Ok, I try to look up how to do this simple pre-map initialization protocol: the mission debriefing, but no one made a tutorial for that specific purpose. This irks me because, SC1's Campaign editor would let you do that without all the varibles, constants, and other mumbo jumbo that I don't have time for! Could someone give me the element layout for this, or something? I will accept any piece of help leading to a successful build.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 2 2012, 5:35 pm by ArchMcShane. Reason: I might have to wait until HotS for this

There is no implementation for that in sc2 like in SCBW.
However, you can create that with triggers.

- You need dialogs to have a window to display text and buttons.
- You need portraits to display pictures of talking units. Sadly there is no easy way to make portraits play talk animations like in SCBW. It's rather limited in sc2 at the moment.

At map start:
1. Do actions which will make the game like not running because we can't pause the game during runtime (-> hide units). Maybe you don't even have to do anything in your map.
2. Create a dialog, place the text label on it, save everything in variables. Don't forget to show the dialog to the players because dialogs are hidden by default.
3. Create the portraits, save in variables.
4. Do the actions you need to do like setting text, text time and swap portrait's model, play sound and don't forget the waits.
5. remove everything

If any button has been clicked:
1. check if the used button was your briefing quit button and do the actions.

This would be what you would need for a briefing like in SCBW.
But you can pretty much do everything you want.

Ok, I got a working button to "Commence Operation", unhide the enemy units, add resources, etc. Still no luck displaying text in a dialog box. What am I doing wrong? I guess I'll have to wait until Heart of the Swarm comes out to build the briefing room.

http://www.staredit.net/topic/13304/

This project might help you understand the basics.

A dialog is like an area where you can draw on. It's like a board or piece of paper.
Then you can create some dialog items on it like text labels. These need some space to display their text, so you increase their size and save them in global variables, if you need to change their properties like their text later on.
With "Set dialog item's text" (or something like this), you can edit the displayed text and you can also change the time it takes to write the whole text, if you enabled that feature for that text label.

Ok, two triggers coincide with each other. First is "Get Debriefing" Which is mainly dialog, hiding enemy units, and pausing total mission time.


Next, you have "Begin Mission which kind of unpauses, and shows the elements mentioned above.


You may call some of this cheating, but another problem is making the Zerg forces (Jargon Brood) less dificult in terms of AI. I might have to post another topic, since AI falls into a different trigger category. As for this problem, I'll consider it [PLAUSIBLE], since there will be no support for mission briefings until, hopefully, Heart of the Swarm.

So what's the current problem regarding the dialog?

If want to have bigger conversations, I would write all of the actions and waits into their own trigger which has NO event. Then you run that trigger after creating the "briefing room" (= dialog, portraits, etc) [Trigger can start other triggers].
The benefit with that is when you click the skip button, you can remove all running instances of that trigger which would cancel the briefing talk without throwing errors or without the need of adding a check after each wait.
That trigger just would contain the actions like: show model in portrait, set text, set text time, play sound, save sound in global variable, wait, set text, set text time, play sound, save sound in the same variable, wait, ...., wait, run the button clicked trigger without checking its conditions to destroy the briefing stuff and start the game.

edit:
Oh, I don't think that Blizzard will add briefing stuff. They used a map for the story mode in the campaign, too. So, basically, we can do everything already except of the Blizzard-only actions.