Postby Lavarinth » Sat Mar 26, 2011 12:44 pm
While WarCraft III had the ability to link maps and use data off other maps, it's true campaign packaging wasn't released until TFT came out, at which point you could (in theory) make campaigns identical to the WC3 lineup. The likely support for something like this probably wont be discussed until the final chapter in the SC2 "expansions."
I enjoy the lack of "filler content" that we were promised during the downtime between campaigns. The most we have coming up are a few custom maps, which have already been played and drained out. I spent a good fifteen minutes the other night waiting to see how long it'd take to start a game of Starjeweled, not a game I'm really fond of, but I like Bejeweled. They don't quite grasp the aspect of updates yet, while community mappers release their "internal" updates to be tested by the public, Blizzard rather interally test the products themselves and release a more polished map in the future. Unfortunately, by then no one would of cared since the player base for those maps are slimming. If they understood to just release maps in a steady stream of updates until the map is "perfected" then they would of acquired more praise. Will they ever learn this? Perhaps. Will it bleed over to their games? Not a chance, considering the maps are maintained by a separate team of folks at the moment.
As for lip syncing which was lightly discussed, all portraits in the game are lip synced, yes. But not how you would expect. In Half-Life 2, one of the first games to feature amazing lip syncing technology, everything was done on the fly, rendered if you will. Audio would be prebuffered and lip movement determined by the prebuffered audio which would then play in sync with the now rendered lips. If you were to replace audio at any time in the files, it would react to that as seen in that music video they created.
With StarCraft 2 however, if you look deep enough, you'll find that every lip sync is prerendered, meaning they used software to generate the lip sync to an audio, and exported the animation, and imported it into the game alongside the audio. If you were to change the audio, the lips would not adjust. It's been noted by Blizzard that you can call upon any of these animations for your own audio, though clearly the lips will not much, but in Blizzard's view it was better than having portraits with sealed lips.
The answer to this would be simple- animate moving lips in the portrait to get it to animate when clicked on or speaking, similar to that of WarCraft 3's methods. Unfortunately it's not what we would ultimately love to have in the end, but it's an option for now.
- - Lavarinth
Campaign Creations Administrator
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