DEBATE TIEM!

Yeah, compared to a lot of other things it is. The part that bugs me is they add both static and dynamic players to the list like there's no difference. Players such as Foes has to get the list of players not allied to the current, Neutral players gets a list by preset player status, Current Player has to... well you get it. This implies they could have generalized this layer in some way.
But it fails at being flexible. And it didn't need to be. High ground -> Dirt -> Water, anyone?

Once you start editing tiles to get around that, you're basically finished using ISOM (sans some cut and paste fun). It's going to look ugly unless you know what you're doing, and you aren't even supposed to be doing it, at that (by Blizzard policy, at least).
I guess that implies the nature of the whole expansion pack thing separating content like that. Meh. I won't argue about business strategies. I just dislike aspects that introduce unnecessary complexity.

At least Staredit wasn't bad at keeping the two apart.

So... how many times has SC been ported? How many patches has Blizzard released during its lifetime? What are the patches dated to?

And during all that time, they couldn't have thought a few simple technological issues (windowed mode, 8 bit color, etc.) were too much of a hassle to improve upon? Alright, granted, they still needed to keep it in the old system specs I guess. But even in 1998, we were starting to get past 8 bit color and stuff like that. Meh.



Anyway, if they can later go and add stuff like replays to the game, it doesn't sound to me like they couldn't have at least done something from the above list...

Keep in mind I wouldn't be making this list at all (or maps for that matter) if I completely hated Starcraft.

Post has been edited 9 time(s), last time on Jul 13 2010, 5:04 pm by Tuxedo-Templar.

Isometrical terrain always decides to mess you over for some reason. Not everyone is a master at blending terrains, personally i really dislike how if you place square terrain over a isometrical terrain then if you want to place a isometrical tile above it, it decides to break through and leave gaps within the terrain, squares of course.

I agree with this.

The issues I have are the ones that can't be worked around, for example I wish you could assign/read/use a #ID unique to each individual unit so they could be easily kept track of for the duration of the game. 1x1 pixel locations only go so far and don't work on most units.

I also wish WAV was not the only format that could be used. Even if the only other choice was MIDI, that would still be a huge improvement.

No custom models and modification of unit variables, everything else im fine with.

You, sir, must be a man of infinite patience.

+1, tux. This post made my day - reminded me of all the things I have to deal with.

ASM at least has direct arithmetic operations (especially multiplication and division!) between registers instead of only add/subtract an immediate value.

Yes, that's correct. I wasn't specifically talking about arithmetic though; I was just just saying that starcraft's editor, just like assembly, can be tedious to use and it's best to use pre-designed functions (or higher level languages) for some tasks.

For example, if you wanted to frequently generate a random number in a map, instead of randomizing a bunch of switches every time then checking every individual case (switch 1 is set, Switch 2 is set...), you could just "call" a function through a switch or a DC that would return another DC that would be a random integer. Or, even better, you could make a small program that would write all the needed triggers needed to generate a random number upon reading a keyword like "rand" you would write in a source file.

Pretty much every repetitive, straight forward yet painfully long task (e.g. arithmetic and logical operations) can be automated through the previously mentioned methods.

Yes, yes, terraining should be something even a total noob can do. The people who've mastered it shouldn't have an advantage. :-|

And in regards to the "bug" you're mentioning (about how rectangular terrain gets screwed up by isometric brushes), that's not even the fault of the game designers or the game at all. The isometric brush isn't supposed to work with rectangular terrain because rectangular terrain wasn't thought to be possible by the game devs. They're not gonna make a feature work with something that they think can't be done.

Blizzard wants Brood War to die, its like those corporations that build lamps built to go out in a couple years, that way they can sell the consumer a new lamp, more money for them. It is the same thing here, Activision Blizzard doesn't want to improve its old product for you, it wants to sell you something new.

So they don't want anyone, not even the community, to maintain BW. I mean imagine if it was open source. We would've developed a BW language like Galaxy years ago, much of the features in SC2 would be put in BW and then community maintained versions of BW might be competitors to SC2 and that would be bad for Blizzard's profits.

But now since Blizzard has sole control of BW they are free to kill it and make people switch to the new game, but why make them switch to a new game lets make it 3 games, 3x $$$$

Finally I divide my problems with mapping into two categories:

• Performance - you can do some fairly complex things in the map editor, but anything fairly complex is too slow, takes up too much memory, and it makes your map too large. Multiplication is supposed to be fast but death counter multiplication certainly isn't.
  
• User Interface - you can't use dialogs or detect keyboard clicks so instead we have beacons and drop-ship selection systems that are limited and sometimes frustrating to use.

Allies vs Non-Allied Victory Players!

Otherwise, nice list. I agree with all of them (woah).

Oh god ya. I hate that shit.

I HATE THIS ERROR.
It is the only error that i seem to get in the development of every map i make.

What the HECK is Nooks and Crannies? I've seen it before, but it just doesn't seem to make sense.