Campaign Creations

Mr. Meta wrote: Do you still have that ooooooold Spiff Wars map, that one with a Hydra hero and some Zerg infiltrating a Terran base and stuff?

That was a pretty cool map IMO. You should consider remaking it for SC2 if you no longer have it there. 

Nope.  I've lost all of it

And the Spiff Wars 2 I make in SC2 is likely to have absolutely nothing to do with Spiff Wars 1.  Except, of course, that I will have a Hydralisk named Cliff in there somewhere.  (Who I had also incorporated into a WC3 campaign I started)  In fact, I really don't have any plans at all yet for what will be in Spiff Wars 2.  But I've got time to think of something.

Oh, and about what Maglok said, pretty much anything I do will be done 90% with StarEdit2.  I may prod someone for a custom unit or two, but it's not very likely.  Voices I might do, depending on how many default ones there are to work with.  And, well, I guess I would voice units if I were to get the whole thing voiced, but I probably won't do that unless I'm feeling extremely ambitious.  So when I say "90%," I mean more like 99.42%.

I remember downloading some Spiff Wars thing that had like one map that I think I still have on CD somewhere.

The mod that came with it had all these cool animations in the main menu like Mario running and the map was some installation thing where you ran around getting keycards

Taeradun wrote: I remember downloading some Spiff Wars thing that had like one map that I think I still have on CD somewhere.

The mod that came with it had all these cool animations in the main menu like Mario running and the map was some installation thing where you ran around getting keycards

That would be extremely awesome if you had it laying around somewhere, because as far as I know, it doesn't exist.  And yeah, all the exe was was me playing around with bink video tools   There may have been some custom sounds and whatnot, but not much.

Maglok wrote: There is of course the fact that mapping isn't the only thing that takes time. The major productions in the day also had high development times for new units, voice overs and I remember a cinematic taking a few months to finish. Indeed let's not be TO ambitious, but still I think that for example the voice pipeline I can make work pretty quickly. Most of us are taking prior experience to the table here and have grown a few years since then. I think we can expect some interesting stuff really.

And prior failures.

Taeradun wrote: I remember downloading some Spiff Wars thing that had like one map that I think I still have on CD somewhere.

The mod that came with it had all these cool animations in the main menu like Mario running and the map was some installation thing where you ran around getting keycards

Where's all the RtaR work you did? Hah!

Maglok wrote: There is of course the fact that mapping isn't the only thing that takes time. The major productions in the day also had high development times for new units, voice overs and I remember a cinematic taking a few months to finish. Indeed let's not be TO ambitious, but still I think that for example the voice pipeline I can make work pretty quickly. Most of us are taking prior experience to the table here and have grown a few years since then. I think we can expect some interesting stuff really.

Ah yes... making maps perfect in wc3, especially once you broke past the doodad and building limits, took quite some time.

If I was to make something in sc2 I wouldn't be scaling it down just because it'd take a while. I'd only start something if I had defeated my bipolar and knew I could actually concentrate on it. Then I would set the flames of hell free upon the world.

The thing that takes the real work is the bug testing.  Playing your same map over and over to make sure it generally works in the way you wanted can get tedious sometimes.

which also happens to be away to test the fun factor.

RazorclawX wrote: The thing that takes the real work is the bug testing.  Playing your same map over and over to make sure it generally works in the way you wanted can get tedious sometimes.

Definitely - I don't even know how I forgot to mention it. Bug testing, especially in huge maps, can be a real nightmare: even though you can test each section separately, you still need to eventually test it as a whole. In fact, at least with my maps, all the mapmaking seems to take only 50% of the time, if not less, if compared to the actual bugfixing.

Polishing the maps, which usually comes along with the map testing, can also be tiresome IMO, although definitely not as tedious as bug squashing.

Seeing as I am a fulltime it-tester I know the time it takes to test, I don't do any different all day.

Bug hunting and, more importantly, figuring out how to fix bugs in diablo 2 is quite possibly the most trying thing I've ever had to go through.

Its especially bad if it takes a few minutes to load up your map. Hopefully they will allow testing within the editor

Also I think there was at least 2 maps for spiff wars

Aiursrage2k wrote: Its especially bad if it takes a few minutes to load up your map. Hopefully they will allow testing within the editor

Also I think there was at least 2 maps for spiff wars

For minimal loading, the closest feature they could input with minimal effort is some optional cache feature to keep a specific size of files in RAM after a game ended (preferably of the most common files) thus you would only need to load your map a first time and then the next times, they basically only load the triggers and do all map initializations from your triggers resulting in a much faster load.

wc3 loading in general is really inefficient because it has to pretty much rebuild the entire map in the game to load it.

What I imply Mesk is to keep in memory the used tilesets, the skins, models, icons, interface graphics ... basically all used "generic" data from the MPQ that is pretty much assured to be used for loading the next map (100% for the same slightly modified map and a good 10-30% for about any map).

However, not everyone would have the RAM (especially low-end computers) to keep a real advantage of such potential feature without having some slowdown (less RAM in general) for playing the next map. So it would be more ideal as a optional feature for those with 2 to 4 gig of RAM.

But yes, rebuilding the map (as in terrain-wise) is kind of inevitable since the slightness modification would render any direct cache for it useless except for the tilesets.

Lavarinth wrote: Where's all the RtaR work you did? Hah!

lol I could do it for you now if you'd like