All of us have our limits. My question is about Starcraft Bnet. When you're hosting a map, what is the maximum file size you're willing to host before you say "This just takes too damn long."?

I personally was wondering what the general people thought would be far too big to host regularly on Bnet. Since large file sizes are seemingly not enjoyed when hosting or trying to distribute.

Depends on how many players the map is, and how long it's gonna last, like if it's a 3 hour RPG I don't mind a 5 minute download.

Anything over 5mb is just too much.

Anymore more than 1mb is uncalled for.

Yeah but norm, you gotta cut some slack for things like the maps that are coming out now. 10,000 triggers takes up a lot of space, you know? My map currently is 1.01 MB, but only 400kb or so is music, and its about as compressed as it'll go, there's like 2 minutes worth.

I think the quality of the map is what matters. If it's a fricken awsome map, yeah I'll wait 5 minutes to DL. If its a piece of crap with 2MB of uncompressed music, thats uncalled for.

Yeah, I was going along the lines of typical maps. An elaborate RPG of course can afford to have much more packed inside of it because it's meant to be one sitting of epicness, as opposed to a game that is designed for pvp competition or high turnover rates.

My current maximum is 120 kb, because of TOO SLOW dl in SC battle net (too poor DL algorithms: I have 50 megabit upload speed when I uploading to rapidshare (62 starcraft maps per second, if map size is 100kb), but in battlenet 100 kb map uploading to most of people approximately in 1 minute, and I tested this on different pc's and internet connections).

When I made my tma map for 8 human players - I choosed "sound pack method": map size is 60 kb, but if you wanna sounds - you can DL sound pack (7 MB) by link, provided in ingame text.


My opinion is next: 150 kb is already too much and in most cases will be slow dl. So ideally most of maps should be less then 120 kb (if possible).

And I agree with Falkoner about 3 hour rpg: you can wait too much if it will be long gameplay.

You don't have enough options for me. The max I would wait is 200KB. Anything more and it counts up so slowly that it's discouraging for pubbies to stay for the dl.

Haha - for me too:) So I voted for 500


I agree - a lot of people press ESC when 1 percent of DL appears more than in 20 seconds.

Well firstly it depends mostly on speed of people...
for e.g. if its 3mb then there's some people with really fast dl,
And if the map is like 2+ hours long its more then worth it.

Any where above 5 is really bad even if its only a 2 player game.

This.

If you can't make a map that comes out to less than 250kb when compressed you're looking to do too much or have too much music.

And the "well some people have really fast connections" excuse doesn't cut it. I don't care if you're on T3, you should know b.net severely limits and caps your up/download speed.

3MB cause I've yet to see a map over that big.

You've never played Rush or Galactic Gunners!?!?!?

By what factor do compressed maps decrease in size? Currently, my AoS is 334KB uncompressed, and it will be ~400-450KB uncompressed on completion of the BETA.

I just don't want people to not want to DL it =(.

I voted 3MB. But this is when hosting for friends (non public).

However a Battle.net map shouldn't have more than 300kB if you intend to host it publicly. Reason have already been named.

labyrinthos is the only map which I've ever hosted for serious which is that large. I hosted rush once, but it's a single player game, and didn't work well.

Compressed maps typically take off ~100 kB I think (at large map sizes).

well i dont usually host maps for pubbies, seeing as how they always leave 5 secs into the game, so i usually end up playing witha few friends.
when playing with friends, it can be as large as it likes.
heck, i even got all of them to downgrade sc and download AO.

but pubbies wise, you'd want a map under 500 kb.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 13 2009, 10:54 pm by darksnow.

10000 triggers are not necessary. Find a way to cut it. Don't tell me "oh there isn't any other way" because there is.

It can still be compressed.

Don't forget a 3MB map takes like 10 minutes. It doesn't matter what kind of computer or internet connection you have. Anything that takes over 2 minutes to download isn't worth playing on Battle.net. It doesn't matter how good the map is or how much time was put into it.

Well, for some things like lots of combinations or cursor EUD detection and such you really do need that many.. Although, IMO, they should just give up on crap like that because it's ridiculous, make your map ideas to SC's limits, don't try to make SC conform to your map ideas. The more you know about SC, the better a map you can make.