Observations about the long video

In the long video I saw that the dead bodies or bits of spacehips, missiles that had fallen out of the sky etc... disapeared verry quickly. I think it would be really good if they hung about for the remainder of the game to be interactive.

Also the strider like creatures remided me of sodaplay. I love the way the physics make realistic looking collisions between creatures of diffrent shapes but thought that the striders lazering the zerg units ought to have been hitting the zelots more and it also seemed as if the striders legs may have been intersecting the zelots several times.

Could the DX10 fetures that they are thinking of adding be per pixel soft lighting. There could be dark areas of maps that where unplayable unless lit. Protos would have some advantege (or disadvantege if you are trying to be stealthy) here as they have lots of glowing bits on themselves.

Please also don't demote the change in land height too much by making to meany creatures that can jump or stride over it and be carefull about allowing protoss to spawn units anyware.

It would be great if there would be diffrent game types so you could play with (for example) only clasic SC units or only ground units (I can't see myself using this much but Im shure there are others who would).

Im hoping all the other great units that are not in the video I remember using will be inscluded. Like (Well I could go on for ages im shure you remember them all)

I loved use map settings in SC\Broodwar and wonder how this will work. Presumably all the unusal stuff will be in there allowing for brood and defence maps etc... I wonder if any of the hax type stuff will still be possible. While I liked being able to stack stuff and do the various tricks would be fun the "crash SC" maps are not and got really annoying.

Also rather more importantly I need to bring up something of great importance. At the moment there is no log on for map creators, so you get rip off maps and v2 then v2-Gold then v2-Gold-Fixed then v2.5 then somone else makes v3 thats not as good as v2.5 etc...

 

Response to RED statement.

The dead bodies disappeared in a matter of seconds as you say. There are many possible reasons for this, one (and I think very important reason) is that the more things going on in the game the more chance that lag is to occur. If a whole game were to take place including 8 people then this could amount to 1000s or conceivably 10s of 1000s of dead units. This could dramatically slow down a lot of PCs to a crawl and this is not something that Blizzard would want to do as it would affect many of their buyers. Another would be to stop annoyances with placement of buildings, units etc because you can't see the ground that you want to interact with. I think the only way to avoid these problems is to have the feature that is already in place (removal of dead units after a set time period) or make a maximum dead unit amount in which there is a limit to the number of dead units and the oldest dead unit is then replaced by the new one. This is in place in other games but mostly action games as far as I know.

Response to GREEN statement.

Valid point. I don't know what the attack type the units have at this point. Balancing is apparently not complete and in the demo they said the things they were showing were not final. That said it may be that the Collosus will have splash damage that affects own units as well. I don't think this is likely as it seems to me to be a support unit rather than a frontline fighter. One thing I did notice about its attack myself was that it sometimes took a long time to disengage its laser. I didn't notice these collisions at all between the legs or the lasers but may I ask where you saw the demo? Downloaded file or maybe YouTube?

Response to Purple statement.

This is an area I'm wondering about as well. What we have seen is mainly the protoss units. But SC2 seems to have a lot of mobility aspects not featured in Brood War. Collosus/Stalkers/Phase Prisms (x2 reasons)/warp in all potentially avoid cliffs. The phase prisms can carry units (wish I knew how many the max is) and can also lay down to "powerup" any structures or be set down to use as a temporary warp in base. This is seemingly a very versatile unit and one that I would expect to be seen used a lot. However besides the phase prisms the only unit of the protoss that can walk over cliffs to my knowledge is the Collosus. The zerg have only shown 3 units. or is it 2 units + 1 structure? The structure seems to be versatile in transporting zerg forces around the place but may very well have restrictions, who knows. The Terran only have the reapers who can jump cliffs. These were mentioned in the demo as being effective base raiders, but they are not particularly strong units as far as I can see. It will be interesting to see what blizzard changes and what they keep the same but potentially I think this mobility could be a good thing as long as it doesn't just cause mass chaos.

Response to TEAL statement.

I would think that fans could make lookalike units for SC2 but not have it actually included in the actual main game.

Response to DARK RED/BROWN statement.

I personally don't like this idea, the units from Brood War were good, teams were well balanced but this is a different game. Certainly some units should stay, zerglings and zealots being 2 examples but a lot of the classic units should be scrapped I think.

Response to GREY statement.

I loved the UMS maps also. A map editor will hopefully be released with SC2. I expect that it will be better than StarEdit that was released with the original. The warcraft III editors were much more advanced than the one that was released with SC and even the home-made map editors like StarForge and SCXE probably don't match it. I'm 99% certain they will release a much greater map editor. In WarIII some fans made a StarCraft movie which involved many of the sounds and the lookalike units from starcraft. Not sure if this was payable. I would imagine "Crash Maps" would be harder to make but unlikely to be fullproof on release. People always find flaws and things to exploit in games/programs. I would definitely think that maps in SC2 have more potential than BW.

Response to BLACK statement.

"Log on"?
This version thing is preventable.
With programs like StarForge you can "Protect" your map so noone can edit it, even from your computer. In other words don't think that you can protect it and then modify it later cause you can't. You should have it finished and then protect it.

Not sure what the DX10 paragraph was about.. Thinking is was more or less Fog of War but on previously unlooked at terrain but not sure.

 

What I ment by the teel statment is that in diffrent "game types" cirtain units like "new units to SC2" or "Air Units" could be prevented from being alloud to be in play. This can be done in UMS anyway but I thought it could be usefull for online play. (Like you get Top vs Bottem and stuff like that at the moment that hardly anyone uses and can be done in UMS but is still a built in option)

I thought that the collisions with the striders ought to have been hapening but I saw a low resolution version. It's not good if the strider delibratly misses all the time. All spash damege should effect both you and the enemy and it looks like a clumsy unit.

The DX10 stuff was about if lighting was more realisitic then areas of the map may need to be lit by units emmiting light to make them playable (not specal light units just units that emit light anyway, like the protoss have glowing pads on them).

 

I am sure Blizzard will include plenty of interesting game types.

The "strider" (Colossus) does not seem to intentionally miss. Throughout its appearances on the video, its beams were always tracking something. Sometimes the beams were slower than the target, but that was it.

You also mentioned that the legs intersected with the Zealots as well: the game engine is not quite perfect, and they may never actually build it to the point that it avoids intersecting with smaller units as it moves: it doesn't place its legs on them when it stops, and that should be good enough for most intents.

About it's splash, or lack thereof: not all units will deal splash damage, and not all units that deal splash damage will deal friendly splash damage. In the original StarCraft, the only units that dealt friendly splash were Siege Tanks and Nukes. I doubt many units will be added to that list in StarCraft II.

With the lighting, I think the general assumption is that there is always some sort of light source, like a star overhead. The "Fog of War" does not represent "blackness" or "unlit areas," it represents unexplored areas and areas your units cannot currently see. All units that can see can therefore "dispel the fog" as they move into it. You did notice that many units now have their own lighting: this exists only for effect. Just like the falling debris, it does not actually interact with units or change gameplay in any way. If it did, it would add a degree of randomness that Blizzard does not want in it's game, as it is being tuned to be playable by professional players.

Please remember, as cool as it is, it is a game, not a simulation. Games follow game rules, built to make things fun, realism is just something thrown on top to make it more immersive.

 

i dont think blizzard will have any special features for directx10 becuase almost no1 is upgrading to vista so it would be a waste of development time, also becuase they are developing for the mac they would need to add all the dx10 features. Also there isnt really any graphics that can be done in dx10 that cant be done in dx9 with effort (lighting effects dont count)

 

adding a whole new dynamic environment to the game would be fine as long as it doesn't affect the game's overal performance in terms of playability, too much graphics requirement will mean that lesser systems will run the game.

The idea of including map modes/game types sounds good though its been done before in other past RTS games, anyway it should add to SC2's gameplay excitement

 

In order to balance it out i think that there should be some cliff that are too tall to jump over (reapers) or walk over (colosi).

 

I was thinking of a game fix where the terrans would have an advantage over the protoss, if you watched the videos, all that is there are protoss pwning the terrans. not quite a good sight for most terran players