SC2Mapster

I'm in the process of developing something I'm calling MapUI. If there's any similar projects underway, somebody letme know. Basically MapUI is intended to be somewhat of a framework for a semi-complex dialog system that has several useful features to add to maps. These items include:

• A vote system. When 3 or more players are in the game, they can all vote to kick a player out, must have a 60% successful vote rate (kind of like the ban beacons from starcraft 1, but has a nice ui this time and isn't dictated by host or whoever is player 1). They can also vote to end the game for everybody and presumably restart the map. I haven't thought of anything else I can add that people can vote for (if you have an idea let me know).

• Local Map Achievements system. From what I can tell blizzards achievement system is pretty much locked out from anyone doing anything similar with it. It's going to be a simple system of adding your own custom achievements. The achievements however are obviously not battle.net driven, they will be stored in banks specific to the map, obviously can be edited, but it's just one of those fun little features that can be added to your map. When you get an achievement it'll announce it to everyone in your game, and it will be possible to view all the achievements, which ones you have, and which ones the people in your game have.

• Statistics. Will keep track of map based statistics. Things like the total time you've spent playing that one map, your win/loss rate, etc. You will also be able to see the statistics of your friends in game. Planning on making it easy to add map-specific statistics.

• Settings. Basically it'll allow you to set some more specific settings for the map you're playing on, such as disabling certain UI elements or the entire UI (if you feel like playing in a cinematic kind of a view), the ability to disable statistic gathering for the MapUI system. Certain settings will be global within all MapUI maps, as well as the map you're currently playing and settings specific to that.

I haven't gone into the Bank related things, from what I read it's all XML based and multiple maps should be able to pick it up. If I'm wrong about any of this let me know, or if you have suggestions let me know that as well (any feature I can add that potentially adds to this framework and helps map authors that decide to implement it would be great).

I'm already well under way on developing this, main menu is done and I'm working on the vote menu now. I'll post up screen-shots and possibly demos later this week.

@mikelat: Go

I was trying to think of a way to give players the choice at the beginning of a map to play the cinematic or skip it. Sounds like even if thats not a specific feature that it could be done with what you have in mind. Sounds good and useful to me :)

Quote from iHaveReturnd: Go

@mikelat: Go

I was trying to think of a way to give players the choice at the beginning of a map to play the cinematic or skip it. Sounds like even if thats not a specific feature that it could be done with what you have in mind. Sounds good and useful to me :)

Yeah the idea is to make it relatively simple by having an action definition that enables you to add your own options, and the framework will essentially add the checkbox to the map options, do whatever calculations are required to resize the window to accommodate the new option, and handle all the bank related issues. This system benefits everyone, the users get a consistent interface that spans across potentially several maps, newer map makers don't have to worry about all the funky dialog triggering, and veteran map makers don't have to waste their time making a polished interface for their map.

@mikelat: Go

Sounds great! Thank you for doing this :)

Since there's a misunderstanding of what I'm doing I'll post some early screenshots of it in development.

The idea is you can copy and paste it into your map. There's a button at the top beside the menu buttons, it has a hotkey of F8, and numerous options.

Now this IS TRULY GROUNDBREAKING !