ABOUT THE PROJECT:
The project very much obviously hasn't been planned out, the idea is that everyone can contribute with ideas, images, graphics, theories and whatever they want to help out with and we'll slowly put this together bit by bit.

The project is aimed to be a community project, everyone can ship in and play a part in the project and, while we all know how terribly good [/sarcasm] community projects turn out to be, there’s many reasons why this shouldn’t stop us from at least trying.

WHY NOW:
There's been a few developments within the modding community right now. Firstly, There's newcomers and oldcomers already giving a new "vibe" to the modding community, getting of of their vacations I dare say. So there's a few projects going on and a few people working on random stuff that makes SC Modding seem like it's reviving a little bit, hopefully that will get things kick started.

Secondly, Farty's dat extender. Up until recently we wouldn't have been able to properly add new units, we would have been lucky if we could have done 5 to 8 completely new units without starting to replace or cannibalize other real actual units. This new technology and this new modding revolution will most likely make this possible.


HOW:
I'm glad you asked. The project will most likely not be made any time soon. I dare say it'll take months, just on research alone, let alone the graphics-making and new unit design and implementation. So yeah, it's not going to be a short project and that works godly because that way no one will be pushed with extreme deadlines. We all know how busy we can be.


WHEN:
RIGHT NOW.

We will start by slowly organizing ourselves and see who wants to help and with what. Right now the best we can do is "post all we know" in this topic about the previous version, plus whatever ideas that come to our mind. So yeah, let's brainstorm for a little while and then we'll put together this baby and start developping it. Fuck yeah.

WHO:
ME.

And everyone else who wants to help. I will be self appointing myself as project leader, ruler and ultimate oppresive dictator and supreme lord of the mod, until someone younger, more attractive and richer takes over.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 9 2016, 4:11 am by Corbo.

[SPACE RESERVED FOR THE FUTURE]

[EVEN MORE SPACE RESERVED]

Here are my thoughts on what I'd wish to see in this mod.

I was writing a whole different initial first topic until I realized I was putting MY ideas on it. Which is something that I want but would not be the best if it's a community project so, here are my ideas:

* Keep the races. But rather make them advance "through time", if you've played Age of Empires I am thinking something similar to that. In the case of the Terrans the "race advancing" could take form of some sort of technology research. Alpha units being Age I, then late pre-beta along with more upgrades and Age II being beta units and finishing up with Age III with the units being vanilla SC / Broodwar. In the case of zergs, they could just "evolve" by finding some weird primal essence or something. In the case of Protoss they'd be like just become more enlightened or something The poing is each race having different "advancement" reasons.

* Advancing through ages should either force you to make the more recently added units only OR keep them all in sub trees, so you could build Age I units while having Age III researched. This last poses a huge balancing task so every unit can have different traits and still be useful later in the game. For simplicity's sake, I like the first one. Why would any race keep making untis from an "old age" anyway?

* While it would be cool to form a just alpha tech tree and just beta tech tree we need to get real. We'd be lucky to find a full tech tree cohesive enough when combined both alpha and beta, so let's get real and include basic units in all ages, for example, why would a marine ONLY come on age II or age III? Marine is the most basic unit so it should be in all of them and things like that, that are obviously basic from the very beggining of a race, should always be included in the tech tree.

*Rubs hands together* Oooohh boy, this is gunna be good!

Alright, Beatmeistro's here to lend a hand!

Okay. Post everything you have on the beta/alpha so I can start organizing the info

Although this thread seems to be sorta dead, here's my 250k cents.
1. We do, fortunately, have the raider, gunship, and cargo ship sprites from the beta still in the SEN archives. Furthermore, Starcraft's imagess ought to, at the very least, have the starbase GRP file from the beta. For anything more, you'd need someone who can make really good GRP's. Which is part of the issue here.

2. Farty's dat extender, unfortunately, cannot do what you want in terms of units. Although it can add new units, they cannot be named, given wireframes, or basically anything else that a unit needs external to DatEdit. Essentially, the only thing for which you could use it would be spell effect units or (possibly) turrets. Fortunately, it does have fully functional sprites, images, and flingy modifications available, so you can add as many new graphics as you want. Furthermore, there are at least 25 hero and unused units that are not used in any campaign or the normal game, 2 unused building entries for each race and the independent buildings.

3. Preventing you from making earlier units could be problematic, since FireGraft doesn't have much in the way of 'not having X researched'. You'd have to make custom plugins for it, although it would, as you said, make more sense. As I understand it, also, many units from current StarCraft aren't in the alpha and beta, significantly reducing the amount of space the newbies would require.

4. If you really do want to make this mod, here's what I'd suggest:
Age 1. Alpha and beta units. Weaker, clumsier, and whatnot.
Age 2. Current StarCraft units. Shouldn't be too hard.
Age 3. Advanced StarCraft units. You can do all kinds of things here, like fancier new weapons and units, or possibly the more "shiny" (i.e. cartoony) units from SC2. If you want to scour SC Revolutions, you could get a decent diamondback texture and the custom valkyrie, along with sprites for zerg and protoss from SC2, and we have a few on SEN too.

That's more just because it is incomplete. I dunno where to put the new names since adding them to stat_txt will sort of fuck up every other string ever. Also they should be able to have wireframes (I think in my test EXE I just reused wireframes instead of adding more).

Why is anyone posting here suddenly? This topic was just to give me some minerals?

But what you didn't realize is that it's actually not a terrible idea.

Its a brilliant idea. But it is no where near being a one man show which is what it seemed to be at time.