Campaign Creations

CC is dead, SEN is dead, host your content privately and distribute links to people you know. In general worry about completing something before you worry about advertising it.

There hasn't really been new blood interested in modding for a long time, and SEN isn't active enough to accrue any interest. One has to lead by example if they're to foster a productive community, and Blizzard's community as a whole has no example to lead by except the extreme selfish greed of 2-3 individuals working largely in private and a dozen or so people who either haven't discussed their project openly or won't release it publicly altogether. RCX is basically the role model of what it takes to get engagement, and as a result he has feedback and posters interacting with his content. He's also the last of his kind around these parts.

SC2 finally launched its marketplace and the lead maps have no custom assets whatsoever, one of them doesn't even have terrain any more sophisticated than bloodbath in sc1 and the gameplay consists entirely of units auto attacking each other. When that's the idea of a marketable map you know your scene is dead.

Sc2 plays like a phone game.

If it means anything (and I'm sure it doesn't), I do intend to finish the Critter Campaign. I was hopeful that applying my modding skills to SC:R would be trivial and it would be so badass that I could port this to the new release, but since it's really clear now that that won't happen, I can justify doing what it takes to push the rest of the missions over the finish line for 1.16 (or whatever the latest regular SC version was). The only thing I'm not looking forward to is the AI editing necessary for the last mission, but it will be nice to finally put some sort of punctuation mark on my relationship with this game and the panoply of files that makes it function. It won't be some amazing tour de force of SC storytelling, but there should be a handful of things that make you think, "huh, that's kinda cool," and I will have finally finished a SC project, start to finish, and can ascend to the stars.

At least you can take heart in the fact that 1.16 isn't an unstable version like SCR and your campaign won't just spontaneously break a week or two after you finish it.

Lasted longer than most. RIP

They really did turn blizzard into a garbage company.

After a bad experience with the ACMD0 mod I decided to try out Metathrom's Aeon of the Hawk since it was next on the list of campaigns I plan to go through. At first it was a breath of fresh air since it had way more quality than ACMD0 but then the pathing issues started... Now starcraft is notorious for its pathing issues but when the map design makes it worse, much worse, than you have a big infuriating problem. It is one thing to lose because of mistakes you made and another to lose because of problems with the game and unfourtunately Aeon of the Hawk is full of the latter. I made it to the third map before I finally ragequitted for good. It may have been highly rated at the time because of its comparatively high production values but with the release of starcraft 2 which spoils players with the lack of any pathing issues I think this mod has unfourtunately aged really badly. An additional problem is that the story is just not very interesting simply because its terran vs terran. There's so many non starcraft games with humans vs humans, we don't need one in starcraft.

You can expect a double post here when I get around to play flame knives if no replies are made.

IskatuMesk wrote: RCX is basically the role model of what it takes to get engagement, and as a result he has feedback and posters interacting with his content. He's also the last of his kind around these parts.

Indeed. Visions of the future (entire series) remains my favourite mod of any game and the only starcraft mod I've played through twice.

chris wrote:

IskatuMesk wrote: RCX is basically the role model of what it takes to get engagement, and as a result he has feedback and posters interacting with his content. He's also the last of his kind around these parts.

Indeed. Visions of the future (entire series) remains my favourite mod of any game and the only starcraft mod I've played through twice.

I don't know how you subjected yourself to that. My god; you deserve a medal.

Makes me feel old, too, but I can live with that. Just thinking about it reminds me how much of a noob I was/am.

What makes me feel old is the fact that this website is the fourth thing I ever made an account on on the internet despite the fact that I only discovered this website when it was many years into the ongoing dark age of starcraft (early 2007). The things I made an account on before CC was hotmail in late 2006, urbandead in late 2006, youtube (which would later evolve to become my gmail account) and then this website thanks to a russian website called rakrent that had links to the best starcraft campaigns, almost all of which were on CC originally.

After buying this new computer and finding an archive of every campaign ever made I have selected a sample of campaigns that are worth giving a chance and intent to use the coming months to go through them all, it will probably involve a third and final playthrough of VotF. Following that, Warcraft III remastered should be out and with any luck it will finally be possible to play Wanderers of Sorceria on that or at least it may be possible for me to finally legally buy Warcraft III and then play WoS on that.

Looks like shadowflare.samods.org is finally gone, or at least the redirect is gone. It still points to Dreamhost at the moment. I didn't end up updating the links on my site before it went down, but worked on it right away when I noticed it. Whether the old links still worked or not, I'd still wanted to update it though, at least to change all http links to https. This just gave me a reason to finish looking through the links.

Not that much of anything ever happens there anymore, but just a reminder that my site was moved to sfsrealm.hopto.org many years ago, though https as of about half a year ago, so currently it's https://sfsrealm.hopto.org/

On that note, will this site get https sometime? Even just for the same reason I noted on my site, to secure forum logins.

I think I pointed Lav towards getting HTTPS a while ago... Maybe when the site is done.

The HTTPS part isn't really that hard to get set up, and the certificate/key can even be acquired for free from at least one place with an automated verification system. The main thing is just fixing references to point to HTTPS instead of HTTP. I suppose how difficult that is depends on how HTTPS-ready the forum is.

HTTPS is easy, I'm working on it- but requires some updates to comply. It's on my to-do!

Thankfully I am now working from home indefinitely it seems, heh.

Did you become a licensed twitter troll or did Corona-chan pay you a visit?

Like many others, employers are instituting a work-from-home policy for the time being.

EDIT: HTTPS has been enabled, however when viewing a specific list of forum threads (a particular subforum as opposed to the overall forum) and when inside a thread it is displaying a Not Secure statement. Investigating this while also working on the theme.