Aside from dealing with the taller units, I haven't really had that issue myself.

Never had that problem. What screen size/res are you playing on?

The level of control with GalaxyEdit goes far beyond any "map editor" and is essentially an SDK.

Clicking single units is harder in SC2, it's just annoying and I don't know why. The select latency also makes me accidentally re-click something I've already selected which is extremely annoying, especially with workers. 3D overlapping makes some stuff hidden from clicks too, and I'm not fond of manipulating the camera.
They didn't ignore it, they thought they could improve on a 12 year old system. It turns out they can, it just took them some feedback from the community. If they had started with the SC1 system it would have been impossible to make the jump to where we are now.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 25 2011, 7:58 pm by NudeRaider. Reason: more factualy discussion please

GE is comparable to an SDK? UDK is an actual game design tool, infinitely beyond GalaxyEdit in every single possible manner. The material editor alone likely has more power than Blizzard can use through hardcoded bullshit, seeing as Sc2 doesn't even use normal maps properly much less compete with Unreal 2 technology.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 25 2011, 7:55 pm by NudeRaider. Reason: more factualy discussion please

But the replays will contain what each player selected with the server side selection which makes it acceptable. Btw, I've never noticed a delay with that. :S

@3D overlapping
SC1 hadn't these tall units. Blizzard could resize every unit to make it "work" for you, but that would make these units ugly or unbelievable (tiny colossus is targetable by corrupters)...

Pretty much exactly what I thought upon seeing what he said. I can't help but wonder that when they announced the game, they coded the engine and editor and left it mostly the same till now, only adding functionality when needed. Look, galaxy edit may be more advanced than worldedit, but it's lightyears behind any modern SDK and game engine I could choose to mention.

Just gonna jump on the bandwagon here. Sorry FaZ-... you can't use GalaxyEdit and SDK in the same sentence. Sure, it's a powerful editor, but it is entirely constrained by the hard-code of Starcraft 2. Sure, at BlizzCon and everything else they applauded the Editor because you can now make First Person Shooters... You can't really, all you do is manipulate the camera object and give alternate controls for one unit.

It is a step in the right direction. The data editor alone is probably the strongest element of the map editor, actors, units, items, classes, weapons, effects, movers, missiles, terrain texture sets etc... Never before could you customize so many aspects of any Blizzard product. Their only fault is the lack of documentation - but c'mon guise, you can't expect them to release a powerful, fully functional map editor AND create pages and pages of documentation for every aspect within it?

I gotta agree with Mesk though, they have made some pretty godawful design choices... and the biggest kick in the teeth to map developers is the sheer hollow and dark abyss you have to walk through to try and get a custom model in the Starcraft 2 engine - looking good, and working. There are just so many limitations on the sc2bitmap filetype and material type (within 3D Studio Max) that it becomes a headache just thinking about it.

So, there are two brands of haters - those who can't learn how to use the data editor, and those who are frustrated with the actual development of the game (how the engine works).

No denying that Melee is fucking brilliant though.

[rant]Fucking hate Terran V Zerg matchups... how am I meant to win? He just masses banelings and mutalisks and even if I hold off the Mutalisks he steam rolls me with his banelings - I'll watch the replay and turns out he has 5 bases. I can barely leave my front door for fear of green balls of GAY rolling onto my army. Any attempts to medivac drop him or harass him with vikings are completely shut down because he has overlords all over the place and his mutalisks are fucking IMBA.[/rant]

Maybe I should just stop playing random xD

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 25 2011, 10:25 pm by Cardinal.

I wish they'd change the settings so that Camera changes don't lag....

Sc2's engine doesn't cull properly or handle rendering well enough for a real FPS/TPS map anyways.

It figures....

*sigh*
No matter how much I hate the editor and how much I loathe not being able to make an FPS map myself..
I'd at least like to PLAY maps such as those... X.x

Wow.. got double ninja'd. Edit: while editing my post. Edit: raar triple... tri tri tricycle.

The brilliance of putting actual effort into developing an editor, or providing the developer's tools, is two-fold.

- First off, if you have developers who are experienced in web design or GUI design in any nature, chances are they'll be able to arrange things in a coherent and organized fashion. Complexity doesn't lead to an editor being difficult to use, it leads to the overall learning process just being lengthier. If the layout of the editor's functions and capabilities is intelligently designed, you won't need to explain half of it because it will be self-explanatory. This also factors into time commitment as well. An editor that is very poorly laid out, like sc2's (a part of the fault to blame is the way the XML files interchange so much), leads to much more time wasted constantly navigating between redundant areas which should have been laid out in a more direct and easy to use fashion to begin with. So this problem, which affects the mapper regardless of their skill level, persists constantly. NWN 1's editor was very intelligently laid out save a few things. NWN 2's editor turned out like sc2's - a big, disorganized mess. Bioware, who made NWN1, was updating the game's scripts 8 years after release. Obsidian (Who made NWN2 using the NWN1 engine) quickly forced out two expansions and used extremely difficult formats (Granny 2) for the graphics. Guess which game is still dominating that area of RPG custom content? At least Blizzard seems more willing to work on basic stuff in the sc2 editor, unlike Obsidian who all but abandoned it despite putting on the typical corporate face.

- If Blizzard was developing the editor throughout the game's life, which is extremely unlikely given that it lacks access to certain XML functions still (they likely just edited raw XML or use a basic XML editor, minus terrain editing which we saw a very short video of some time pre-release), the documentation would have been partly written out for internal staff throughout its creation and lifespan. I can't see basic staff putting up with the editor as-is for constant experimentation. Layout and organization are extremely important when performing constant testing and tweaking over and over and over. It would have drove them insane. Maybe this explains the development life?

That said, video documentation is a faster and much easier way (both for the creator and the viewer) to demonstrate tools than written documents and experienced end-users can make that extremely easily. The UDK has both, with written documents getting updated every release. I don't expect Blizzard to ever provide a stable resource of information, given that custom content is the lowest priority on their time table. As it is, though, the only thing about the editor itself that massively bugs me is how poorly laid out it is. A project like Armageddon Onslaught would take a tremendous quantity of time to create just because of how slow it is to navigate between menus and find specific things to do extremely basic stuff, whereas in most games I've modded more complex tasks take very little time. Having helped BK design the layout for Datedit and used that program/its ancestors extensively for years upon years, along with the editor for Age of Wonders 2, most of Diablo 2's editors, ect. ect., that's ultimately what the difficulty of making projects comes down to.

Sc2's editor is powerful. But that's because it's a glorified XML parser, and sc2 exchanged hardcoded rails for a very loosely organized XML pipeworks. I think that much of the editor's layout is in XML files of its own, though. It's probably possible to "mod" the editor itself, last I checked (in beta) and make some of the layout a bit better.

Otherwise, it's the very poor engine performance that keeps me from doing any more than my three months worth of stress testing. Ignoring the release of their 3d max plugin is a big deal, but you can scrape by with the new version of NiN's plugin. It breaks on most of the models I've tried to export, but it's workable and supposedly supports particles now. Too bad he stopped work on it.

I am almost always extremely pessimistic and aggressive when it comes to things I don't like. There are things about sc2 I do like that I feel are huge improvements over wc3. Most notably the ability to tint doodads in properties. That's a big deal. Also, control over lighting and cameras is very easy to work with, despite that most people don't know how to make those look any good. When I was working on my TPS maps I was able to create very powerful atmospheres despite the skybox and farclip issues.

A video I recorded within the first month of said experimentation, part of a FPS test -

Notice how the FPS is less than stellar. The map is very bare, very empty. Detail is minimal. FPS only drops as you go on. When reading at mapster, suggested farclips for basic TPS cameras were around 80. I had to go down to 40-50 to have playable FPS on an i7 920/12gig ram/4870x2. I also had a smaller FOV than what comes default with TPS maps. Sc2 is not multithreaded and it does not cull properly. Occlusion culling is one of the big things that lets shooters have complex outdoor environments. It basically stops rendering stuff hidden behind other meshes, outside the camera, ect. Sc2 doesn't do this correctly. I encountered major slowdown from particles outside the farclip, and the terrain mesh especially caused very considerable slowdowns in this view. This is why all TPS maps are restricted to tiny playspaces on very small maps, and still typically perform bad. The input latency from B.net 2.0's enforced 125ms+net lag was not a concern since this project was going to be SP only, outside of b.net.

Another bug is the particles displaying against the non-existent skybox. Farclip kills the skybox. Any depth of field and particles causes the particles to display at max blur strength against the darkness. You can see this bug displaying against the water near the end, too. Again, only relevant to TPS maps, but kind of a big deal. Since the sky is always black, every map is basically always night. Another problem is the fog, which seems unchanged since wc3. The fog also does not display against the black sky. Thus, any fog color besides black looks extremely weird. Fog also does not cull stuff at max strength.

Another issue that occurs no matter the camera - dynamic lights/shadows cause incredible performance drops in sc2. They are the most graphically demanding feature of the entire game for some reason, possibly related to the game running transparent shadow calculations in campaign menus that don't even use them. (source - http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33967499&highlight=translucent ) Disabling transparent shadows yielded no performance returns on this map, though. The highest fps I could get on the test map was around 20-23 without recording. With a single computer player at an APM cap of 300 in the map my average fps drops to around 9 usually. This particular issue is cpu bottlenecking. A large game with computer players is impossible on my hardware setup. A dual core with higher clocks would no doubt get better, but still less than stellar, performance. This means that for a project like Armageddon Onslaught, who relies on CPU players, an entire overhaul of the game's computer AI would be necessary. As AMAI's programmers in wc3 told me [about wc3], such projects are extremely demanding. I think sc2's AI is, thankfully, much more softcoded than wc3.

In fact, SC2's AI is probably the best possible outcome we could have had. I think the computer AI is sc2's strongest feature for a potential campaign or TC project. If you look past the monstrous inefficiencies of their current softcode, which ofc you can change yourself, structurally it seems the most capable of any RTS I have ever seen. It is leagues ahead of supreme commander and other "moddable" RTS'. Too big of a subject to get into. The current computers suck balls but in much the same way the BW computers sucked. It's a suck you can unsuck.

AI performance demo on that map, slightly newer than the other one -


Inevitably what bothers me more than sc2 itself is the people who somehow think that sc2 is god's gift and no one makes editors like Blizzard does. That is not true, never has been true, and never will be true. I've been around town more than my mom has. I've seen games pull off custom content brilliantly, and others fail 42x worse than Blizzard. There's 69 different subjects I could fling out and bash Blizzard for ad infinitum, but the reality is they don't affect me that much. Only a few do. It just so happens those few are significant enough to rule out every project concept I had for the game. Blizzard pisses me off, but its community pisses me off more.

This, but specifically people + SC2Mapster community's general lack of criticism towards the game.
It's a good game in certain ways, but it has huge flaws.

I obviously don't go into as much detail as Mesk, because, as I found out while reading his post, he is awesome

But, I can take this from a design standpoint, which is what I'm best at.
For anyone who have never made a map, or even tried to, in WC3, they will have an EXTREMELY hard time working with this editor, as I have.

First of all, the editor itself is lagtastic. It also requires an online connection, which is very redundant. The data editor is a mess of tabs that yields no clues as to what works with what. Comparing this to Staredit, Units are units, and triggers are triggers. And in the triggers, there's actions and conditions. Everything has a sensible pattern. As one delves into Staredit, the Unit editor is made to be user-friendly, i.e., one interface covers all.

While trying to simply replicate a hydralisk unit and rename it, it was a nightmare. One had to copy the unit, the actor, abilities and behaviours and everything individually. Then, manually link these things together as one unit, and finally still manually change the unit sounds b/c of a glitch in the system (whether or not that this is fixed doesn't matter, as it is still a hassle).
Why can't there be a basic user-interface for unit creation that covers the general things that one'd need, such as the unit type (unit/hero), its stats (HP/dmg/armor/sight range/attack range/attack speed) and just copy all of the abilities and actors that it is a replicate of?

Anyway, it's not like I haven't tried to work the sc2 editor. But when I found out what a pain it is to just copy a unit and rename it.. which is probably the eziest thing to do... I instantly gave up, because I knew the rest of the journey is not worth it. But since I still wanted to map, who can I blame this internal conflict on?

Blizzard.

You only have to select the actors when you duplicate a unit. Also, the trigger editor is pretty decent. The lack of functionality in the galaxyscript tool was a bit disappointing, but there are notepad++ extensions for that now, and staredit didn't let you edit the script directly anyway.

Having only lightly worked with JASS I have no place to talk about triggers. So, gl hf with that.

The data editor is actually so straightforward. If I had the pc specs to record those tutorial videos - I would...

You create a Unit, you give it an Actor, you create a Weapon for the Unit - then you create the effects you want to weapon to trigger (Create Persistent, Launch Missile, Damage - maybe a Apply Behaviour). Done. It's that straightforward.

I do think a unit creation Wizard would be handy though. I like creating everything from scratch and it's a bit frustrating when you go to test your new weapon out and your unit won't attack because you forgot to give the unit a sight radius. Just like the most basic fields should be filled by the Wizard - eg: Name, Prefix, Suffix, HP, Shields, Energy, regen, armour, movement (all), abilities (attack, move, patrol etc), sight radius and cost. If I remember correctly, that's all you need on a new unit from scratch anyway - excluding weapons / extra abilities. Anyways, it's late and I'm ranting.

Edit: (ninja'd by isk)

The triggers in SC2 are really simple. This happens, and if this is this then do this. You just gotta fit your argument into that statement and you're done. Sure there's neat little ways to speed up map initialisation by enabling multi-threading and breaking the init actions into action definitions, calling them as functions instead of running them at map init for example. But you only really need to bother with that if you're making Diablo 1 *cough ahli*

UGH I'm going to rage

I NEED to find out who Luzzotica is as he has made a version of Temple Siege

but Guess what? W/o posting anything on the forums, and w/o any ability to PM or.. and w/o any ability to find the person's contact or add him to friends w/o his e-mail on b.net 2, I CAN'T CONTACT HIM!

Am I being ultra stupid and am missing something
or is B.net in total just totally fucked?
I'm not even angry that sm1 has beaten us to the game (i'm actually quite flattered, I never thought ppl'd go through the trouble to do it)

I don't want to rage, but fuck facebook integration, fuck e-sports, fuck friend codes, fuck the b.net forum, fuck "MVP"s, fuck it all. I CAN'T EVEN CONTACT A PERSON THROUGH B.NET 2 OR THE FORUMS.

THIS IS THE LAST STRAW, BLIZZARD. I just CANNOT even PRETEND to like this game.

IN SC1, if you want to protect your Identity, YOU JUST DON'T USE YOUR NAME AND PROBLEM IS SOLVED. NO ONE WOULD KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND EVEN IF THEY DO, YOU JUST SQUELCH THEM
WHY THE FUCKING HELL DO THEY GOTTA MAKE IT SO FUCKING COMPLICATED?!??! IT MAKES NO SENSE!

I think the reason they got Temple Siege finished was because instead of bitching about Activision-Blizzard 24/7, they actually opened the map editor and got shit done.

wrong.. it's almost purely trigger editing... i.e. no data editing...

I'm pretty sure most of my bitching was b/c of the data editor... but the main point is that, in order to get TS up to the current standards, we'd need to use the data editor.

so.. are you going to learn how to use it?