I do have to disagree with your take on polish. Polish is part of the overall experience of the game. It should never be neglected. Waiting for your new genre map to become popular before polishing it is counterproductive. A polished version would have a much higher chance of getting popular.
Fun is 90% a factor of how polished a map is. People will play things that have almost zero gameplay value (Farmville, anyone?) if they're getting a reasonably polished experience, but the best idea in the world isn't going to work if its buggy, unbalanced or unfinished. When you're making a map for SC2 you're dealing largely with people who are going to pick your map out of a list knowing nothing about it and make a judgment in the first 10-30 seconds or so.
The reason people sit there and complain about Blizzard screwing their games is simply because they water down their games and make them as simple as possible to appeal to a broader audience, which pisses off veterans, and allows scrubs to overrun our games. Such in WoW's case, I was able to hit end game in a little more than a month. It was not very fun to me, whereas, roughly 4 years ago, WoW was so much more fun and enjoyable to play because the game -wasn't- overrun with scrubs, gold spammers, and multi-boxers. And it was harder. And the only reason they allow multi-boxing is because it brings them more cash, while on the other side it ruins game experience when you're getting face rolled by 5 Shamans all critting for half your hp, per spell.
As for Starcraft 2, look what they're doing to their game. They're supposedly charging full price for each expansion pack which really is only worth buying for the Campaign. I mean, sure, you have a few new units, but it's not like they're going to overhaul the game engine, and remake every single unit from scratch. Especially since they use their own editor to make their game, cutscenes and all. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's..meh. Oh, and can't forget the 60 dollars blizzard wants for SC2 when they've cashed in well over 200 million gross profit since WoW's release, and for each subsequent release after. And they crank out xpacs for WoW that just break more things, and take away the cool things that were added in the previous release.
tl;dr If you're too lazy to read this, then go do my achievement.
Strike everything I said before; this guy exemplifies everything that annoys me.
Publish them, and they'll show up in the list when you click Co-op vs. AI or Create Custom Game. There is no way of launching a map from within the game without publishing it first.
No it doesn't. You have to understand when you edit text in the data editor you're actually editing a reference. By default the highlight tooltip references the same string as the unit name, but by changing the reference path to something else you can make the two different.
I'm annoyed when I read someone stating that Blizzard is intentionally screwing things up to maximize their profits.. (popularity sort for example)
I mean, where's the logic in that?
Yeah, this gets me too. It's one thing if you can at least present some sort of logical chain to support your conclusion (for example: no LAN because they want to increase profits by stopping piracy makes plenty of sense), but a lot of times you get people saying things like "OMG popularity sort sucks, Bobby Kotick is behind this I'm sure of it!"
Make a proxy ability of type "effect - instant." This is the ability the player will click that will actually be on the command card.
Make an effect of type "Issue Order", set the unit to Caster and set the ability to your morph ability. Under command flags check "Preempt" and set the proxy ability's effect to this.
What happens is that when the ability is used, it places the morph ability at the top of the unit's order queue but retains the rest of the order queue, so after morphing the unit will resume its previous orders.
Well obviously there's no animation as the hydralisk doesn't have a tentacle.
There are a bunch of Uberlisk tutorials in the tutorial section that specifically cover how to add spine crawler-esque tentacle attacks to an existing unit.
You want the sound to play for a different unit than the owner?
I can think of a couple of ways to do that but it depends largely on the circumstances of your map. For example you could change the unit's sound actor (default is Unit Sound which filters out everything except the player) to one which doesn't filter out non-players. Or you could create a separate actor for each sound and use actor signals to play it. Or you could use catalog functions to extract the sound asset at runtime (not 100% sure this is possible, but probably is.)
Yes, poke around with actor events. You can use a timer (within the actor events) to cut off an animation early and there's a message that sets the current position for an animation that lets you skip ahead.
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Not currently. Data persistence is possible via banks but transitioning is not supported.
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Fun is 90% a factor of how polished a map is. People will play things that have almost zero gameplay value (Farmville, anyone?) if they're getting a reasonably polished experience, but the best idea in the world isn't going to work if its buggy, unbalanced or unfinished. When you're making a map for SC2 you're dealing largely with people who are going to pick your map out of a list knowing nothing about it and make a judgment in the first 10-30 seconds or so.
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Strike everything I said before; this guy exemplifies everything that annoys me.
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@Frightwolf2005: Go
Publish them, and they'll show up in the list when you click Co-op vs. AI or Create Custom Game. There is no way of launching a map from within the game without publishing it first.
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Custom campaigns aren't currently supported. This will probably be added in a patch.
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@Eiviyn: Go
No it doesn't. You have to understand when you edit text in the data editor you're actually editing a reference. By default the highlight tooltip references the same string as the unit name, but by changing the reference path to something else you can make the two different.
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Highlight Tooltip field under the unit's actor.
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Under unit Flags uncheck "No tooltip"
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Yeah, this gets me too. It's one thing if you can at least present some sort of logical chain to support your conclusion (for example: no LAN because they want to increase profits by stopping piracy makes plenty of sense), but a lot of times you get people saying things like "OMG popularity sort sucks, Bobby Kotick is behind this I'm sure of it!"
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Here's what you do:
What happens is that when the ability is used, it places the morph ability at the top of the unit's order queue but retains the rest of the order queue, so after morphing the unit will resume its previous orders.
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Well obviously there's no animation as the hydralisk doesn't have a tentacle.
There are a bunch of Uberlisk tutorials in the tutorial section that specifically cover how to add spine crawler-esque tentacle attacks to an existing unit.
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You want the sound to play for a different unit than the owner?
I can think of a couple of ways to do that but it depends largely on the circumstances of your map. For example you could change the unit's sound actor (default is Unit Sound which filters out everything except the player) to one which doesn't filter out non-players. Or you could create a separate actor for each sound and use actor signals to play it. Or you could use catalog functions to extract the sound asset at runtime (not 100% sure this is possible, but probably is.)
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Not true, there are validators that can check this information.
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Yes, poke around with actor events. You can use a timer (within the actor events) to cut off an animation early and there's a message that sets the current position for an animation that lets you skip ahead.
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The maximum cap used to be 100,000, have they raised it since beta?