Do we have a wish list or list of questions for Blizzard about the map editor?

Well, I thought I jot down a few things that I'm really curious about:

1.) Will there be functionality in the new editor (henceforth SC2E) to arbitrarily move a unit up and down in Z in an absolute sense? In WC3 one could change a unit's flying height, but this value only ranged from 0 to 1000, and furthermore was subject to terrain conditions. Hence, it was very difficult to judge what flying height would be ideal, and nearly impossible to make units fly extremely close to cliffs--they'd always end up much higher in the sky due to the "always on" terrain matching algorithm.

2.) Will it be possible to arbitrarily change a unit's pitch, roll, and yaw via triggers? This was not possible in WC3, although it was possible to use the editor to make specific units with funny pitch or roll. Even then, however, the pitch and such were subject to terrain conditions. All of these parameters should be accessible by some sort of function that can override terrain-matching algorithms in specific cases.

3.) Will there be debris models from specific units? The way in which pieces of the destroyed Warp Rays fall to the ground and then slide down the ramp suggests to me that there are separate models for each piece of the debris being manipulated independently. Will we be able to access individual models like this and manipulate them as units in the game when we want to make really impressive explosions?

4.) Will it be possible to change the animation rate for all special effects? In WC3, this was not possible, at least not for all special effects.

5.) Perhaps most important, will there be an absolute timing system in SC2E? In the WC3 editor a major weakness was the reliance on wait triggers to sequence events. These polled waits meant different run speeds on different computers. While it was possible to mitigate some of these effects by running multiple trigger threads simultaneously, sequencing events to occur precisely in rapid succession was not possible. For this purpose, and entire suite of JASS functions was written by two savvy modders that helped a great deal, but this was a bit cumbersome to use.

6.) Will there be AND and OR logical operators in the scripting language?

7.) Will the GUI compiler improve so as to narrow the efficiency gap between writing code by GUI and by hand? Writing code by hand subsumed everything the WC3 GUI could do, of course, but sometimes looking up all the myriad functions was difficult, and after that the presence of _bj functions that merely served as wrappers for safe inputs to functions that actually did the work made for some very suboptimal trigger code.

 

Lol.... so in essence you're saying that modding the WC3 engine to do what you wanted was a pain in the ass.

I'm assuming it will still be a huge pain in SC2

 

Not quite.

As I got more and more experience modding, I began to use more sophisticated techniques to achieve even greater levels of detail and "wow factor" in my maps. For instance, I designed a set of spider units to "walk on the ceiling"--really, they were units that flew and triggers periodically judged their positions in certain regions to match the topography of the ceiling. This worked pretty well, even for cinematics. There were also triggers I wrote so that when the units "died" they would fall from the ceiling, accelerating as they did so, and make a big splat all over the ground.

So, it's things like that that I really want to be able to do--things that could be in the game, but aren't because there's only so much game that Blizzard will produce and there are so many potential uses of the triggers they've designed (especially when you allow users to manipulate elemental variables in the same context as units and other things).

All I'd like is for Blizzard to do a few general things (like include AND and OR functions) that would make it much easier to use the editor in these ways to create new and exciting effects.

Perhaps I should not have said that the JASS system for precise event timing was cumbersome to use. It really wasn't. It's just that the events I wanted to use became much more complex as soon as I had that tool, so naturally my scripts became difficult to read. I should've relied more on a tool like JASScraft to show me the code in colorized syntax highlighting to make it easier to parse. But, again, the WC3 editor had a lot of powerful features, and the things that were added to it were mostly just scripts and wrappers to streamline the exploitation of these features to achieve highly choreographed results. My hope is that Blizzard will look at all that and make the next editor with much of the same convenience already built in.

 

Well to tell you the truth, I haven't worked in the WC3 editor AT ALL.

I have no idea how the Cinematics are actually manufactured, only a very brief insight into the components that go into it.

When the actual editor comes out I'll probably dive headfirst into it (after securing gameplay) and start to immerse myself in the controls. I had a pretty good grasp on the original Starcraft Editor and made quite a few complicated UMS maps, and then moved onto the more complicated tilesets and triggers.

As far as modding is concerned though, I'm not very familiar. I'll be following in your footsteps there.

 

Oh, I can mod all right, but I do lean on others to make 3D models and I stand on the shoulders of giants (Vexorian, The_Prophet, Magos, iNfraNe, and Anitarf to name but a few) when it comes to using scripted systems. Some scripts are useful, but others are invaluable because they permit you to accomplish things that would not otherwise be possible.

The cinematics are pretty simple to understand, and the "maturity" level of a modder is determined by how well he or she understands the mechanics underlying the game itself. What makes a unit move from A to B, for example, what controls its flying height, how you make it turn, what animations are played under what circumstances and how the game interpolates between animations to give the appearance of smooth transitions.

The next level, once you figure all that stuff out, is to find out how to do it conveniently with scripted code and functions, which really draws on any computer programming experience you might have, to set up very complex movements with relatively simple component functions.

After that, it's just a matter of willpower and elbow grease.

If you want a good example of some of the more advanced methods in WC3 map development (which, owing to the un-moddability of WoW is the most advanced Blizzard editing tool we've got), check out that "Barracks" map I made as a preview to Norj'Hal II (a project which, alas, I will not finish due to waning interest in WC3 and the coming release of SC2). In that map, you'll find A LOT of scripted trigger code--in fact, much more than there is of GUI trigger code. There are a couple of systems in there (i.e. the troop movement) which don't work so well, and this is because they were made with the GUI and then converted to script. Had I known how to script at the advent of that map, things would have been very different. You can also look at Norj'Hal Act I, a completed project, and you'll see that the whole thing is GUI. I could have probably made that game run smoothly on significantly slower CPUs had I used script code with more general functions and optimized some of the stuff by hand. But, you live and learn...

One thing that I am excited about is the fact that Blizzard has gone from that annoying diamond grid to a square one with the option of making octagonal shapes with the cliffs. This was introduced in WC3, thanks to the 3D nature of the game and the possibility of higher-resolution terrain that no longer demanded the diamond grid to produce visually acceptable forms of terrain.

Great maps start with good terrain layout, including plenty of height variation (which was already pretty good in WC3--in SC2 it's gotta be even better), then you add nice tile variation to the terrain, and often times you have to import images to make highly customized tilesets, such as the merger of Cityscape and Underground I used for the Barracks map, or the merger of Dalaran and Lordaeron Winter I used to make the Norj'Hal capital city of Dajh'Onnar (see http://www.wc3campaigns.net/showthread.php?t=91314&page=2). Then you make very carefuly doodad layouts and lean on a few simple custom models to get you most of the way to where you want to go, lay out the trees and fauna nicely and adjust their heights to make sure that the model edges aren't exposed, and add a few carefully planned weather effects (and FOG EFFECTS) to really make the map look nice. (I can't see them omitting fog in SC2--it was so useful for giving more realism to maps in WC3.) Once the terrain is down, you start with the trigger code and build up quests one by one, play-testing as you go. Best to build up quests and play-test several things at once, because otherwise you waste a lot of time loading the map and running around to the point you want to test. The dialogue gets added as the quests do, and so do the cinematics. Cinematic scripting and testing goes hand-in-hand with other trigger work, and also with the choice of music--you can select camera changes to coincide with movements in the music if you've really got things down pat.

Whew! Got all that?

 

Well I can tell you that if you need an elbow greaser fix-it-all code reader who can work out kinks in any system, you've found him.

I can unwittingly look at any programming language and sometimes it suddenly works. Or I insert one fixed tag and the entire thing clicks. It's happened before.

Even if I can't immediately solve the problem, I'm very consistent at shutting all systems down until the working ones are separated and then building back from there.

I'm excellent at working on other peoples' coding because I can literally SEE it work in my head before I work on it. But other than that I'm just decent.

This sounds like an exciting project, but my only condition is that you lay out your storyline somehow for me so that we can come to an agreement and some possible compromises. I want the storyline to be something that I'm excited about as well, not just you.

 

Agreed. This will be a good exercise for me as well, seeing as I tend to push hard in the directions I like, but I will write out a story and send it to you in chunks via PM (perhaps you could send me back a portion of those 800 minerals, now that I am seriously collecting them again ;D ).

I'll post the opening cinematic sequence in another thread, to help you get an idea of where I'd like to go with this. For reference, this will be a cinematic as could be accomplished in WC3 using the editing tools I know about, so it's almost certain to be easily doable (technically, though again it may take a bit of model editing and some careful timing) in SC2.

 

Just send it to my e-mail. PM me for it.

 

What is the maximum string limit for starcraft II mapping?

Unlike starcraft is it possible that we can we mix tilesets together in the starcraft II mapping?

Will the trigger setup for starcraft II be anything like starcraft editors and is it much more user friendly then starcraft / warcraft III editor?

Will we be able to give units new abilities or some other unit abilities within the editor?



I dunno.. all I can kinda think of..

 

I think I can answer a lot of these questions right now:

Certainly, it will be possible. However, it will take a re-hash within the new editor. SC2 is using different tile layouts (note the difference between diamond and square grid designs for the terrain). So, I think you're out of luck if you want to directly convert one file type into another, but the new editor will certainly be able to make anything the old one could.

Yes, Blizzard has said that they want to include more of the underlying trigger code in the editor for modders to utilize, even more so than was available with WC3.

Yes, there is this new jungle world, not Aiur, in addition it seems to most or all of the original tilesets. So far, we've only seen space platform and jungle world terrain, though. I would expect, as was the case in WC3, a lot of borrowing between certain tilesets, as well as some models that are merely re-textured, but it seems that Blizzard has really gone all out with the 3D doodads and terrain in this game.

An excellent question, because in WC3 it was technically 256 characters, but they took up like 205 of those characters, so people who tried to make multimaps (like myself) were baffled at why their games kept crashing on map transitions. Just remember, though, there's a lot of files you can specify with even 49 characters! This question is one for the list!

I would expect this, but cannot confirm it, based on the functionality in the WC3 editor. If it's not explicitly built in, you'd probably find success just taking an MPQ extractor, finding the relevant terrain textures, and importing the files in a custom map (I used both techniques to make some of my WC3 maps). But, this is a good question

Blizzard says they're going to make it more user-friendly, but in many aspects the WC3 editor was very user-friendly. I think the trigger coding section in WC3 really lacked a more extensive text editor and manual on the operations of each of the trigger functions, but Blizzard is now saying that they intend to allow users to see even more of the underlying trigger code, which to me says that they're going to have more depthy explanations and make the guts of the code more visible.

I bet you dollars to donuts yes. This needs to be put directly to Blizzard, though, with specifics like "will we be able to make custom doodads as well?"

Another question that I'd like to see:

Will there be a distinction between doodads (permanent) and destructibles as there was in WC3?

 

Here's another one:

Can we use multiple fade filters on top of one another? Or, is there a way to display an image at a fixed location in front of the camera? (See my Reply #5 in http://www.starcraft2forum.org/forums/index.php?topic=3926.0).

This should be dirt simple to do, and it would really make possible a ton of visual effects like the "Missile Cam" or upcoming "Zerg Sight" I have planned. Animating those effects is what would really be helped--because if the images can be nroken down in component pieces with transparency and then overlaid, they could be imported into the map much more easily.