SCU:Starcraft Unraveled

Welcome!
From StarCraft Unraveled

Well, somehow you, of all people, made it here, to this page, and are reading this sentence. If you have any questions concerning the SCU project itself, visit the FAQ first. You are about to make your first step into the world of Starcraft customization, revealed to you in SCU. A few starting notes are needed however, so that you're not surprised by what you see in-here.

SCU is thought to be addressed to everyone. And here, "everyone" means just that. The reader may be a complete newcomer to Starcraft customization searching for some certain knowledge, but also an old "guru" looking for an explanation of a single opcode, or even a Battle.net player wanting to develop his abilities after playing some "special" maps. As the matter of fact, any former experience with Starcraft would be very helpful in cruising through SCU, however, it is not obligatory in order to understand what is written in it. We wrote it in the manner so it's (hopefully) comprehensible even for someone touching the game customization world for the first time. Sure, some of the game concepts can be harder than others, but we really did our best to present them so the reader has the least problems with them.

SCU is thought as a highly accessible resource. That means you don't have to read it all along to find whatever you might be looking for. The purpose of organizing it into chapters and sub-sections is, from one hand to organize the material, but also to facilitate your possible searches for answers. For example, if you search the explanation of how "explosion type" value does work, you just look at the Contents page, you find the "Arsenal III's Weapons Editor" reference being a sub-section to the Weapons Control part and voila - you got what you wanted. Besides, if you want to know how it actually "works", then you'd consider to take the main, "theoretical" section under your attention.

The probably most significant property of SCU is the big amount of content. Clearly, this is an effect of the extensiveness of the subjects we cover in it. It is very important that you realize that SCU is not an easy lecture - in certain parts it becomes really advanced and without the willingness to read and absorb new information without question, you won't make it very far.

OK then, let us start the story...8)

The primal goal for people who make some modifications to a game is to understand how the game engine reads and uses its external structured data. For example, say you have the math function + (addition). Suppose that is our "engine". If you give your engine two numbers, say 1 and 2, it will give you an output, say 3. (That's 1 + 2 = 3 for all you non-math whiz's) If you give it a different input, it will give you a different output. 1 + 3 = 4, 2 + 3 = 5, 1 + 1 = 2. Now, you really don't need to have any idea how + actually "works" but you get a sense that its operation is logical and that no matter what numbers you have it as it's data input, it will produce a logical output. Always. The same basic idea is behind a game engine. You do not need to understand how the actual program is processing and transferring the data, you just have to see the patterns in the input data vs output results.


The Starcraft engine starts with a set of initial data that was given to it by Blizzard. That's the same as, say, + starting out with the numbers 1 and 2. Whenever the engine runs with that data as input, it will always produce the same output. 1 + 2 will always be equal 3 (Yes, really ALWAYS . When you run Starcraft with its initial data, a Zergling will always look like a Zergling (and not like Elmo, a hamburger, or a Starwars pirate . But let's say you wanted to receive a different output from the engine, say 4 instead of 3, and Elmo instead of a Zergling. In the case of +, you know you can just give a different set of input data like 2 and 2 or 1 and 3. For the Starcraft engine special case, you may know that if you input a different GRP file (Starcraft graphics file) you can get your 'ling looking like Elmo.


Once we see the patterns in data input and output, we can begin to manipulate it in an orderly fashion to produce the outputs we want. And that is, basically, it. Except that Starcraft engine is much more complex than a math operation such as addition. It requires a large, structured set of data to run properly - from graphics to sounds to statistics and more. Thankfully, Blizzard provided a full initial set to begin with. (duh, otherwise the game wouldn't run) So, your task is, when making a mod, to decide which pieces of initial data you want to change in order to get the game to perform in the way you would like it to.