Maplantis was an offshoot that was started by SEN's founder, and was really heavily interested in SC1 modding.

We just had tons of sites crop up and then die off. No one was ever really interested in modding... had quite a few attempts at campaigns, almost all of them miserable failures.

No matter what you end up doing in life, you're always going to get shit thrown at you. Unless you work fucking hard, get extremely lucky and one day you'll be the one at the top throwing the shit.

If you have aspirations and no motivation then you're doing it wrong. Your motivation should lead you on to achieving your aspirations.
[/philosophical rant]

Starcraft 1 is over a decade old. Excuse my sort of lack of nostalgia for it, but to me, making a map for SC1 is like releasing new albums on cassette tape. I don't know anything about the SC1 map making community, except that the editor is limited and despite the hundred and one workarounds that have been created, you're still extremely limited.

I hope - for your sake - that you'd give the Galaxy Editor another chance.

And as for your earlier remark about my unfinished projects - yea, I have unfinished projects. I also have a lot going on in RL . The point is, if you want something done - do it yourself. There's no sense waiting around for other people to complete it for you, and I mean that specifically for your TS-2 project.

Custom content is not a hobby. It's a devotion.

Amen to that.

Sure back in the days of SC1 creating a map was a relatively simple affair. Golem Wars (probably the most popular map when I was playing SC1) was just 5 bunkers, beacons to choose your unit and a triggered combo-hero system. All units had custom stats, everything else was triggers.

If you want to recreate this simple map in Starcraft 2 - you need to put more effort into it because there is a lot more customisation you can do. You could just copy the units and weapons and alter the damage effects and the stats. Or you could create each unit individually, with a new custom weapon, change the effects, add upgrades etc.. There is simply so much stuff you can do that you could never do in StarEdit / WorldEdit.

What annoys me the most though, is how people percieve this as bad. Instead of putting the extra effort in to learn a superior tool, they whine that Blizzard made it unnecessarily complicated and designed it bad. If that's your attitude towards custom content/modding/mapping, then god help you if you ever attempt to use 3D Studio Max or UDK or Unity etc...

I don't 100% agree with either of you...

If custom content was not a hobby, I would've never gotten into it so much so that I'd devote myself to it later on.
Or in other words, custom maps should be a hobby for some, allowing people who just wants to make an entertaining map to do so without going through the horrible design of the Galaxy editor, while it should also be devotion for others, allowing them to really dig deep and customize everything they want for their great map(s).

The idea that putting extra effort in learning a superior tool makes sense. And I'd agree that Galaxy editor is superior (duh...). I'd also agree that my attitude (as well as the attitudes of a handful of people on SEN) aren't the greatest.
But I don't agree that the editor is not designed poorly.

Seriously, it is designed very poorly. Instead of focusing on what's wrong with the editor, because that would take me days to type it all out, and Mesk probably knows more than me, I can tell you what could've been made way better.

First of all, the Data editor for the Units and Abilities should contain a UI separate from the rest of the data editor. These are two major things that newbie mappers will worry about. These UI should cover copying units and abilities into a unit in one window, or in a well designed, tabular window, where it is sufficient enough to mess around with units and abilities without going through actors, models, effects, behaviours, etc. etc. etc.
It's about getting comfortable with the whole thing. You don't start playing a game where you have to start using every ability in order to survive... And neither do good programs require you to use every function for simple things. Like Photoshop, there're tons of options and stuffs to mess around with, but the Wizard's always there for newbies.

All in all, I can say that, on behalf of newbie sc2 mappers everywhere (who have not touched wc3), we do not want to bake our brains just trying to copy the heat seeker ability onto our goliaths.
This is NOT Good design.
And sure, as any "Pros" would say - "Well Brah, that shit is EASY, you just gotta do this and that"... Where have we heard this before?
pretty much in every game...
except it is usually the games which are easy to pick up but hard to master that're popular.

And in the end, it won't help you as a mapper either. Just think of all the missed opportunity that mappers had who were turned away by the faulty editor. Think of all the maps and knowledge that could've accumulated if the Editor user-friendly. I'm sure that tons of people stopped mapping just b/c of the poorly designed editor. And I didn't even Start on the horrible Battle.net 2 Custom map System, which only serves to further drive away future map makers.

Let me tell you now that SC1 was very different. The editor was simple and user-friendly. The triggers hugely limiting, but guess what? People found ways to work around it through their ingenious and creativity. Everything from Massing games to Doodad States to Hyper Triggers to Bounds, they were all developed within the limitations of the SC1 editor. The SC1 UMS community didn't need customizability to grow. All they needed were a well designed editor, and a well designed battle.net to share and test their maps.

Overtly defending SC2 is just as useless as Attacking SC2.
I'm trying to work the editor as well, but I treat this as a hobby and that's it.
Initially, I drew the line when I couldn't copy and create a unit, which was probably the biggest "new thing" for us sc1 mappers, since we had to make use of whatever units were available to us in SC1.
Now, I've tried harder, and the line has still yet been crossed (tho I think I'm about to break it.. but i'm taking it real slow)
Overall, I can tell you that the experience is not a good one.
Sure, there were some rage periods in SC1 mapping, but never to an extent in which I blame the editor. And maybe that's the biggest difference.

I can form arguments like that too. Watch.

Sc1 mapping is grossly inferior to sc2 because in sc1, ANYONE, with about a week or two's time of learning, can figure out how to use it! Just think about what kind of shit maps would be propogated from a system like that. Almost all of them would be worthless "Every 5 seconds unit spawns here" massers. All of the systems in it are innately flawed. Take for example the "Waits" thing. Someone had to do random shit by chance like "Hyper triggers", which don't even make any sense, to figure out how to have a suitable workaround for the broken system. Even today, in korea, they still use shit work-arounds like building burning. There are even unexplainable breaks in games. Sometimes, due to a lesser-known error, games' triggers will randomly STOP working. I'm not making this up. You could have a trigger that was working for forever, and then it'll just stop working.

Let me summarize your entire argument for youGj

If you think about it, you weren't even able to do anything with sc1 mapping at all awhile ago. Fact of the matter is, the only thing that let you be able to do anything clever (apart from basic functions and hyper triggers) was SCMDraft and other mappers. Staredit has so many obnoxious menus.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 3 2011, 7:11 pm by DevliN. Reason: Flaming

Well, you should agree with us because I think (at least Iskatu) speaks from experience, and I back his view 110%.

Custom content was a hobby. It was game developers giving us an extra tool or toy to play with. The key word here is was, as in, past tense. I've had this argument/discussion with you 101 times. To summarise it yet again: the more advanced the software/the engine/the graphics/the environment/the project - then the more advanced the tools are going to be. This advancement leads naturally to exponential and drastic changes in the learning curve of that associated tool or program. Compare Microsoft Paint to Photoshop - which is pretty much what you are doing with StarEdit and GalaxyEdit.

Those "tons of people" were hobbyists and if they didn't have the perseverance to stick with the editor for at least 2 patches - then god help their (future, if ever) commitment to creating a real project or map.

Not really, Melee is fucking awesome, the models and graphics (with a few minor slip-ups Mesk can fill you out on) look pretty good, tournaments are being televised and E-Sports is actually existing thanks to this game. We have been given a powerful standalone editor which people cannot seem to get to grips with - and that to me, is the only flaw Blizzard have in SC2 - which is the people who bought the game and wanted instant gratification and simplified map making.

Quote from UnholyUrine

I'm trying to work the editor as well, but I treat this as a hobby and that's it.

I play the guitar as a hobby, I don't look at some Bach sheet music and think Bach was a total fucking cunt, I practice until my hand gets cramp but I ultimately learn how to play that piece. Why? Because I enjoy it. The same reason I've battled and had the same ups and downs you are having with the same editor. But I enjoy learning how to create objects and how this powerful editor combines modular functionality and customization.


Fire me a PM. What is you're specifically struggling with? I have seen that you are trying and it is applaudable. I'll honestly help you through the data editor if you're willing to read lengthy PMs which explain why and how the pieces of the puzzle fit together in the way that they do.


And on the final bombshell - can we end this modding debate? Since this is technically a thread in the SC2 Melee Strategy section and no-one has told me how to fucking deal with banelings yet.

EDIT: @Tikels

Wow man...
I like how you constantly attack me and derogate me

Not really sure why, because attacking me won't help anyone who currently dislike sc2 change their feelings.

Tho you did bring up a good point tho. Wait triggers were really annoying and Hyper triggers required mappers to put in extra work to work around this.
But there is a difference between Wait Triggers and "going through more menus". Waits were never intended to be used to an extent such as we did. Moreover, it isn't part of the way that the editor is structured, nor is it the first thing newbies need to learn to work around when they start messing with the editor.

Going thru the Units/Effects/Behaviours/etc etc. stuff has been unecessarily put as part of the first thing that newbies come across (Assuming that most newbies would want to mess with units/abilities first). In that sense, it is much harder for us to get used to working with the Galaxy editor.

Staredit DID have a lot of menus, which was why Starforge was great for ppl like me to speed thru trigger editing by typing stuff half-way through. It'd've been even better if Staredit had customizability to the extent that the current Data Editor has... like we can click a Unit and change scripted values such as range and speed and what not. But I definately wouldn't give up the Menus, as they were pretty important in the process of learning the editor.

hmm I herd the trigger editor in sc2 is more straightforward.. maybe i should do that instead.

anyway, not sure why you're so over-zealous about this.

---

*looks at topic
Oh shit it IS in melee
I've been way way off-topic

Agreed.. melee is fine...
EDIT2: except for the campaign. At best it is mediocre

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 3 2011, 7:13 pm by DevliN. Reason: Removed minor flame, as I removed his.

The one thing mapster has over other mappibg communities if similar size is instead of whining about the editor, most of them got down to working it out. Some of them even tried making a new editor which failed a bit.

Wc3 would not have prepared you in any way for sc2. Instead it would have made you build up expectations that would have been consequently crushed in sc2. Familiarity with wc3 is probably a death sentence to your ability to enjoy GalaxyEdit.

Don't worry about it. Tikels just likes to act superior and insult ACTUAL mappers, seeing as how he's never made a map in his life.

My only complain would be that Protoss os OP against Zerg, and ZvZ being boring as all mirrors, there's only oen matchup out of three that I enjoy playing. I'm not playing melee anymore unless FF and Colossus are nerfed.