Guys, I worry when there's nothing from y'all for a week.
Yeah, yeah, I know :P
We're working on it, it's just not very steady progress at the moment. The terrain is pretty much finished up. Maity has added a whole bunch of pretty cool starmon to the game. We've also been hooking up the different cameras for the different arenas and fixing bugs related to various systems. We're now at 3 arenas, which means 3 people can be play simultaneously. It's a slow process because there's like....Well, a ton of doodads, cameras, points, regions, and other things that have to be hooked up to the trigger system in order for the battles to function properly. We'll have more ready later- at least 4 (but possibly more for alpha), definitely more for release.
I do have to confess that I haven't been able to work on the map much at all over the past few weeks- I've got a whole bunch of stuff going on in real life that's occupying pretty much all of my time. It really sucks, but there's not much I can do about it. I'll start to have some free time in about two weeks, and then I should be back to my normal speed a month or two afterwords.
That said, I'm working on the map whenever I do manage to get some free time (like right now), and I want to get the alpha to you guys as soon as possible. You've all been supporting us and waiting to try it out for so long that I want to get something playable into your hands :P
To hold you over, here's some screenshots. There's a disclaimer, though- Moz is not done with the terrain yet, so all of this is still subject to change. Don't judge it yet, unless you like it- in that case, feel free to judge as much as you want :) You can click on any of the pictures for the full-size version.
Here's the newest zone, tentatively called Cinderwood. It's got an interesting climate, since the ocean is to the west and the dry areas (volcano/desert) are to the east. So it's got some green, forest-ish type stuff as well as more rocky, volcanic rocky stuff. There's no quest content here yet, but we've got some trainers and wild starmon set up, so we may allow you to enter. We're not totally sure yet.
Here you can see more of cinderwood- at the top of the picture you can see a little bit of the town. There's a little security checkpoint at each of the town gates to keep nasty things out :)
This is the border between the tropical area and the ocean which lies to the west.
This one's a shot taken from the ocean looking on to the beach at high tide (the tide actually goes in and out :) It's one of those little touches that make the terrain really come alive). The beach is definitely not done, but it's a nice little shot. You can't quite see it, but there's a little coral reef below this rock where the ocean sort of drops off.
And here's a shot from one of the inner rooms of the powerplant.
i was looking at their career page today (doing industry analysts paper) and notice that there are job opening only for World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Blizzard all stars. There is not a Star craft 2 or Warcraft 3 section anymore. i guess they are pulling out all their developers from them??
Any ideas?
These are hiring pages, not lists of the entire team. Like Nebuli said, they're in the middle of developing expansions for Diablo 3 as well as SC2. The plans for titan were scrapped, and they're starting over. That means most of the titan team was transitioned off titan and onto WoW, D3 or Sc2. In other words, they have a surplus of people working on either of those games, because they had to shift programmers off Titan onto those projects. So yea, there's no reason to hire anybody in those areas at the moment.
Hey guys! As many of you may know, apple's new mobile operating system, iOS 7, is scheduled for release tomorrow (the 18th).
Blizzard recently posted a little precautionary notice for those of you who use the iPhone authenticator app. It's possible that upgrading your iPhone may reset your authenticator, therefore locking you out of your battle.net account. To be safe, it might be a good idea to either write down your authenticator's Serial Number and Restore Code (so you can restore your authenticator if needed), or temporarily turn off your authenticator when you install iOS7.
This should only be a precaution, but we wouldn't want anybody to get locked out of their accounts! You can read the official post here.
I saw this earlier. Blizzard is definitely moving in a good direction, and it looks like they're listening to feedback. I certainly hope we get some arcade updates as well- they've been reaching out to some extent to get our feedback, but I really hope to see that feedback make a difference :)
For US Map Night
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.2.min.js'></script> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" ></script> <script>$(document).ready(function () { makeCountdown(5,00,'pm',-5,'yes','US Map Night','Saturday') });</script><center></center>
Link: starcraft://group/1/129749
As with the previous timer, this one was set up originally for another purpose, so it's a bit strange. Ignore the link on it while it's live. If you get here a after the event's started, it will have reset the clock again to 7 days, but map night continues for much longer :).
At the moment we're not broadcasting it live- if we can get a proper streaming setup in the future, we may do that. It's 18:00 (6:00 pm) GMT on the European Server, every Friday. You can actually just click here to hop into the group from sc2.
A doodad is just an actor- it has none of the complicated bits and pieces that make up a unit. So they usually get used as props- trees, walls, fences, bushes, wires, cables, monitors, etc...In our case, Maity found a way to make those actors interact with the world in some ways. We were having some major lag problems early on in development, because our grass squares were actually units. Every unit needs to have a whole bunch of information stored, and then needs to have a whole bunch of information checked & recalculated each game loop (all it's stats, a bunch of actors, collision/pathing information, movers, etc...). So units are way more costly in system resources to have on the map than doodads, which are just actors and nothing else. Now that maity has made the grass into doodads, we can add them all over the place without fear of tanking performance (we'd need to add thousands and thousands more than necessary before we ran into any lag). The same thing applies with the doors- we don't need to run any triggers or checks to see when they should open or close. It doesn't seem like much, but it would waste resources if we had to check the position of each player against that of each door several times a second.
So basically doodads are just visuals, whereas units are visuals + a ton of other stuff that runs the visuals.
I haven't made any "noteworthy" additions to the game, which is why we haven't really updated much. I've been fixing bugs, working on a few little stability things, and adding debugging features. Since we won't have a trigger debugger in multiplayer, we needed to add some in-game debugging commands. For example, we can now get information on any battles going on, along with their type, location, involved players, etc...Each battle gets a unique ID, and if a battle gets stuck somehow (or bugs out), we can now force them to exit so you can keep testing without restarting the map. We just recently breached the 400th build of the game- we're at build #407 today. :)
Moz has been hard at work creating new zones. He's found a really great way to redesign the overall map layout, which means we'll have less wasted room. This means we can have a larger player cap (6-8 is the current estimate), along with a few new zones. None of the new zones are playable yet (there's nothing to do there, it's just terrain) but they look great. We've got all the major zones needed for the alpha ready to go from a terrain standpoint- The Town, Route 1 (Our grassy tutorial area), The Mysterious Forest (A little higher level forest area), Route 5 (a path that leads from the forest up to the caves/mountains in the north), The Power Facility (Highest level zone in the alpha, about lvl 20). On top of that, we have one more zone that's terrained but doesn't have any gameplay in it yet (we won't push back the alpha to add quests to it, we can do that later). We also have a beach, which isn't finished yet, but will be ready to go by the alpha. There's another 7 or so zones which have some basic foundations set up, but aren't nearly ready yet (so again, we'll get to those later). We plan on adding a map to the game so you can get your bearings more easily, but that's not something we feel is necessary for the alpha. Especially since there's only a few zones you need to worry about for now.
Then there's small little bugfixes. It's small, but important, things. For example, until recently we haven't had an auto-save system. It wasn't a big deal for us, since we just generate a new set of starmon to test with each game, but losing progress in the real game because of a disconnect or crash would be infuriating. Then there was swapping starmon around in your inventory- again, not game breaking, but frustrating. Another thing (for example) that I'll have to get working is 2v2 battles when you begin with just one starmon. Right now, you must start a 2v2 with at least 2 starmon, or it won't work (although one can die in the process and it'll become a 1v2 automatically). It hasn't been an issue for us, but what if somebody runs into a quest-related battle without a second living starmon?
Then there's creating all the battle arenas. Each arena needs to have doodads set up, then we have to hook up each point (so the system knows where to place all the different starmon/trainers/abilities/moves that might need to spawn at particular places) and set up each camera. I just finished another one today, so we've got support for 2 simultaneous battles now.
Oh, and I almost forgot the most important thing. Maity added automatic doors that open when people (or AI-controlled units) walk by. He sort of covered the town in them, and I may or may not have spent way too long yesterday running around through them.
So anyways, we're working on a lot of not-so-interesting-but-still-important things. Although I do need to confess that "real life stuff" has prevented me from working as much as I'd like over the past week or so. We're still chipping away at it, piece by piece :)
Some of you have been helping test the sc2 art tools in the closed beta. If you haven't gotten the chance to test them out yet, they're now in open beta! If you're interested in participating, you can download the files (along with instructions) here.
Has anybody here tried the tools out in the private beta? Is anybody else thinking about trying them out now? Hopefully we're going to see some pretty fancy models coming up soon!
I'm also snagging one of the pictures from the official post. Pretty neat, non-sc2-looking models :)
I realize you've got the answer now, but I'll share a quick tip for this type of thing.
If you press control + D while in the trigger editor, it replaces all the action labels with their internal script name (you can press ctrl + D again to toggle this back). This is a quick and easy way to see how the code is set up for any existing GUI action.
Say what you want about Blizzard, but man, they make the best cinimatics :P
Anyways, I'm really hoping they get this right. It seems, at least from what they've announced so far, that they've learned from their mistakes. And from what I understand the item system 2.0 will be coming to vanilla D3 as a patch (sort of like the updates for HotS). I'm really happy they're doing that. I never played D2, but from what I've heard, it was significantly worse before the expansion came out. My fingers are crossed that this turns out great! If not, at least we'll have more gorgeous cutscenes to watch :P
Seriously? You can clearly see the wall right there (just kidding :P). We were in need of a good wall model, and SoulFilcher managed to make us one super fast. We owe him one ^.^
We don't usually show off terrain until moz deems it "finished", so we'll hold off on posting the actual powerplant. This is the inner courtyard of the powerplant where the power from the solar panels is collected. Down south you've got the windmill farm, and then to the right you have the actual building itself. The actual powerplant looks great, and it uses tons of walls, so you'll see it very soon :)
Creation. We run errands by travelling to different stores or people to pick up parts/ingredients. Then the person who gave us the quest will brew up a really good item. This could be a starball, held item, or consumable. It would be cool if this quest could be repeatable for different items.
We're planning on adding something just like that. It's probably going to be a sort of crazy scientist cooking up neat items for you.
Solve dispute. 2 people really dislike eachother but one's good and one's evil. Depending on who you defeat will affect your karma and reward. Maybe add a third option where both people become friends with eachother.
We'll have some random events like this, although nothing specific is done yet. But yea, karma rewards for side quests where you "pick a side" will definitely happen.
Journey encouragement. Some dude (like prof oak) will give you different types of starballs for every amount of starmon (like 20) you catch. That way, the more you catch the more easier it is to catch more.
Right now, we're planning to unlock portions of the DNA lab as you unlock more of your stardex. Discovering new starmon will allow you to view their IVs, and eventually EV's. Capturing more starmon will allow you to manipulate their IV's and eventually EV's (or possibly the other way around). We can add a new type of pokeball as well, it's a more tangible reward instead of just an unlock.
Friendly rival/friend. Whenever you feel like it, you can give them a call and we can meet up anywhere for a battle. The interesting part is their party levels will always match yours so it's a way to test your team at any point in the game.
Definitely a neat idea. It probably wouldn't work with the actual rival, as the two of you aren't likely to be on good terms. But some type of "sparring/practice partner" would be cool. We've already got the arena, so you can always test yourself out there, of course. But this is a cool idea for sure ^.^
Anyways, as far as development progress goes, a lot of stuff has been going on. First of all, blizzard got back to us and confirmed that the loop change was intended. Like I said earlier, this isn't nearly as big of a deal as I originally thought, and everything that did break has been fixed (we think :P).
We added a new type of currency called Arena Points. You earn these from battling in the town arena- the first time you beat a particular trainer you'll get 5 AP, and every additional time you fight the same trainer you'll get 2. Since there's more trainers in the arena than you actually need to fight in order to progress through the story, this should add a little incentive. We'll probably add an AP reward for fighting in PvP, or in a few other arena-based things we've got planned. You can spend the AP at the arena store, where you'll be able to get some neat items.
We also made some small tweaks to our debug system- the huge wall of text that covered the screen will be hidden now (except error messages, those are sort of important). I finished the changes to our dialog system, so they should all work in multiplayer now. We've improved the way auto-saving works. We still want you to manually save the game before you quit, but we added an auto-save feature that saves your information as it changes. It should hopefully prevent you from loosing progress in the event of a disconnect.
We're probably going to add an NPC you can speak with who will bump your party up to level 25. Right now there just aren't quite enough side-quests and activities to do between the lv 10 and lv 20 gap. We're going to add way more for sure (and we've already got 10 or so added), but we don't need to delay the alpha to add them. We'll likely make some basic debugging commands for you guys as well, in case the game decides to misbehave and you get stuck in a battle, or something like that. Finally we have to add in more arenas so we can support multiplayer. The current setup looks like we'll at least have room for 4 players, but we're going to tweak some of the terrain to make room for (hopefully) 6 or 8.
I know it seems like things are moving along a little slowly, but we're actually fixing tons of little bugs and adding tons of little things. They're just not very interesting to mention.
Don't use the player numbers to assign teams or roles in the game if you want it to be set up as it was in the lobby. I believe you can use the "player on team" function to grab the correct player numbers, although I'm not sure. Honestly, the best way to avoid this problem is to just set up your teams/roles in the game itself.
As far as I'm aware, dialog items are always behind the sc2layout stuff. That said, dialog items and layout files were changed during the 1.5 patch and I haven't fully tested them out yet.
Why exactly would you want a dialog item in front of the menu? Is it just the visual effect? If that's the case, you can create a sc2layout frame in front of the menu. I'm not an expert on these files, but I made it work in a previous map of mine. This is a copy of the layout file for that part:
<Frametype="Image"name="InfoPanelBorder"><Anchorside="Left"relative="$parent/InfoPanel"pos="Min"offset="-15"/><Anchorside="Right"relative="$parent/InfoPanel"pos="Max"offset="100"/><Anchorside="Top"relative="$parent/InfoPanel"pos="Min"offset="-30"/><Anchorside="Bottom"relative="$parent/InfoPanel"pos="Max"offset="20"/><Textureval="MiddleBar.dds"/><!-- the image used--><TextureTypeval="Normal"/><RenderPriorityval="499"/><!-- This changes the priority of the render. For me, I put it BEHIND the menu. You would want to change this --></Frame>
0
Yeah, yeah, I know :P
We're working on it, it's just not very steady progress at the moment. The terrain is pretty much finished up. Maity has added a whole bunch of pretty cool starmon to the game. We've also been hooking up the different cameras for the different arenas and fixing bugs related to various systems. We're now at 3 arenas, which means 3 people can be play simultaneously. It's a slow process because there's like....Well, a ton of doodads, cameras, points, regions, and other things that have to be hooked up to the trigger system in order for the battles to function properly. We'll have more ready later- at least 4 (but possibly more for alpha), definitely more for release.
I do have to confess that I haven't been able to work on the map much at all over the past few weeks- I've got a whole bunch of stuff going on in real life that's occupying pretty much all of my time. It really sucks, but there's not much I can do about it. I'll start to have some free time in about two weeks, and then I should be back to my normal speed a month or two afterwords.
That said, I'm working on the map whenever I do manage to get some free time (like right now), and I want to get the alpha to you guys as soon as possible. You've all been supporting us and waiting to try it out for so long that I want to get something playable into your hands :P
To hold you over, here's some screenshots. There's a disclaimer, though- Moz is not done with the terrain yet, so all of this is still subject to change. Don't judge it yet, unless you like it- in that case, feel free to judge as much as you want :) You can click on any of the pictures for the full-size version.
Here's the newest zone, tentatively called Cinderwood. It's got an interesting climate, since the ocean is to the west and the dry areas (volcano/desert) are to the east. So it's got some green, forest-ish type stuff as well as more rocky, volcanic rocky stuff. There's no quest content here yet, but we've got some trainers and wild starmon set up, so we may allow you to enter. We're not totally sure yet.
Here you can see more of cinderwood- at the top of the picture you can see a little bit of the town. There's a little security checkpoint at each of the town gates to keep nasty things out :)
This is the border between the tropical area and the ocean which lies to the west.
This one's a shot taken from the ocean looking on to the beach at high tide (the tide actually goes in and out :) It's one of those little touches that make the terrain really come alive). The beach is definitely not done, but it's a nice little shot. You can't quite see it, but there's a little coral reef below this rock where the ocean sort of drops off.
And here's a shot from one of the inner rooms of the powerplant.
0
These are hiring pages, not lists of the entire team. Like Nebuli said, they're in the middle of developing expansions for Diablo 3 as well as SC2. The plans for titan were scrapped, and they're starting over. That means most of the titan team was transitioned off titan and onto WoW, D3 or Sc2. In other words, they have a surplus of people working on either of those games, because they had to shift programmers off Titan onto those projects. So yea, there's no reason to hire anybody in those areas at the moment.
0
Hey guys! As many of you may know, apple's new mobile operating system, iOS 7, is scheduled for release tomorrow (the 18th). Blizzard recently posted a little precautionary notice for those of you who use the iPhone authenticator app. It's possible that upgrading your iPhone may reset your authenticator, therefore locking you out of your battle.net account. To be safe, it might be a good idea to either write down your authenticator's Serial Number and Restore Code (so you can restore your authenticator if needed), or temporarily turn off your authenticator when you install iOS7.
This should only be a precaution, but we wouldn't want anybody to get locked out of their accounts! You can read the official post here.
0
I saw this earlier. Blizzard is definitely moving in a good direction, and it looks like they're listening to feedback. I certainly hope we get some arcade updates as well- they've been reaching out to some extent to get our feedback, but I really hope to see that feedback make a difference :)
0
For US Map Night <script type='text/javascript' src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.2.min.js'></script> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" ></script> <script>$(document).ready(function () { makeCountdown(5,00,'pm',-5,'yes','US Map Night','Saturday') });</script><center></center>
Link: starcraft://group/1/129749 As with the previous timer, this one was set up originally for another purpose, so it's a bit strange. Ignore the link on it while it's live. If you get here a after the event's started, it will have reset the clock again to 7 days, but map night continues for much longer :).
0
Fantastic! I'm so happy for them ^.^
Time to celebrate :P
0
@egodbout: Go
At the moment we're not broadcasting it live- if we can get a proper streaming setup in the future, we may do that. It's 18:00 (6:00 pm) GMT on the European Server, every Friday. You can actually just click here to hop into the group from sc2.
starcraft://group/2/130284
0
@Trieva: Go
A doodad is just an actor- it has none of the complicated bits and pieces that make up a unit. So they usually get used as props- trees, walls, fences, bushes, wires, cables, monitors, etc...In our case, Maity found a way to make those actors interact with the world in some ways. We were having some major lag problems early on in development, because our grass squares were actually units. Every unit needs to have a whole bunch of information stored, and then needs to have a whole bunch of information checked & recalculated each game loop (all it's stats, a bunch of actors, collision/pathing information, movers, etc...). So units are way more costly in system resources to have on the map than doodads, which are just actors and nothing else. Now that maity has made the grass into doodads, we can add them all over the place without fear of tanking performance (we'd need to add thousands and thousands more than necessary before we ran into any lag). The same thing applies with the doors- we don't need to run any triggers or checks to see when they should open or close. It doesn't seem like much, but it would waste resources if we had to check the position of each player against that of each door several times a second.
So basically doodads are just visuals, whereas units are visuals + a ton of other stuff that runs the visuals.
0
@Trieva: Go
I haven't made any "noteworthy" additions to the game, which is why we haven't really updated much. I've been fixing bugs, working on a few little stability things, and adding debugging features. Since we won't have a trigger debugger in multiplayer, we needed to add some in-game debugging commands. For example, we can now get information on any battles going on, along with their type, location, involved players, etc...Each battle gets a unique ID, and if a battle gets stuck somehow (or bugs out), we can now force them to exit so you can keep testing without restarting the map. We just recently breached the 400th build of the game- we're at build #407 today. :)
Moz has been hard at work creating new zones. He's found a really great way to redesign the overall map layout, which means we'll have less wasted room. This means we can have a larger player cap (6-8 is the current estimate), along with a few new zones. None of the new zones are playable yet (there's nothing to do there, it's just terrain) but they look great. We've got all the major zones needed for the alpha ready to go from a terrain standpoint- The Town, Route 1 (Our grassy tutorial area), The Mysterious Forest (A little higher level forest area), Route 5 (a path that leads from the forest up to the caves/mountains in the north), The Power Facility (Highest level zone in the alpha, about lvl 20). On top of that, we have one more zone that's terrained but doesn't have any gameplay in it yet (we won't push back the alpha to add quests to it, we can do that later). We also have a beach, which isn't finished yet, but will be ready to go by the alpha. There's another 7 or so zones which have some basic foundations set up, but aren't nearly ready yet (so again, we'll get to those later). We plan on adding a map to the game so you can get your bearings more easily, but that's not something we feel is necessary for the alpha. Especially since there's only a few zones you need to worry about for now.
Then there's small little bugfixes. It's small, but important, things. For example, until recently we haven't had an auto-save system. It wasn't a big deal for us, since we just generate a new set of starmon to test with each game, but losing progress in the real game because of a disconnect or crash would be infuriating. Then there was swapping starmon around in your inventory- again, not game breaking, but frustrating. Another thing (for example) that I'll have to get working is 2v2 battles when you begin with just one starmon. Right now, you must start a 2v2 with at least 2 starmon, or it won't work (although one can die in the process and it'll become a 1v2 automatically). It hasn't been an issue for us, but what if somebody runs into a quest-related battle without a second living starmon?
Then there's creating all the battle arenas. Each arena needs to have doodads set up, then we have to hook up each point (so the system knows where to place all the different starmon/trainers/abilities/moves that might need to spawn at particular places) and set up each camera. I just finished another one today, so we've got support for 2 simultaneous battles now.
Oh, and I almost forgot the most important thing. Maity added automatic doors that open when people (or AI-controlled units) walk by. He sort of covered the town in them, and I may or may not have spent way too long yesterday running around through them.
So anyways, we're working on a lot of not-so-interesting-but-still-important things. Although I do need to confess that "real life stuff" has prevented me from working as much as I'd like over the past week or so. We're still chipping away at it, piece by piece :)
0
Some of you have been helping test the sc2 art tools in the closed beta. If you haven't gotten the chance to test them out yet, they're now in open beta! If you're interested in participating, you can download the files (along with instructions) here.
Has anybody here tried the tools out in the private beta? Is anybody else thinking about trying them out now? Hopefully we're going to see some pretty fancy models coming up soon!
I'm also snagging one of the pictures from the official post. Pretty neat, non-sc2-looking models :)
0
I realize you've got the answer now, but I'll share a quick tip for this type of thing.
If you press control + D while in the trigger editor, it replaces all the action labels with their internal script name (you can press ctrl + D again to toggle this back). This is a quick and easy way to see how the code is set up for any existing GUI action.
0
Say what you want about Blizzard, but man, they make the best cinimatics :P
Anyways, I'm really hoping they get this right. It seems, at least from what they've announced so far, that they've learned from their mistakes. And from what I understand the item system 2.0 will be coming to vanilla D3 as a patch (sort of like the updates for HotS). I'm really happy they're doing that. I never played D2, but from what I've heard, it was significantly worse before the expansion came out. My fingers are crossed that this turns out great! If not, at least we'll have more gorgeous cutscenes to watch :P
0
Seriously? You can clearly see the wall right there (just kidding :P). We were in need of a good wall model, and SoulFilcher managed to make us one super fast. We owe him one ^.^
We don't usually show off terrain until moz deems it "finished", so we'll hold off on posting the actual powerplant. This is the inner courtyard of the powerplant where the power from the solar panels is collected. Down south you've got the windmill farm, and then to the right you have the actual building itself. The actual powerplant looks great, and it uses tons of walls, so you'll see it very soon :)
We're planning on adding something just like that. It's probably going to be a sort of crazy scientist cooking up neat items for you.
We'll have some random events like this, although nothing specific is done yet. But yea, karma rewards for side quests where you "pick a side" will definitely happen.
Right now, we're planning to unlock portions of the DNA lab as you unlock more of your stardex. Discovering new starmon will allow you to view their IVs, and eventually EV's. Capturing more starmon will allow you to manipulate their IV's and eventually EV's (or possibly the other way around). We can add a new type of pokeball as well, it's a more tangible reward instead of just an unlock.
Definitely a neat idea. It probably wouldn't work with the actual rival, as the two of you aren't likely to be on good terms. But some type of "sparring/practice partner" would be cool. We've already got the arena, so you can always test yourself out there, of course. But this is a cool idea for sure ^.^
Anyways, as far as development progress goes, a lot of stuff has been going on. First of all, blizzard got back to us and confirmed that the loop change was intended. Like I said earlier, this isn't nearly as big of a deal as I originally thought, and everything that did break has been fixed (we think :P).
We added a new type of currency called Arena Points. You earn these from battling in the town arena- the first time you beat a particular trainer you'll get 5 AP, and every additional time you fight the same trainer you'll get 2. Since there's more trainers in the arena than you actually need to fight in order to progress through the story, this should add a little incentive. We'll probably add an AP reward for fighting in PvP, or in a few other arena-based things we've got planned. You can spend the AP at the arena store, where you'll be able to get some neat items.
We also made some small tweaks to our debug system- the huge wall of text that covered the screen will be hidden now (except error messages, those are sort of important). I finished the changes to our dialog system, so they should all work in multiplayer now. We've improved the way auto-saving works. We still want you to manually save the game before you quit, but we added an auto-save feature that saves your information as it changes. It should hopefully prevent you from loosing progress in the event of a disconnect.
We're probably going to add an NPC you can speak with who will bump your party up to level 25. Right now there just aren't quite enough side-quests and activities to do between the lv 10 and lv 20 gap. We're going to add way more for sure (and we've already got 10 or so added), but we don't need to delay the alpha to add them. We'll likely make some basic debugging commands for you guys as well, in case the game decides to misbehave and you get stuck in a battle, or something like that. Finally we have to add in more arenas so we can support multiplayer. The current setup looks like we'll at least have room for 4 players, but we're going to tweak some of the terrain to make room for (hopefully) 6 or 8.
I know it seems like things are moving along a little slowly, but we're actually fixing tons of little bugs and adding tons of little things. They're just not very interesting to mention.
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@Arkzan: Go
Don't use the player numbers to assign teams or roles in the game if you want it to be set up as it was in the lobby. I believe you can use the "player on team" function to grab the correct player numbers, although I'm not sure. Honestly, the best way to avoid this problem is to just set up your teams/roles in the game itself.
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@lemmy734: Go
As far as I'm aware, dialog items are always behind the sc2layout stuff. That said, dialog items and layout files were changed during the 1.5 patch and I haven't fully tested them out yet.
Why exactly would you want a dialog item in front of the menu? Is it just the visual effect? If that's the case, you can create a sc2layout frame in front of the menu. I'm not an expert on these files, but I made it work in a previous map of mine. This is a copy of the layout file for that part: