IskatuMesk SC2 Beta Coverage

[IskatuMesk]

There is no campaign in betas.

I just played my first game versus the AI.

First Impressions

The AI is dreadfully bad. You'll have to see my video for details, but in short the transport usage is the worst I have ever seen in any game. Obviously this is a beta and I could only select the "Very Easy" difficulty, but still. The transport usage was so bad that I am most certain it is extremely bugged right now.

My Terran AI ally spent the time between 2:45 and something like 8:06 doing absolutely nothing. 22 minutes into the game the enemy zerg had acquired an army of... 6 hydralisks. None of the comps expanded and ran out of minerals in their mains but I suspect they had 30k+ floating in their banks.

The game load time is not nearly as fast as it was during their presentations. It's about as fast as a big wc3 UMS map. I have heard that i7 performance is kind of broken in sc2 right now so I can't say much about that.

Graphics -

The graphics are less impressive ingame than they are in screenshots and videos but they are still pretty good. The units are a little blurry and some of the particles could use more density and such but overall they are quite nice. I don't have any difficulty in reading the game but I have yet to see a big fight because the AI is so bad.

90% of the options in the graphics defaulted to "Ultra" so I guess the beta does have the high-rez textures (models defaulted to high), which is quite the achievement because I dug through the mpq and found multiple 40-50meg DDS files but the game somehow compresses them nice and tight and is sitting at a cool 2gb or so installed right now.

Vespene geysers KILL performance. With 6 on the screen and recording with fraps my FPS dropped from 24 to 16. Even with a ton of carriers wasting a zerg base my fps never dropped past 24. Without fraps going I got a solid 45fps or so in the carrier slaughter. I suspect a big fight could potentially cripple my computer. Which is kind of bad news for lower-end system. Again, I haven't tried it, so I don't know. SC2 does have instancing in some areas and this might make big fights run a lot better. No idea why geysers made such a huge hit.

Sounds -

I've only played Protoss so far, but the majority of voice acting is very disappointing. The Immortal's voice sounds like they applied a stretch onto a guy's voice and just left it the way it was without restoring the fidelity of the voice, so it sounds pretty amateurish.

The sound effects on the other hand are quite wonderful. I love hearing Zerg die. It's great. So much squishy.

Liking new Protoss music.

UI -

I feel the UI for battle.net is too damn cluttered and "puffy". I preferred Warcraft 3 over this. The menus still have animations in some instances which is also kind of annoying but at least they are faster. I would prefer a minimalist approach to the battle.net interface over the current rendition. I'll get used to it I guess. I think they could have improved the game creation menu by allowing you to select the map while the game is hosted, but it's still like sc/wc3 where you can't change it once hosted.

Gameplay -

Holy fuck sc2 is faster than sc1. Mining seems to be nearly twice as fast and you start with more workers. I ended up floating like 20k minerals just like the Blizzard employees because I was too busy watching zerg die and my idiot ally flail medivacs uselessly across the map. Faster mining = faster mineral depletion.

You can't mine gas when it depletes. That's it, the geyser's dead. This is a pretty big change.

Carriers are INSANE. They start with 4 interceptors, you can build 4 more. You can upgrade their deployment speed. In addition to that, when the interceptors deploy they all shoot out the front. If the target is the front, they all fire as soon as they spawn. HUGE damage. They fly very fast and attack very fast. Carriers utterly slaughter hydras now.

Mothership is not nearly as slow as people made her out to be but the new "time bomb" has a very small aoe. Can't teleport to allied structures, only your own.

There seemed to be a native 1 second delay to all of my commands and actions. Either the beta servers are laggy because it's beta and all or we're seeing a remake of wc3. I'm betting the former.

[Dem0nS1ayer]

All of that sounds... incredibly lame.  I knew the battle.net interface is was cluttered and ugly.  I think Blizzard is trying to hard to revolutionize the way games are played online, and it's not working out too well.  I really hope the voice acting isn't as bad as you say.  One thing that made SC fun was the badass voices. :O

[Pr0nogo]

If it is as bad as he says, my recordings will be a definite improvement.

[WB]

They've already mentioned i7 has issues, so performance...probably not the same as someone with high end but NOT i7.

The MPQ compression...that sounds fucking amazing actually.

I would expect Very Easy to be retarded. Maybe they're meant to mimic a retarded player, thats why they scout with medivacs?

I've been watching ustreams all day, immortals sound awesome dude :O

http://www.starcraftmethod.com/livestreams-huskystarcraft

[Ricky_Honejasi]

I would like to know if from game to game, it loads "faster" (implying keeping loaded data) or if it seems to always re-load the same data over and over.

I might ask more specifics later, watching that guy playing from WB's link.

[IskatuMesk]

it loads EXTREMELY fast now... maybe it already parsed all of the data but even frapsing it I loaded the next big maps very quickly. I guess it just needs that one load to see all of the compressed shit.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

That's nice to know thus it will be quicker to play the same map over and over or quicker from one map to another.

Perhaps build a full base with all units teched out, then proceed to show us a demonstration of how they work in a battle/strategic situation.

A minor detail on top of it is that you give time to let us check (or to the worst, long enough so we can pause the video in 3-4 secs) the tooltips of the various units, techs, buildings. Preferably even the tooltips of the side things (UI and so on ... especially for the weapon/armor/shields icons since I would like to know if it shows a basic tooltip or if it have detailed info about extra damage against/vs armor, etc.).


Maybe another side thing is if Blizzard somehow included custom maps in this beta then play with them too.

[IskatuMesk]

Old build orders are totally not going to work in the new game.

I'm having a huge difficulty adapting to the insane speed of the economy and the necessary macro mechanics.

Zerglings are INSANELY fast. Like, too fast.

Also you can summon a MULE to anywhere you have vision. Basically it can be used as a much longer scan if you really want it to, it has a long duration and three of them spawn.

Also they fixed the crappy tank sounds.

Thor's are huge and ridiculously OP with their insane 6 second stun/200-250 damage attack and anti-air.

[WB]

Mule dropdown only spawns 1 mule. What game are you playin? Also, lol I got beta.

Note: i received my invite @ like, 7:00, so its still being sent out, I guess? Makes sense, they're ramping up to not destroy the servers maybe.

[l)ark_ssj9kevin]

What's with the username format?

[Dread]

What's with the username format?

The . bit? People can have the same but the will maintain that special little uniqueness we've all come to expect. So if two Dread's show up, I'll be dreadrx (from Dread.dreadrx) while the other one will be a noob. : p

Unless I misunderstood it, or am far off base. Some people aren't liking it, heh.

[IskatuMesk]

Mule dropdown only spawns 1 mule. What game are you playin? Also, lol I got beta.

Note: i received my invite @ like, 7:00, so its still being sent out, I guess? Makes sense, they're ramping up to not destroy the servers maybe.

It spawned 3 mules... or maybe I spammed it three times I can't remember.

Some further thoughts;


All of the zerg sound very similar to each other except for the Mutalisk which sounds really bat-like. Not a fan of the mutalisk sounds, especially the wimpy attack sound. The advisor is also not really that good, hopefully they get Helfer to do it when she does Kerrigan. Overall the zerg just sound way too similar to each other and don't have that unique distinctiveness like SC1. Their external SFX are great. Don't care at all for the zerg music, which seemed to stop playing entirely about 10 minutes into the game. Sounds like bad C&C music to me. Not at all zergy. Melody is similar to sc1 but still far from the original glamor.

I'm also 99% certain they had Arnold Shwartzanigger do the voice for the Thor. Or someone who sounds exactly like him. All in all the terran voices, except for the Raven which sounds horrible, are a lot better than what I've heard previously. But they are veeery quiet, too. They totally fixed the siege tank shock cannon sound and it's awesome now. Terran music is nice.

I studied the file structure and so far have made the following presumptions;

SC2's data is split into three pieces in a "mod" folder,

Core.SC2Mod
Liberty.SC2Mod
LibertyMulti.SC2Mod

This raises the possibility of a sequential data management system similar to sins or supcom. Aka, you can mix and match mods that don't have conflicting data. I haven't seen ANYTHING related to a mod loader inside sc2 yet so I don't even know if that's how it works. That's just a theory.

All of the files within these are just renamed mpqs and I can browse them at will. Two mpqs exist - Assets, which contain, derp, assets, and data, which contains code and XML files (excel tables aka diablo 2 aka wc3). Haven't looked at XML files yet.

The model format is m3, obviously an updated m2 (the WoW format). There is an m3h filetype I don't know the meaning for. I suspect m3 will most certainly be a max-exported format like the others but I dunno yet. It could be an entirely new format and just a sequential name. M2 was a very, very difficult format to work with. Pretty much everything in the game looks like it's m3 format. Cliffs, units, buildings, doodads, if it's not a flat texture it's an m3, often with an accompanying m3h.

The game is using DDS files for textures. Some units have over 7-8 textures files tied to them, a number unheard of in any game I've seen so far besides WoW (which calls some 50-60 textures for the Necropolis in eastern plaguelands). Some textures include masks, two types of Specular maps, ect. Haven't looked at textures themselves yet.

.wav and .ogg for sounds, seemingly interchangably for reasons I can't fathom (why not just use ogg for everything?)

There are several seemingly major core AI-related files in one of the mpqs, coded in the new Galaxy code. The code looks like this,

Code: Select all

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//  AISetAttackState
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
void AISetAttackState (int player, int attackState) {
    string msg;
    int oldState = AIState(player, e_attackState);

    AISetSpecificState(player, e_attackState, attackState);
    
    if (DEBUG_ATTACK_STATE) {
        msg = "Player " + IntToString(player) + "-" + PlayerRace(player) + " attack state " + 
            AttackStateName(oldState) + " -> " + AttackStateName(attackState);
        DebugAI(msg);
    }
}

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//  AISetMainState
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
void AISetMainState (int player, int mainState, int mainSubState) {
    string msg;
    int oldMainState = AIState(player, e_mainState);  
    int oldSubState = AIState(player, e_mainSubState);

    AISetSpecificState(player, e_mainState, mainState);
    AISetSpecificState(player, e_mainSubState, mainSubState);

    if (DEBUG_MAIN_STATE) {
        msg = "Player " + IntToString(player) + "-" + PlayerRace(player) + " main state " + 
            MainStateName(oldMainState) + "(" + IntToString(oldSubState) + ") --> " + 
            MainStateName(mainState)  + "(" + IntToString(mainSubState) + ")";
        DebugAI(msg);
    }
}

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//  EndMeleeScript
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
void EndMeleeScript (int player) {
    string msg = "Reached end of script for player " + IntToString(player) + "-" + 
        PlayerRace(player) + " : More AI code coming soon.";
    UIDisplayMessage(PlayerGroupAll(), c_messageAreaSubtitle, StringToText(msg));
    DebugAI(msg);
    AISetMainState(player, e_mainState_Disabled, e_mainSubState_Unset);

As a very basic example.

Aka EXTREMELY complicated shit. This is your new JASS, ladies and gentlemen, and this is the simplest code I could find in the files. It is based on C, not lua, as I (and Blizzard) have said it would be.

The syntax doesn't sound like it would be too hard to figure out once you're accustomed to it but otherwise is very daunting to take on.

I cannot find anything build order or composition related within the AI files, in fact no real core structure to them at all. The files are pretty small and just call a variety of functions and integers I can't possible understand. Their structure is very similar to the wc3 AI but has none of the core elements. I haven't dug too deep into this subject yet, but I'll take a closer look later on. From what I hear, Blizzard doesn't give a flying fuck about AI in the beta and it's unlikely we'll see the higher difficulties, so having any idea how this stuff really performs is probably not going to happen.

I have recorded a number of games vs the AI so far, mostly just me fucking around and floating tons of minerals. I've found a few bugs already, including a weird graphic artifact, a probe that freaked the FUCK out, and crazy lag from vespene geysers and zooming.

[Marco]

A bit off topic, but I'm glad to see some stuff can hold your attention and keep you awake for extended periods of time. 

[Xenon]

Thanks for the code example Mesk. Since I can read that and get a general idea of what those do, I should be able to start messing around with scripting as soon as it comes out  8)

Can you try to find any function-list files equivalent to common.j or blizzard.j in WC3? Maybe .g or .g** or something...

[Ricky_Honejasi]

The big advantage with that kind of code is if you understand C or C++, it's more natural to code in the galaxy editor in the non-GUI form.

Heck, it IS even possible to pre-code partial triggers for SC2 maps in advance just based on that since you can use a C++/Java editor and compiler to code and test. Then you declare all objects (the variables unit, unit groups,etc. found in galaxy but not native in C++) as "filler" objects to make it work syntax-wise.

When it comes the show, you essentially just need to copy/paste your technically functional code then edit the required details to make it 100% work in Galaxy when the SC2 Editor comes out in beta (and by extension when retail SC2 is out).

EDIT : Okay, a considerable flaw is the lack of knowledge of events (conditions are essentially just if/else/then thus very doable) but it is still quite doable overall if you code while factoring existing the various existing WC3 events. Remember that you should be able to convert SC2 events from GUI to code via the future Galaxy Editor.