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I posted this to the Blizzard "editor issues/bugs/requests" forum but I thought I would put it here too. After spending a day trying to find out why my previously working code stopped working I don't think anyone else should have to go through that.
Banks are unable to be preloaded in extension mods. You can still create banks and write/read data to/from them, however without the ability to preload banks existing banks are simply erased when you try to open them. there is no way to actually use banks for what they are intended - creating persistent data that lasts between games.
This is a HUGE set back for many people and an insurmountable roadblock to any more complex (and way cooler) extension mods.
For the record I have tried preloading banks in the GUI trigger module, including them in the mod-preload info-banks section and manually editing both the "Preload.xml" and banklist.xml files in the import editor. None of the above work.
Basically this prevents any kind of build order tester mods, macro trainer mods, any kind of map where units are persistent across games such as any kind of large RPG with different maps, hero units which carry over between games, maps which track ELO scores, mechanics practicing maps... and that's only the ones that I could think up in 10 minutes, who knows what great ideas others will have that will never be able to be produced due to this bug.
with this current bug the community is stuck where we were before, making identical coppies of existing maps and adding the mod file to it and publishing it again as a mod. I don't have to go into all the problems with that, as it is the reason extension mods were created in the first place.
Thanks,
Turtles.
EDIT:
see further on for Blizzard response
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To be honest, almost all of those examples you give should be relegated to the Arcade anyway, rather than being an extension mod (RPGs, persistent hero units, etc.). The only one that I see as a potential loss would be an extension mod that tracks ELO scores, but given Blizzard's stance on third party ladder systems, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say this is as designed.
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That is sure crappy. It's frustrating that the only method for getting designs beyond the scope of one game at a time has been and continues to be so problematic, when it is one of the really interesting doorways for custom game creation.
@caustic it's more about the possibilities
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On February 27 2014 13:48 EatThePath wrote:
@caustic it's more about the possibilities
Vague possibilities doth not make a priority feature in a product-oriented company's backlog. I get what you are saying though, and completely agree it'd be awesome for extension mods to also have this working properly. I might even be wrong about Blizzard's priorities on the matter; I didn't expect them to come out with extension mods either even as others were suggesting they should implement such a feature. Blizz can pleasantly surprise sometimes. 
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On February 27 2014 14:18 iamcaustic wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2014 13:48 EatThePath wrote:
@caustic it's more about the possibilities Vague possibilities doth not make a priority feature in a product-oriented company's backlog. I get what you are saying though, and completely agree it'd be awesome for extension mods to also have this working properly. I might even be wrong about Blizzard's priorities on the matter; I didn't expect them to come out with extension mods either even as others were suggesting they should implement such a feature. Blizz can pleasantly surprise sometimes.
Yes for some reason I always hold out hope ^^
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caustic, it rules out all training and practice mods for a start. That is a major setback to the SC2 custom games scene. Lack of Elo mods being the least of the problems that I can see.
As for more acrade style games it is a major setback for them as well. Without this bug you could create arcade games with different maps. I am talking in generalities because the scope of the issue is so large and expansive.
Personally I've always wanted to make an SC2 version of "Battle for Wesnoth" sometime in the future where the characters transfer between games and are killed if you lose the match. But that is no longer possible either.
As it stands I will have to publish the mod I'm currently working on, not as an extension mod which is what it should be, but as 20 seperate maps on the arcade. I will then keep it constantly updated with the new map pools and will have to risk getting banned by breaking the protection on protected maps and publishing them with my mod. Most map makers I have spoken to are obliging in that regard but many do not speak English or are not contactable.
I have spoken to a coach of a pro team who waponts to have a training mod for their players as well. That is no longer a possibility as an extension mod either.
Even if you are not interested in those I guess you could agree that the behaviour of tools should be consistent. Just the fact that it is broken and does not behave as it should is a problem in itself as it will cause untold grief for people down the line who expect that the functions should behave like they are claimed to in the documentation.
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On February 28 2014 00:59 turtles wrote:
caustic, it rules out all training and practice mods for a start. That is a major setback to the SC2 custom games scene.
Didn't seem to stop Blizzard's own StarCraft Master training map, or the numerous marine split training maps, etc. What's the particular need for choosing your own SC2 melee map to perform training routines on rather than a custom map better tailored to helping train particular skills?
On February 28 2014 00:59 turtles wrote:
As for more acrade style games it is a major setback for them as well. Without this bug you could create arcade games with different maps. I am talking in generalities because the scope of the issue is so large and expansive.
What I'm working on wrapping my head around is why Arcade-style games would/should be anywhere other than the Arcade. Like, what's the use case here?
On February 28 2014 00:59 turtles wrote:
Personally I've always wanted to make an SC2 version of "Battle for Wesnoth" sometime in the future where the characters transfer between games and are killed if you lose the match. But that is no longer possible either.
As it stands I will have to publish the mod I'm currently working on, not as an extension mod which is what it should be, but as 20 seperate maps on the arcade. I will then keep it constantly updated with the new map pools and will have to risk getting banned by breaking the protection on protected maps and publishing them with my mod. Most map makers I have spoken to are obliging in that regard but many do not speak English or are not contactable.
Is there a particular reason you wouldn't want to have maps designed specifically with your Battle for Wesnoth mod in mind? Maps are a huge part of RTS game balance. There are also plenty of community mapmakers who I'm sure would love to have a crack at it; a number of us melee mapmakers have made maps intended for (and in some cases even used by) the Starbow mod, for example. In fact, they've specifically avoided making Starbow an extension mod because they want control of the map pool and, by extension, greater control over the mod's balance. In short, I'm not sure why you'd want to shove your completely different RTS mod to fit into the model of SC2 melee maps, other than to cut some corners.
On February 28 2014 00:59 turtles wrote:
I have spoken to a coach of a pro team who waponts[sic] to have a training mod for their players as well. That is no longer a possibility as an extension mod either.
I talked about training mods above. In retrospect, though, there's also a specific "training" mod type, separate from extension mods. Has there been much investigation into these, and are they affected by the same issues as stated in the OP? I'd look myself if I wasn't currently at work, though I'll be sure to check it out later as well.
On February 28 2014 00:59 turtles wrote:
Even if you are not interested in those I guess you could agree that the behaviour of tools should be consistent. Just the fact that it is broken and does not behave as it should is a problem in itself as it will cause untold grief for people down the line who expect that the functions should behave like they are claimed to in the documentation.
I don't think anyone would disagree with such common sense. Features should work as intended; if Blizzard intended for banks to be pre-loaded in extension mods, then it's a bug that needs to be fixed on their end. I'm just questioning your intended usage of extension mods and debating whether alternative (and in some cases, better) solutions aren't already available to achieve the same results. I'm not sold on this issue being an insurmountable wall, as you describe it.
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Could someone educate me briefly on why one would not use a dependant mod instead of an extension mod for the applications being described here?
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Maybe relating the history of my current project will help illistrate some problems. A long time ago I released a practice and training mod on several different maps in the common map pools. It got some die hard fans, I was expecting a lot of lower level crowds would pick it up but to my surprise not many low level players knew about it. instead I got a lot of feedback from masters, grand masters and even a few professional players. I know this from emails and via the replay files of training sessions they would send me to illistrate bugs.
However they were disapointed that they could not train on a lot of the GSL maps. A lot of the GSL maps were locked. I managed to speak to some to send me a copy but most were uncontactable. Someone broke the security measures on the maps and sent me a zip file of all the current pro level maps but my conscience won out and I decided I would respect the map creators wishes and not tamper with their maps at all even if I was not touching the map itself but only adding triggers and data.
So not only were some maps unavailable, but I had to take an 10 month break and in that time the map pools had all changed. The players were upset that they could no longer use the tool to train on current map pools and bailed. Some still used it on old outdated maps but to most it was vitally important that it be on current and upcoming maps and I simply couldn't maintain the map pool.
Discovering that Blizzard has come out with extension mods I figured this was the answer to all my prayers. The ability to put training mods on current map pools, or any map the user wanted for that matter. But now that I've discovered this bug it is not possible to continue development. I will probably have to go back to the old ways which are a lot more hassle for all involved. Not to mention very confusing now that they cannot access them via the normal method for extension mods, because that's exactly what it is, an extension mod.
Although, if I can't get a hold of the creators I will probably just break the protection on the maps to publish all the locked maps (locking them myself when I republish of course). If a map creator wishes for me to take any of then down I will.
I happen to know of others in a simillar boat as well.
As for publishing more "arcade" style maps you mention Starbow and their choice to control the map pool as a factor in their descission. That's fine, but that was a choice. They very well could have decided to open up the process of map creation to the community instead. What if the creator of a game decides to focus on designing the game itself and open up the map creation to the community, after all, that's what Blizzard has done. Say I want to create the next big moba? what then? It inhibits the ability for the community to design maps for my moba game.
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I still have to ask the question: where does preloading banks come into the equation? Not just that, but what kind of practice/training was your mod designed for? Providing some idea of the functional scope of your project would go a lot further in explaining the necessity of preloading banks in an extension mod than re-iterating your inability to acquire locked melee maps.
On February 28 2014 15:25 turtles wrote:
As for publishing more "arcade" style maps you mention Starbow and their choice to control the map pool as a factor in their descission. That's fine, but that was a choice. They very well could have decided to open up the process of map creation to the community instead. What if the creator of a game decides to focus on designing the game itself and open up the map creation to the community, after all, that's what Blizzard has done.
Um, if people want to make maps for you, they can send the maps to you. I already talked about how Starbow does this. Every single map in their pool is made by the community.
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to bad a recently added feature won't help you, but being so overly dramatic about it won't help you in upping that in Blizzards priority list. I mean you want to bring attention to the problem which is good, but mentioning things that have little need of the mod extension will rather hurt you in that. As well as saying that the whole mod extension is useless because it can't work with banks.
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I've never claimed that extension mods are useless. They are very useful, and I'm glad to have them in the game. But this bug prevents them from being far more useful than they currently are.
If we are talking about my map specifically I need the use of banks for a few reasons.
- for a user to be able to maintain their own list of build orders to create, chose from and to share with other players.
- The mod needs to know what a players hotkeys are for their control groups. default is to use 1-9 which covers most people but for those who use customized control group keys not having banks means they will have to enter them in every time they play the game.
- unit hotkeys, the build order tool can display hotkeys for you to use to help train you to use the keyboard and make your game play faster, but I can't expect people to enter their unit/building/upgrade hotkeys every time they play.
- records of a players performance, banks are needed to show them how much time they are saving in a build, the outcome of battles, spending quotient, time spent supply blocked and other metrics for them to be able to compare their skill against previous benchmarks.
I was intentionally avoiding talking about why I personally need access to bank files because this could quickly turn into a thread about questioning my need for bank files, how I might be able to circumvent the lack of banks, or sound like I am asking for help with my current project. If anyone knows ways in which I might be able to achieve these without the use of bank files then I am up for suggestions, but I do not want to turn this into a thread asking people for help with my own projects.
the reasons I brought up this thread was to both save other people who will experience this bug and the effort of having to discover it themselves and to hopefully draw attention to it so it may be fixed.
EDIT:
Um, if people want to make maps for you, they can send the maps to you. I already talked about how Starbow does this. Every single map in their pool is made by the community.
That still makes your project centralized and dependent on you maintaining it indefinitely. You will only have a limit of 20 maps and will have to be in charge of which maps to accept and which to reject. People would not be able to experiment and test on their own. That decentralization is the reason extension mods are so great in the first place. I'm not sure if you can publish a map with a locked dependency belonging to another person, I've never had to. Even if you can that would still result in having to search through many different versions of the game instead of only having a single mod which players can then add to their game.
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UPDATE:
Here is a Blizzard dev response to my origional message on the Bnet forums:
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
As you might imagine, there were a lot of changes necessary to support all aspects of extension mods. We didn't want to delay the release of extension mods until bank support was available it would have required a lot more changes. We recognize that it is important to you and hope to add it in a future patch.
Thanks for your patience.
That could be either a "yeah, we're doing what we can to fix this" response, or it could be a "meh, we might get round to it... eventually" response. But it is good to know they are aware of the issue and are looking to fix it
Sorry if people think I was under valuing extension mods. The truth is quite the opposite. I actually think extension mods are a far greater thing than the community yet realizes. I'm surprised people haven't realized yet how ground breaking it could be. But while this issue persists it very much limits the abilities of them.
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On February 28 2014 18:02 turtles wrote:UPDATE: Here is a Blizzard dev response to my origional message on the Bnet forums: Show nested quote +Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
As you might imagine, there were a lot of changes necessary to support all aspects of extension mods. We didn't want to delay the release of extension mods until bank support was available it would have required a lot more changes. We recognize that it is important to you and hope to add it in a future patch.
Thanks for your patience. That could be either a "yeah, we're doing what we can to fix this" response, or it could be a "meh, we might get round to it... eventually" response. But it is good to know they are aware of the issue and are looking to fix it Sorry if people think I was under valuing extension mods. The truth is quite the opposite. I actually think extension mods are a far greater thing than the community yet realizes. I'm surprised people haven't realized yet how ground breaking it could be. But while this issue persists it very much limits the abilities of them.
It is definitely in the developers' interest to support banks for extension mods. The question is however, as you mention, when it will be added. Since it seamingly might take some time to support, it ultimately depends how far up on the priority list they decide to put it. Extension mods can definitely be useful in some scenarious, as you explained in an earlier post, and I'd love to see bank support for it in the near future.
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On February 28 2014 16:29 turtles wrote:
I was intentionally avoiding talking about why I personally need access to bank files because this could quickly turn into a thread about questioning my need for bank files, how I might be able to circumvent the lack of banks, or sound like I am asking for help with my current project. If anyone knows ways in which I might be able to achieve these without the use of bank files then I am up for suggestions, but I do not want to turn this into a thread asking people for help with my own projects.
First off, thanks for explaining how pre-loading banks would be useful for an extension mod, particularly in your case. I can understand and appreciate why you would avoid sounding like you're just looking at help for your project, although at the end of the day if you're able to receive a decent workaround then you'd be able to work on the project as Blizzard addresses the core issue(s).
On February 28 2014 16:29 turtles wrote:
the reasons I brought up this thread was to both save other people who will experience this bug and the effort of having to discover it themselves and to hopefully draw attention to it so it may be fixed.
Like I said before, if a feature isn't working as intended, then the people responsible for the feature should provide a fix. My comments have been more an exercise in ensuring you're utilizing the most effective tools possible for executing your ideas than anything else.
On February 28 2014 16:29 turtles wrote:EDIT: Show nested quote +
Um, if people want to make maps for you, they can send the maps to you. I already talked about how Starbow does this. Every single map in their pool is made by the community.
That still makes your project centralized and dependent on you maintaining it indefinitely. You will only have a limit of 20 maps and will have to be in charge of which maps to accept and which to reject. People would not be able to experiment and test on their own. That decentralization is the reason extension mods are so great in the first place. I'm not sure if you can publish a map with a locked dependency belonging to another person, I've never had to. Even if you can that would still result in having to search through many different versions of the game instead of only having a single mod which players can then add to their game.
I still have to ask the question, though: if you're not actively maintaining a mod, are you truly invested in its longevity?
So, all of that said, I'd love to respond better than explaining my reasoning for playing devil's advocate, but I'm unfortunately inebriated after attending a hockey game.  The only functional part of my brain is the part that discusses humanity's existentialism, which isn't useful at all. When I'm sober again, I'll try looking at solutions to the functional problems you mentioned (despite your desire to avoid seeking help for workarounds to the preloading bank bug). 
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just wanted to report that this issue is still unresolved. LotV didnt fix it. i hope seeing this spares others from hours frustratingly wasted in trying to get banks to work with their mods.
i daresay this might be intentional since extension mods with an ELO system would maybe stand a chance to lure a significant amount of players away from the crapfest that is lotv multiplayer.
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On January 08 2016 03:25 summerloud wrote:
just wanted to report that this issue is still unresolved. LotV didnt fix it. i hope seeing this spares others from hours frustratingly wasted in trying to get banks to work with their mods.
i daresay this might be intentional since extension mods with an ELO system would maybe stand a chance to lure a significant amount of players away from the crapfest that is lotv multiplayer.
I've checked a few times and noted the same thing. And I'm still having to deal with people complaining about why my map won't work correctly and having to explain to them that there is nothing I can do untill this bug in the game is patched.
I still have that other game idea in the back of my head I've always wanted to create but with things as they are it would be way too impractical.
People saying you should just release each map individually and not as an extension mod I think undervalue how tedious and long that process is. it takes about 7 minutes to upload a map. multiply that by 6 servers and 20 maps and that is a full on 14 hour process. when you factor in things like breaks, fatigue, boredom it's basically a two day job any time you want to make even the smallest of changes.
I would never have 2 days to dedicate to simply uploading files. I'm sneaking in about 3 hours atm to work on a map before I go to my actual job before noticing this post. and it's been probably a week since I was last able to put in a few hours of work on it (and about a month or two hiatus before that). Requiring that kind of commitment to something so boring and tedious would more than halve my productivity or more likely prevent me from even trying.
Again, I'm not trying to make this about me. I didn't make this post to complain about how the bug effects my own projects or projects I would like to make. Maybe there is someone out there who has that kind of time and dedication, that's not important.
What's important is making sure the issue is out there so others know the limitations of SC2 and don't waste their own time, and so Blizzard is aware of it and know there are people who would like to produce content for them but are restricted.
While fixing this bug would greatly help any other mod and create more competition for ladder I don't think it's fair to say they are intentionally not fixing this bug. There have been small bugs which would seem trivial to fix which have been around for ages but this one (to me) sounds like it would be a much bigger problem to solve. It could just be that when they rank all the bugs in terms of cost/benefit ratio, this bug isn't high enough on the list. I think it should be higher because it opens the pathway for more expansive custom games and who knows if there is some future DOTA game out there which exists in someones head but will never be a reality due to this. But that is a judgement call that is for them to decide on.
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i cant really see how this is not intentional - the bug has been known for 2 years and storing any values works perfectly even in an extension mod. there is just absolutely no reason for loading values not to work in a mod when it works in individual maps
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EPT
