the particle or texture properties, etc. The shortcut to insert a keyframe is "I"
0
Hi.
I've been working the last years on Episodes from Brood War 2 (project page), a reimagine of Starcraft 2 campaigns.
I've made 3 missions public recently and people seem to like it. It has positive reviews in blizzard's arcade and the discord got more members than I would expect.
My original plan was to release the forth mission (the last of the first episode), consider the project finished and move back to work on my original coop campaign project. However, the recent events made me rethink this and now I want to finish at least the second episode.
If I keep working alone on the maps, I won't be able to deliver the next missions before the public lose their interest in them. That's why I'm looking for people willing to help me out.
I spent the last few weeks setting up a github private project and polishing the script to facilitate collaboration.
KillWithFire's already working on data, and miazmatic on terrain. I need a triggerer and a tester. It would be cool if they were lore fans, because I would like to discuss and improve the story too.
Well. That's all. I hope someone is interested.
0
Maybe you're lucky and your editor client just changed your locale. It's configured under file/Preferences/General/Locale
Try going to Map (or mod)/Locale/Export, and check if your locale is the same in there than the one in the preferences. If not, export it and reimport it to make they match, or change the locale in the preferences.
0
(SC2Mapster Red tape)
I guess I'll quit uploading things in here after this one gets approved... You'll have to wait a couple extra hours, or I can send it to you via discord.
BTW, it does have the shirt and the hat, but I had to remove the particle effects.
0
There you go.
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ. Now give RPG.
0
I'm glad it worked.
Just to clarify...
This is not my tool. It was made by println, who worked over a xlm converter made by someone else.
I don't know it from A to Z. If I did, I would fix all the compatibility issues with blender. All the fixes that I'm sharing are workarounds for the things that happened to me at least once.
0
The converter doesn't support projections. Find the projections section in the xml and remove it. That should fix the crash.
0
That's easy to solve. It happens because the names of the materials sometimes have some issues.
"xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 156336, column 31" means that the converter didn't understand the character 31 in the line 156.336. You can just remove it or replace it with another.
0
I'm planning to add tips in the launcher related with the campaign UI. I want to avoid having to work on that function again if possible.
The amount of coding and planning is infimum compared with some other projects in this page, like The Curse of Tristram or Rogue Star. Nevertheless, I've learned the hard way that if I don't build over a firm basis, the rest of the pieces will crumble. I must take all the time needed to have this working before starting.
0.962264150943396
Log 2
I've been working on banking and user types structures these weeks.
User Types
I have defined 7 User types at the moment:
- Campaigns. Defines the folders where the maps are and stores the campaigns progress.
- Episodes. Classifies the missions and defines the subfolders where the maps will be.
- Missions. Stores the map names, paths and arcade links, and keeps track of the stats and rewards achieved in the missions.
- Stats. It's a sublevel of missions. It contains most the information of the missions that I want to be tracked and retrieved by other missions. Thanks to tya, I could set a variable text describing the stats progress, allowing them to be easily mantained when editing the mod and viewed from any map that uses it.
- Upgrades. It's a sublevel of campaigns. It's used to know if an upgrade was already unlocked and/or aquired when a mission is being played.
- Upgrade Groups. It's going to be used to make windows for each upgrade group when purchasing them.
- Achievements. It's a list of all achievements. Contains their icon and description, and an indicator that shows if they were unlocked or not.
They'll allow me check the campaign status at any moment without filling arrays. I just have to call a function that writes in those tables the player's progress stored in banks.
I had to make some considerations, like how to handle the saving in replays of missions already played, missions that weren't unlocked yet or missions saved before playing other ones and continued afterwards.
I've decided to directly ignore saving in missions that weren't unlocked yet, and check before ending the rest of the maps which data from other maps needs to be overwritten, which is new and which is not.
Tech Tree
After making these definitions and filling the user types with the data needed by the first missions, I stumbled with my first rock:
I asked myself "What's the easiest way to restrict and unlock progressively the tech tree?" The answer was "Why don't you just check how Blizzard does it?"
So there I went. I've found the action "Apply Campaign Tech", which was pretty straightforward. It just disables the abilities and enables them back again if they are unlocked.
I've created a trigger removing all the unlockable abilities for all the players, and another one that checks for the upgrades that should unlock those and enable them back if it corresponds. The enemies will have their abilities unlocked manually in each map, since I want to manipulate their units and abilities compositions.
Briefing screen
I remember that I've made this briefing screen originaly for my
failurecoop project Exodus and iterated several times over it by adding functionality and new features.The outcome of the process is an incomprehensible code that takes hours to debug and update. I've spent 2 days adjusting it to the new initialization triggers.
I like how it looks after the changes, but I feel pity for the future me that will have to add voice acting, fix it for other races or move it to the UI module.
As you can see, there's not as much text as before, and it doesn't feel as overwhelming as it did.
Banks
As I've said before, I load the banks containing the campaign progress and write their content in the editable fields of the user types when the map inits. Doing it this way, I avoid the potential lag caused by loading a lot of variables when a mission starts.
There's also much less amount of code in the triggers, and the data is more organized than when I was using records.
The structure of the banks is basicaly a shorter version of the user types I've defined. It only contains their ids and the information that needs to be carried over.
It also has an extra section called "slot", used to start a new campaign without losing the progress of another one.
I have to copy the load and save functions into every map for arcade compatibility reasons. If I do it that way, I can upload the mod with a different account, saving space for one more map.
I remember having troubles with preloading if it was done directly from the mod, so I preload the banks in every map instead.
I've created functions to retrieve the values from these user types. Now I can check with a line of code how many credits the player has at the moment, in which order he completed the missions, when did he unlock a tech, when did he purchased it, what's his record in this or that stat, etcetera.
Take control from replay
I've been investigating how this works. It will be pretty useful for the arcade version, but I've found two issues with it: If it's used, the banks can't be saved anymore, and the actor messages sent via triggers aren't issued again.
I couldn't find a workaround for the first one. I'll have to send the actor messages over and over again in a periodic event for the second.
I'm almost there. The only thing missing to start working on the actual maps is the launcher. If these implementations work fine, the story and the missions are the only things I'll have to focus in the future.
0.963128491620112
Allright, I gave the map a try. I Didn't find any gameplay bug, but I did get param/values for every line. I had to remove all the locales that weren't enUS before starting playing. Another small thing is that in the intro cinematic, while the characters are having a chat, you can hear the sound of a doodad, and it breaks a little the immersion.
On my first try, the first Reaver I saw killed Alarak. It happened in the second try, the third try and the forth try too (well, in some of those I might have reached further, but those reavers had something to do in every one).
After more retries that I would like to admit, I could finally beat it. I made only DTs and used them to clear all the sections but the bases, where I focused fire on the cannons with khalani and softened the defenses before sending the DTs to kill the reavers.
The difficulty is OK for me. I mean, I like to be challenged, but I don't know how every player would feel about that. If you watch the first try in the video, where I lose like 3 DTs against those purifier ninjas, you can say that it is my fault, and I could've done better.
But the reavers are very unforgiving, and that can become frustrating. As soon as they get in sight, they shoot you, and you can't make anything to minimize the damage you receive if you're not expecting them. They really slow down the pace of the mission too, because you have to be careful to avoid bad engages and hope for their AI to mess up. But, well... I've tested the in the hardest difficulty, so I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.
The only thing that I have to say about the boss fight is that you could see dirt textures on the highest ground level, they don't look very well.
I liked the mission overall (I wouldn't have played over and over again if not). The terrain is perfectly readable, the distance between enemies is well planned, and the flow doesn't get tedious.
Keep them coming, and good luck.
0
Thanks!
I already have my own briefing and transmission functions working, but I'm not so proud about the way I'm handling the AI. I'll surely take a look at your library.
0
Thanks! I'm Looking forward for yours too.
1.31144825954515
Log 1
Hi guys
Now that I'm over the downheartness caused by my failure to reach the top 10 in the RTC contest with "Losing Memories", and my little editor vacation has ended; I'll return to spend my free time on my campaign.
I've decided to keep a log of what I'm doing and thinking while developing it. I believe that this will help me to stay focused and motivated, and it might be useful for those who are working on similar projects, to get ideas and learn from my mistakes. I'm also hoping to draw the attention of someone interested in helping me with the crafting.
My original plan is to bump this post once every one or two weeks, starting right now.
I'll begin writing about the campaign itself. The ultimate goal for it is to create a reboot of SC2, taking the best of SC1 (the immersive storytelling) and SC2 (the gameplay and the mechanic variation between missions).
I'm aware that it's too pretentious. That's why I've started with a single mission (Bottleneck, here's the link of its testing thread) to see where it goes. Now that I'm a little more confident, I'm focusing on the first 4 maps with their banking and linking.
If that's too much work, I'll decide to stop when they're done. If not, I'll continue with other episodes, periodically reevaluating if continuing is worth it or not.
What do I have so far?
- Lots of loose ideas,
- a basic structure of the story (a ~6000 words script),
- a functional map and two more in early stage of development,
- an early mod with several useful functions,
- a task list programmed until the end of june, and
- Finally, after more than half a year without finding one, a campaign name to replace the placeholder "SC2Bis": "Starcraft: Episodes from Brood War II" (the one you see in the title). I've made the banner you're seeing at the top and an icon for the launcher too:
How do I want this to work?
The player will play an active role as a character of the campaign. He will be a young Dominion Lieutenant in the Terran episodes, a Brood Queen in the Zerg episodes, and Artanis or Zeratul in the Protoss episodes.
There will be small RPG sections between missions, where the story will develop, and a SC1 style briefing before the start of each mission. I hope to come up with fresh mechanics for most of them.
Where am I going to start?
Now that I'm focusing back on this after the RTC contest, I would like to apply some things I've learned recently in the campaign mod. Specifically, I'll focus on two:
An achievement system: I was handling achievements in a very archaic way, I'll switch to user types. They're way more efficient.
A budget system: Several achievements will unlock techs. After every mission, there will be an amount of credits as reward. If the tech wasn't unlocked via achievements, it will be available to be purchased in the RPG sections.
There will be hidden techs too. For example, the secret of the first mission will unlock warpigs.
Once finishing with those, I'll continue with the introductory map, which is supposed to set the mood before the campaign starts.
Well, that's all. I hope I didn't bore you... Next logs should come with more eye candy.
0
Blender interpolates the transformations between keyframes. You can set keyframes for lots of stuff, like the bone position/size/rotation and the particle or texture properties, etc. The shortcut to insert a keyframe is "I"
BTW, Here you have the tutorials:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130621151638/http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/35492-blender-how-to-create-an-animated-coin-model-for-starcraft/#posts
1.32994923857868
You have to create a variable of the type record. Then you'll be able to reference it