Over the course of Starcraft's long and decorated lifetime, there have been a variety of third party programs developed by fans to help improve the game we all enjoy.
However, some of these programs had so much of an impact that they helped shape how the game has been played significantly.
I propose three programs that have changed the history of Starcraft and it's up to you to vote which one you think has had the most impact. 1. BWChart by jca Arguably the king of third-party BW programs and the program that gave birth to the term 'actions per minute'. BWChart allowed users for the first time to look right inside of game replays, from the amount of units produced to how many exact resources each player had harvested.
In addition, BWChart was also able to detect whether a player had map hacked or not by detecting unit selection among fog of war - leading to hack makers to rethink their programming methods and catching a lot of prominent players out.
Lastly, BWChart provided hotkey maps which allowed people to analyze player's hotkeys. In an age where smurfing on ladder was prevalent, hotkey 'detectives' were called upon frequently by the community in order to find out which professional Korean players were smurfing on which account on the major ladders.
2. ChaosLauncher and Latency Changer by MasterOfChaos Building on the foundations provided by the program BWLauncher, ChaosLauncher was the definite launcher program for Brood War. With the ability to utilize dozens of plugins at any given time, ChaosLauncher had a very easy-to-use interface and was updated frequently by its creator.
However, the main draw of ChaosLauncher was a plugin created by MasterOfChaos himself called 'Latency Changer'. Before the creation of Latency Changer, players (especially professionals in Korea that did not live in the same house) had to rely on a LAN emulation program known as Hamachi to help recreate the settings of practicing under LAN/offline latency. However, this meant that players would be distant away from the world of battle.net, missing out on contact and chatting with friends etc.
The creation of Latency Changer completely changed the landscape of battle.net for everyone and made the game a lot more cleaner to play, especially in an age where mutalisk micromanagement was starting to shape the metagame heavily. The implementation of the plug-in into their launcher (along with their anti-hack), helped iCCup become the premier BW ladder system after the demise of PGTour.
BWScanner by TravelToAiur These days, many of us can't fathom to play people without some sort of anti-hack, whether it would be wLauncher or iCCup Launcher. However, before BWScanner and BWChart arrived, a lot of skepticism would loom over major tournaments online as the suspicion of hacking would always be apparent without the prevalence of anti-hack software.
This would change when TravelToAiur, an Italian player, released BWScanner, a program which built upon the foundations of a previous anti-map hack program, BWSentinel. It would message you if your opponent was map hacking while using the program, and while it may seem very archaic to us now, was actually an effective method against the map hacks developed at that time.
Like BWChart, BWScanner was used as a tool to stop competitive players from map hacking, and those that tried to push the boundaries would be punished. Several instances of players being caught by BWScanner had occurred over its life time. BWScanner became obsolete once launchers for the competitive ladders of the time (PGTour) were developed with their own anti-hack software.
Poll: Most significant third party program?
(Vote): BWChart by jca (Vote): ChaosLauncher by MasterOfChaos (Vote): BWScanner by TravelToAiur (Vote): Other (suggest in the thread)
MasterofChaos and the Lan Latency. Plus that guy was the younger/older ( i don't recall) brother of my Clan ally: Aop)Werzerg( So, there's some bias in my judgement ^^
For bw in general its gotta be BWChart. That thing was really impressive at the time. For me personally it was Doxstar. Made the game a lot more enjoyable for me
It allows AI researchers to use StarCraft for research in RTS games. Besides that, it also has functionality for increasing and decreasing the game speed during the game ( even in Human vs Human), up to 16x fastest speed.
Penguinplug should have gotten a shoutout, more so than BWScanner.
Latency-Changer itself is far more valuable than Chaoslauncher, as there were already other launchers and have since been (see MCA wlauncher) etc. that can launch multiple plugins. Nonetheless I still use Chaos because MoC made the best thing ever.
I'd say BWRepInfo and the Advbnet plugin from Advloader were more valuable for me personally than BWChart, as it really helped differentiate between pure speed and actual utility for myself and others. (Also it doesn't crash when you load a thousand replays etc.)
As a replay fanatic I remember replay with text as a feature that was not native to BW and that definitely made watching replays far more interesting especially in team games and UMS where you could follow through players conversations and thought processes.
Big shoutout to Xenotron for making the W-Mode plugin, often allowing people to play BW that had all sorts of OS issues etc. and allowing you to obs games while doing other things.
Also Obsmode and Statinfo plugins by SmK, they helped be understand the value of worker economic advantage so much better and also made for a much more entertaining play/obs experience.
BWchart is the clear winner. Jca is essentially responsible for the iconic APM idea. Before this no one even talked about apm. There was no way to measure it. I dont think the newer people appreciate what an awesome advance this was for brood war or gaming in general. Sure it may not seem like much now but back then it changed everything. It was exciting to finally see who was really the fastest pro gamer; before then everyone just had to guess. It gave all the newbs like me something to focus on, a real tangible number to measure our game play and improve. When bwchart first came out it was mind blowing.
Close 2nd is lan latency.
Also i'd like to give a shout-out to the newest launcher, mca64. Really helped my lag problems(direct ip, no dns etc) with iccup and has a nice built in apm tool. Not to mention the color fix, high res options, window mode, and more.
On February 06 2015 04:55 LetaBot wrote: The BWAPI:
It allows AI researchers to use StarCraft for research in RTS games. Besides that, it also has functionality for increasing and decreasing the game speed during the game ( even in Human vs Human), up to 16x fastest speed.
This is very cool... Pro-gamers should channel their inner DBZ and play at 2x speed (gravity?). If you can play a game at 2x speed, 1x should be easy right?
For me, obviously bwchart. It basically started the whole thing, opened the way to 3rd party programs to make BW even better. The APM concept is awesome, before that we used to speculate on how fast someone was or not, and it was nearly impossible to find out about shared accounts. BWchart became known at the time of the bananasplit controversy and it helped a lot in that case of obvious cheating. Lots of features were also helpful to analyse the game. It changed the game more than any other program, imo.
BWChart definitely gets my vote, but PenguinPlug is definitely important as it started out the long chain of various popular launchers that improved upon the BW experience over the years. It also caused Blizzard to implement some new features in BW (and we all know that getting Blizzard to fix and write new code for BW is basically impossible )
RWA's will always have a special place in my heart though, as they're what got me into BW heavily in the first place (and how I found teamliquid!).
For me, SCMDraft is the most prominent because I was primarily usemap maker & player. There was some massive communities purely dedicated to map-making & UMS back then.
I really like mca64launcher and am surprised it hasn't been mentioned more in this thread. Can someone elaborate as to why it doesn't stack up as well as the aforementioned AH's?
On February 06 2015 10:01 Hesmyrr wrote: For me, SCMDraft is the most prominent because I was primarily usemap maker & player. There was some massive communities purely dedicated to map-making & UMS back then.
yeah actually, i think a mapmaking tool should be on the top3 of third party programs, without it it wouldn't have been possible to make some of the fine competitive maps we see today, which are a vital part of BW's balance efforts. And also team/UMS games are still the biggest aspect of BW gaming today which is also in large part thanks to mapping tools.
so basically unlike BWchart (which only applies for competitive BW players), mapping tools permeates all aspects of BW, which imo deserve significant recognition.
Most players have no idea how huge of an impact third party map editors had on the game.
Does everyone remember the days of no inverted ramps? That's right, Lost Temple 9 o clock. Weird as fuck ramps on Bifrost. Without third party map editors, no map in the rotation for the past 5+ years (Just a guess. Probably even longer) would've been possible. Fighting spirit would have awkward downward pointing ramps and long thin crappy bridges. Python 11 o clock and 5 o clock would probably be lowground with the ramps, again being fucked. Blue Storm's maw wouldn't exist, nor would any of its high-ground elements nor its small-unit paths. Remember RoV and its huge hill in the center of the map? Boom, doesn't exist.
There were a bunch of these third-party editors but probably the most used (at least in the foreign scene, I don't know if the koreans used the same one) was SCMDraft 2. The functionality it provided was amazing in comparison to the blizz editor. Remember neutral dark swarm and disruption webs? They were SCMDraft 2. Same with La Mancha's really cool 60 degree wide ramps in the middle. Avalon's neutral xel-naga temples and mineral fields placed on unbuildable locations. You might not notice it but it also has some really cool unbuildable cliff design, again, using a third party editor. Demian's special bridges and sex-ramps are all products of the third-party editor.
Edit: Ninja'd but yeah, SCMDraft and other third party mapping tools are by far and away the most influential third-party program.
SCMDraft gets the huge shoutout to me. wouldn't have half the maps we do today without it, as well as the still much more fun UMS compared to SC2 arcade.
mcalauncher for sure.. it has everything integrated into one, i'm surprised you didn't even consider it as a vote option, my second option would be bwchart
On February 06 2015 11:50 [[Starlight]] wrote: Any Build Order Calculators out there for BW?
There was Evolution Forge, but it didn't really work very well and nobody used it.
It's probably possible to use SCFusion (which works very well for SC2) because you can change game rulesets via XML files, but I don't think anyone has tried adapting it for BW.
As for other software, I don't know about ranking any of it by significance, but probably the coolest is Replay++, which uses BWAPI to take watching replays to the next level.
Most significant is undoubtably Stardraft. Because it was from Stardraft that everything like SCMdraft, firegraft, arsenal, ice, AI editors, etc. all eventually spawned from. Without Stardraft, there would not have been modding as we know it.
EPT
![[image loading]](http://bwchart.teamliquid.net/img/bwchart.gif)
![[image loading]](http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/chaoslauncher.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://poinsart.com/pp/logos/bwscanner.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images/thumb/c/c1/BwRepInfo-Screen.png/294px-BwRepInfo-Screen.png)
![[image loading]](http://bwapi.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/bwapi3.jpg)
