Hello! This is my first post on these forums!

Back in 2006 I decided to make a fun remix of the base StarCraft campaign, I added new difficulty settings, optional objectives, new AI behaviors, ec't... I posted it on the now dead StarCraft.org website.

Looking back I am unsatisfied with how this turned out and want to redo it from the ground up. In 2014 I tried restarting the project in SC2 working off of the well known StarCraft Mass Recall campaign. I tried to add out-of-mission upgrades similar to the segments on the Hyperion in the SC2 campaign. I got this working but SCMR updates frequently and kept breaking my build when I tried keeping up with the latest version.

In late 2016 I came down with a near-fatal illness and have been too exhausted to play fast-paced games, but I am now on the road to recovery and able to enjoy playing StarCraft again. I decided that I want resume my project in SC1 now that SC:Remastered is out and the community is alive again, but first I want to double check if anyone else has done something similar to this project already? If so I'd love to play it first!

Welcome! There's this which redoes the missions and also adds co-op for them.

Welcome, FullMetalSnorlax!

In addition to Project: Hydra, there is also Nekron's UED AI Project. Do you happen to have a copy of your original project? I'm sure people would be interested.

That project Hydra is much higher scope than anything I had planned. I'll have to play it when I get my "new" PC up and running in the next week or so, (the patch that added the starcrafts mod made SC:R unplayable on my current toaster and I'd rather finish assembling my new machine than find my old SC install discs).

I can upload my old project, but I feel awkward doing that when I regret a lot of the design choices I made XD
The missions that turned out the best in retrospect were the ones where I decided to try goofy things or throw last minute-curveballs at the player when they think they are about to win. So I think I will try out more of that.

Download link here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AgO_9vghs2CBhbIv6mGy8xcfiJoNLw?e=1XAo2p
I don't think I even backed up My Protoss campaing, I remember I was least satisfied with it. I recommend playing Terran missions 1 & 8(trump card) to see what I mean by goofy curve-balls. I'm also somewhat proud of Zerg mission 4.

I don't really like maps that require mods now that the game is back in active development again, and mods can have version compatibility issues. However the main regret I had with my original take on this project was the compromises I made around using the existing AI scripts. It's good to see all of the work put into AI modding as of late, and I really want to get into that!

I've decided to work on this project, but I may put it on the back burner after I play through Hydra It depends on how many people show interest in my work.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 16 2020, 5:21 pm by FullMetalSnorlax.

You can use existing AI scripts somewhat creatively even w/o modding, just mix them up in a way that introduces some challenge, maybe add more players to the maps. There are at least a couple of scripts for each race that have decent attacks. Would be at least cool to see, though usually blizz maps have more issues than their scripts.

Welcome FullMetalSnorlax, and good luck for your project! As Nekron said, there are several AI scripts from the original campaigns that can be used creatively in custom maps. You only need to experiment a bit to find the ones that suit your needs, and you can also mix them with triggered attacks.

Is there any documentation on what each of the campaign AI's do exactly, or a way to read them directly? I don't look forward to researching that the hard way, and for something I'm planning I need to know the timing of the AI's attack waves so I can synchronize something with each one.

PyAI and SCAIE3 can both read aiscript .bin files and you can find both on SEN. SCAIE3 is easier to setup and sufficient for just reading

OK so I have the attack timings down. Now I just need a way to figure out what direction the AI decided to attack from.

I want a "special unit" to travel with certain attack waves. Any ideas how I could do that?


The AI system wont work with this "special unit" so I can't use AI modding. I know with Campaign AI's attack routes are intentionally random. I could simply put a location at each entrance to the players base and have a hyper trigger set to detect when an attack wave enters that location and spawn the "special unit" at that location, but that looks messy, and I don't like messy.

I need to know where the attack wave is going while it's still grouping up the units, and also knowing where the units are gathering would be nice too.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 21 2020, 7:22 am by FullMetalSnorlax.

So I'm really at an impasse with the very nature of bonus objectives. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite proud of the objectives I've come up with for the Terran campaign, but I always feel like for most players "optional objectives" are not optional at all. Players will go as far as to reload the mission immediately if they fail the optional objective, (unless a mission is particularly frustrating). Making a bonus objective is a tricky thing because you don't want them to feel mandatory lest they become a chore, but I moreso hate when a bonus objective isn't rewarding. My favorite way to combat this issue is to make the player choose between two optional objectives, (with neither always being an option), that way the player can never see a potential "perfect playthrough". Perhaps a better way to handle this is the way SC2 does it, by offering a special currency, for completing bonus objectives, and there is only so much you can buy with it so you don't need to get it all. But I can't really replicate that in SC1, heck as it is I need to make a rather big and complicated tree of maps to make bonus objectives function. So currently there is just one bonus objective per map, unless I get inspiration for new ones...


I would say the Terran campaign is currently 45% complete, but I have some family stuff going on IRL right now so don't hold your breath.
I also haven't finished building my new computer yet so I haven't tested my triggers yet...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 11 2020, 6:55 pm by FullMetalSnorlax.