EPTCommunity for the SC2 Map Editor?
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P00RKID
United States424 Posts
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Whiplash
United States2929 Posts
Http://www.staredit.org Basically those are the communities that still live today that mod (and map make) sc, although they aren't too active. They got the experience on their side though, so expect them and maybe wc3campaigns (which will have a new domain name im sure) to do some editor related things. It could be a toss up though with a brand new community popping up and becoming the biggest, it really depends on what site has the first big project to be released. As far as the editor goes it can do almost anything you want, the scripting language was bumped up from jass to a blizzard version of C. | ||
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redmarine
Denmark165 Posts
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lololol
5198 Posts
You can also read the mapmaker Q&As, although they consist of(quoting a battle.net poster): - Can the SC2 editor... - Yes, it can. | ||
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IskatuMesk
Canada969 Posts
As for sc2's editor capabilities over, say wc3, well I know for starters... - Texture brush system like E2150/NWN2 in addition to tiles I believe. - Hardpoint system, hardpointed gizmos are basically just units (see: uberlisk, homeworld 2), expect to need 3ds max or maya to attach new hardpoints to units. Thus expect to need a buggy and unfinished third-party model importer because no one ever releases importers with their plugins. - Havok physics (I've heard it's client-side only, then I've heard that pretty much everything including projectiles uses it.). It's up in the air how much the editor will give you control over this; I'm not expecting a heck of a lot without serious code work, excluding it from most users. I have major doubts about some things in sc2 seeing as Blizzard absolutely loves hardcode. Modding in wc3 was just a disaster, though mappers had a decent time with JASS despite its memory leaks and many issues/stuff that was unfinished. Almost all of Wc3's capability was through extremely complicated and difficult JASS systems which still didn't offer the functionality of certain starcraft modding sections like the iscript or BWAPI and did not function in a mod environment. So far the only thing modding-related Blizzard has said is that there will be a mod loader, probably similar to supreme commander's, and the ability to add additional races to the menu which anyone who's tried to do to wc3 will be thankful for. To elaborate on those two sites Whiplash mentioned; Campaign Creations is a veteran Starcraft community oriented primarily around creating, surprise surprise, campaigns. It's home to famous campaigns like Legacy of the Confederacy, and RazorclawX's Wc3 campaign, Wanderers of Sorceria. However, it does have a few experienced modders there as well, myself included. Most of these guys have sc2 campaigns planned. Staredit.net is primarily an UMS mapping community with a few inexperienced modders - poor administration and moderation drove away most of the veterans. | ||
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DeCoup
Australia1933 Posts
I'm not going near game altering maps for at least 1 year (longer if the expansions are on time). I want to learn the ins and outs of SC2 before I start looking at other games built on it. | ||
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IskatuMesk
Canada969 Posts
A mod changes the entire game and every map loaded. So, like, the ui mods in World of Warcraft would be mods. Counter-Strike is a mod. Even a mod for sc2 that just changes the races to sc1 races but takes place when you load any given map in your iccup 2.0 list is still a mod because it's affecting everything. The mod environment takes place globally; changing main menus, even the default campaigns, stuff like that. A map is just a map and is considerably more flexible, but has much less of an impact. Mod popularity really decreased in warcraft 3 because of the power of the editor and because many things, like the AI, the pathing, and porting JASS to work on a global format were just too broken or painful to play around with. Also, mods always required third-party tools to run/make (mpqdraft, winmpq, ect), another advantage that maps have is they don't need those. Maps are just much more inviting. But I don't like maps. I make total conversions that change the entire game and function across every melee map you have. I find the replay value to be much greater and overall the project to be much more rewarding. But very few games are built to be that open to modders. I think mods are going to die even more in starcraft 2 as the Blizzard community moves further away from big projects and more into stuff like aos clones and tower defense. For someone like me who has spent the past 10 years making large-scale mods for Starcraft and other games, it's very depressing, but I hope sc2 is designed in a way in which people like me can pursue our own projects. | ||
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Judicator
United States7270 Posts
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Physician
United States4146 Posts
http://www.broodwarmaps.net, http://www.mapdori.com/, http://samods.org/ SEN and CC as mentioned already http://starcraft.org/ & closest to my heart but in no particular order http://www.broodwarai.com/ (AI mods mainly) Mind you, all maps/mods eventually get linked here at tl.net so you will know who is who eventually if you're just checking this forum : ) - Hope it helps ~ | ||
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redmarine
Denmark165 Posts
Atm the WarCraft III community of Hiveworkshop is thriving since thousands of modders are on the site each day and even more visitors. It's a huge site a place for all sorts of projects and all people at any skill level. Since the WarCraft III mapping commnnity and StarCraft mapping community will most likely move towards StarCraft II's Galaxy Editor it'll ofc be a spamfest and copying at the beginning but I highly doubt that will cause any sorts of problems. It hasn't on WarCraft III instead helped creating variety. | ||
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P00RKID
United States424 Posts
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IskatuMesk
Canada969 Posts
On January 06 2010 17:22 redmarine wrote: I don't really see what was so bad about the WarCraft III Editor and certainly not the concern of yours that the new Galaxy Editor would kill or ruin the mapping community for StarCraft II. Atm the WarCraft III community of Hiveworkshop is thriving since thousands of mappers are on the site each day and even more visitors. It's a huge site a place for all sorts of projects and all people at any skill level. Once corrected, your statement is indeed quite correct. Hiveworkshop has many mappers, and maybe only a handful of people who even know what an actual mod is or care to make anything of that scale. And, no, Galaxy Editor will only spur them on and attract more. tl;dr version - I'm talking about modding, not mapping. Two very different things. Coming from a wc3 perspective, I can see why someone would confuse the two. There are just so few mods for wc3. Project Revolution was a mod. AMAI is a mod. Dota is a map. Wc3's engine is also a step back from Starcraft in many aspects that make Starcraft mods what they are. Do you understand? I could elaborate a little further. Long version - The thing about Blizzard's two games, being Wc3 and SC2, is that they are killing modding. Not mapping, oh no, the same reason mapping is thriving is the same reason modding is dying. Once maps get so much power as they have been, no one sees the meaning to put effort into mods anymore. Only a few... including myself... who do not like having their elements restricted to but a single map. I'm coming from a Starcraft perspective. In Starcraft, there is absolutely no possible room for debate on what is what. A map like paintball arena or the latest RPG is still but a map. But something like ITAS, Ad Astras, or AO are mods (the former two being correctly referred to as total conversions). The difference in Starcraft is very blatant. To play a map, you load her up on battle.net in a pub and get cussed out by some kids. End game, maybe play some melee on iccup. To play a mod, you always run an external exe file. This patches starcraft's memory. For the duration that the game is open you are running the mod. The effects this mod places effect EVERYTHING. The single-player campaign might be totally changed, all of the main menus are different, new music, new ui sounds, and - of course - the gameplay is often radically different. Making a mod requires a ton of third party tools. Why make a mod in starcraft when you can make a map? Well, where have you seen a map do this? ![[image loading]](http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2009/355/0/1/AO___Promotional_shot_3_by_IskatuMesk.jpg) The difference in Starcraft is very clear. Mods give you a huge more amount of power to work with. But you are also limited. You can't play around with most of the triggers even though you can change melee triggers, because many triggers are dependent on terrain elements and locations and all that. Enter warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 suddenly gives the power of the modding tools to the mapper as well. But it does this in a way which makes it totally uninteresting to map, and it is also designed in a way that making a mod - a project that does what they do in Starcraft and converts the entire game - is very, very painful. First off, the engine is a mess. Everyone knows about that unit movement limit - that is crippling for any kind of mod or map that wants to have more units than wc3. Then, there's the AI. I've spoken a lot with Zalamander, one of the pleasant fellows who works on AMAI. AMAI is the only major Warcraft 3 AI mod out there. Why? Because an incredible amount of work has been put into it often aiming for one single goal - to get around hardcoded problems. The AI in warcraft 3 is an absolute disaster. You can complain about Starcraft AI's lack of micro and building placement all you want, wc3 is ten times worse on top of ridiculously bad pathing and horrible attack group management. Despite AMAI's amazing work, these hardcoded problems still give their project a lot of trouble. Ai is critical for any kind of mod in my opinion. A starcraft mod without a custom AI will never be played by anyone! Because there isn't enough players. Sc2 would be different, of course, but I would make custom AI regardless. Now, pathing and AI are two very critical things, but you don't really have to worry about them for the most part in many maps. Sure, the pathing pissess you off in Dota when your guy just spins around and does nothing, but it's not a huge problem. When you make a mod, it's typically presumed you're kind of making a new RTS or something in that style because you'll be playing the mod on existing melee maps. That's where things get rough. And, again, triggers and JASS tend to be very specific to the map they're made in, and porting them to the global J files is painful - especially if you are not extremely skilled in JASS. And, again, you must rely once more on third-party applications to do a lot of the work for you. You can bypass SLK files by just throwing the war3map files into your mpq, and you can even import gameplay constants. Warcraft 3's engine is also a step back from starcraft. And here's where we get into the really harsh stuff from a modder's perspective. The power of Starcraft lays in something called the iscript.bin. This allows you, the developer, immense control over how your units act. See that picture of Mal`Ash up there? That's all thanks to iscript and some custom sprites. With the iscript and a few lines of super-basic code, I can make a nova attack. I can have him trigger a dozen different weapons as part of some amazing epic animation sequence. The iscript controls the units anyways, it decides how fast they move, their animations, their engine glows, what they can do, when they attack. You can simply expand upon this and make their actions more elaborate. It's very powerful. Something as simple as firing twice in one attack is not possible in warcraft 3 - not without JASS. And JASS is slow and cumbersome. In a Dota-style map, that doesn't really matter because there's only a few units that would be using something like that, right? Also, fancy stuff like spawning effects around the unit according to what they're doing, ect. is also entirely trigger and JASS dependent. Now consider the mod environment. You can have hundreds of units up at a time doing stuff like this. Starcraft? No problem! But warcraft 3 has much stricter limits and JASS is very inefficient and very slow when you start stacking it up. Also, memory leaks. Now, granted, I never learned much of JASS, only what the guys who wrote my physics system and stuff for my maps told me about. I trust them, and I trust the opinions of those I see on Hiveworkshop. Okay well what the hell does any of this have to do about sc2? I'm very, very concerned about sc2 from a modders perspective. I have no doubt that mappers will love it and create dota 2.0 and throw it into a state of recycling the same thing over and over again, just with more ultra fancy skills and heroes. Mappers are gonna love the game. But what about us modders, who like to really get into the engine? Custom shaders, global code elements, customizing the entire menu and not just the ingame menu, y'know. Now, this fear could be totally pointless because it's based on the little information my inside contacts and Blizzard itself gives me. So far, Blizzard has only said two things related to actual modding (Mention of the mod loader and the additional races in the menu). They've ignored every topic and e-mail myself and others have ever made about mods. Now, this could mean anything. Blizzard likes to repeat the same garbage in their Q&A's, they answer the dumbest questions on the forum, maybe they just don't care to talk about it. Or they don't really give a damn about mods and things are going to be even worse for us. I personally do not think SC2 will be as bad for modders as wc3 was, but it really depends on what the game itself looks like. Is the AI softcoded? Can we play around with how it places buildings, how it handles spellcasting, how it moves attack groups around and picks targets? What about units and projectiles? Blizzard says we can now stop a projectile in mid-air - through their new "data editor" and so on. The uberlisk really got my hopes up! I was pretty pumped by that, especially when Browder said it was all from the data editor. Surely, all I have to do to make that global is to port the files out of the map archive into a custom mpq - I probably won't even need to do that if their mod loader works anything like supreme commander. So what the heck am I worried about? The game itself. I walked into supreme commander thinking that it was the most moddable game ever and everyone told me it had no limits. Turns out, you can't have stationary attacking air units a la the battlecruiser. Turns out, the unit AI is HORRIBLE and you want to break your face into a table. The game's an absolute mess on the inside - just to define a custom effect using the same settings as a different one and just pointing to a new TGA I had to define a ton of new stuff in like seven different disorganized files. I'm worried because Blizzard is not a company that really gives a damn about modders, and only now are they really opening up to mappers and listening. So people like me, as few as we are, are left out. Yes, the sc2 editor is going to benefit us quite a lot, too! And believe me, I'm pretty excited to get my first look at the editor and start spitting out demo videos on youtube of what I can make out of it with zero programming knowledge. But getting all that fancy stuff to work and play nicely in a mod format is something I will remain skeptical about until I actually try it. Okay that turned out as kind of a big rant but I really don't like it when people mix up modders and mappers. I'm a little passionate about my business. Anyways this is kind of going off-subject so I won't speak of it anymore. broodwarai.com is a great place, I agree. Not very active, but very helpful members and a lot of info. | ||
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emikochan
United Kingdom232 Posts
I'm a mapper personally and i'm drooling at the new editor, though i've worked on mods in the past, I hope all the best for the modders, hopefully "Blizz c++" isn't retarded. | ||
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Khaile
Norway17 Posts
http://galaxyedit.net/index.php? | ||
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Spartan
United States2030 Posts
- http://staredit.net - http://broodwarmaps.net - http://campaigncreations.org - http://broodwarai.com (I miss infoceptor.net) And some newcomers trying to get prepared for SC2.. - http://udmod.com - http://galaxyedit.net In my honest opinion, I think HiveWorkshop.com will quickly take over the SC2 scene with the same site, or an offspring. The above SC1 sites that I mentioned won't be able to adapt quickly to the new ground, most of the sites are rarely updated (on the coding and site features side) and has resulted in outdated designs that are not user-friendly. | ||
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Damian
Germany335 Posts
On January 30 2010 14:51 Spartan wrote: In my honest opinion, I think HiveWorkshop.com will quickly take over the SC2 scene with the same site, or an offspring. The above SC1 sites that I mentioned won't be able to adapt quickly to the new ground, most of the sites are rarely updated (on the coding and site features side) and has resulted in outdated designs that are not user-friendly. I think so, too. Hive has a big and active community and their site really offers anything you need as a mapper (good layout, good filebase, good tutorials, good rules, etc.). @the mod topic: Also I think that moving more towards maps and away from mods didnt hurt Wc3 too much. There are millions of people (mostly in China / Taiwan nowadays) who play DotA-esque and totally different (TD, footman frenzy, ORPGs, etc..) maps. Mods just have too many disadvantages: file size, time to create, time to get used to, small player base (at least at the beginning), no easy access. There were so many BIG map projects canceled, because at some point the creators would loose their motivation and that is even more of a concern for mods (only some of them due to World-Editor restrictions like Neratia f.e.)... I am looking forward to the merged WC3+SC+newcomer mapping community and I hope - no I'll bet that they will produce great maps! PS: TFT added some really nice features to the Worldeditor and as we will have 2 expansions for SC2 we might see many improvements as the time passes by... | ||
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neobowman
Canada3324 Posts
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