Campaign Creations

+1, Mesk. Truth should have been self-evident to everyone by now.

Never, ever make plans in that a for-profit company is going to do something for less than 5 people. It won't happen.

The more I think about the exe change the more I think it was about their streaming shit that did pretty much 0 good for the game besides bloat load times to excessive levels just like it did WoW.

IskatuMesk wrote:The more I think about the exe change the more I think it was about their streaming shit that did pretty much 0 good for the game besides bloat load times to excessive levels just like it did WoW.

I think the worst is in SC2's case, there could be an easy solution. Have some sort of boolean variable that hits true if every file of the client is 100% downloaded which can go false if there is a new patch or some MPQ modification based on MD3/hashcode/whatever that isn't very slow detection-wise.

Then if it's true, the game shouldn't bother with any sort of streaming in map loading or in-game.

I think the only reason to not do it beyond just not doing it is to ensure abusive absolute control of the MPQ data being 100% "correct".

Heck, there must be something wrong for their streaming in general period. For example, I don't remember Guild Wars 1 having any real issue with streaming in mid-game.

That's rather dissappointing. I really didn't expect Blizzard to do anything in favour of the custom campaign community until after Whatever of the Third Expansion was Called, but I didn't expect them to actually go and make things harder for us to use workarounds to make campaigns. Like Mesk said, they don't really care about us. From that, I expected them to just ignore us and let us do our own thing with the tattered scraps of hope we still had left, not for Blizzard to snatch them from us and light them on fire.

Ah, well, the initial lack of support for custom campaigns basically killed any enthusiasm I had for SC2 campaigning anyway, so this really doesn't change anything for me. Still though, would've been nice to see what other people might have done.

Just a note, since I get a bit tired of everyone being Tony.

By Tony I mean utterly incapable of finding shit out for themselves.

Dropping a map on E:\StarCraft II\Starcraft II.exe runs the launcher.
Dropping a map on E:\StarCraft II\Support\SC2Switcher.exe runs the map.

It was also retardedly easy to make an "index" map with a dialogue to load other maps if you want to go that route. Utilizing banks I don't see it being much different than how WC3 ones worked besides how the map starts. You could even make it show what has already been played, etc.

Index map = basically the menu map thing I said. I didn't know about the second exe, though. I bet that gets patched out as soon as they find out! Abuse it while you can, peter!

ok I did a thing

SC2 Campaign Launcher public beta 1



the program searches subfolders of your SC2 maps folder for files named "campaign.xml", later versions of my program will be able to create the file for you but for now here's an example campaign.xml for the Rebel Yell remake (only done as an unofficial example, I haven't been in touch with Jones313 or Ultraling). The campaign.xml file needs to be in the same folder as all the maps, so with that example one save the xml file in "Maps\1. Rebel Yell".

it should work natively in Vista & 7 but XP users (lol XP in The Year Of Our Lord 2012 wtf) will need to install the .NET Framework 3.0 if they haven't already and idk/idgaf about Windows 8. I've only tested it on my Windows 7 x64 desktop but everything seems to work properly except a silly bug with the listboxes if there are identical names for multiple campaigns or multiple missions within one campaign, which is fixable but I haven't got around to it so try to avoid creating that situation for now.

edit: also if you want to be a jerk and force people to use your index map instead of the mission list in my program set show="0" in the files tag then the missions list will be hidden and it will only load the first or default file. Later versions will probably let you screw around with design stuff so you can use your own background image for your campaign instead of the blue hexagon thing and change the colours of the text etc.

Excellent!

Credits galore shall be in-place for maximum awesome.

Pretty epic, but it's not working for me. It says it can't find my SCII directory, although it is directly inside the "StarCraft II" folder.

EDIT: However, this could be my own damn fault since I didn't directly install the game and instead copied over the files from a previous computer. (I wasn't able to redownload several gigs of updates. Ah, the joys of rural life.)

Jim, it's highly unlikely that your SCII registry keys were something you copied over, and I think that's what controls how other applications find that kind of stuff.

Awesome news. Although I can't say if I will ever do anything with sc2, if I do I'd definitely use this. Nice to finally see some tools coming out.

Pr0nogo wrote:Jim, it's highly unlikely that your SCII registry keys were something you copied over, and I think that's what controls how other applications find that kind of stuff.

You're probably correct in that assumption. Where are the registry keys and how do I copy them all over?

You'd need to manually add them in using RegEdit (windows tool, pre-packaged with every legal installation of windows) or find them online. Google up registry keys for StarCraft II and see if anyone's extracted and uploaded the .reg file (they're the same files that store battle.net gateways for BW/WC2/WC3 for use with mods).

yeah my program is only intended for use with legal copies of starcraft 2, sorry

Excellent work my man. You should add support for launching through beta too. Currently my campaign is using HotS specific features (like finally fixing conversation choices), and would be handy to be ble to test through your tool.