Hi, How do I make a UI Dialog appear ontop of the menu buttons instead of it being underneath them. I try to bring up a UI dialog on the part of the screen with the menu buttons and it shows up underneath the buttons so i cant see it. Is this doable with triggers or is this a UI SC2Layout file thing?
I have a UI i made, its a box with a button on it, when the players mouse hovers or moves over the box i want the cost of the unit to appear in text on the UI. So my problem is, is there an event that fires when the players mouse hovers over a UI button, if not is there anything i can do, would i be able to do something in galaxy to get this effect. I know that SC2 has this built in with their unit cards, but of course im not using the SC2 unit cards im using my own UI box.
IMO there are two main aspects to map making. Theres game design ability and technical ability. Game design is most important as you can aquire techinical ability, game design is to some extent more of a given talent. More specifically, within game design, there is the "idea". You need to be able to come up with a good idea for a game, that is more important than anything. A great idea can even make a game that is poorly executed succesful, and a bad idea even if executed very well still will probabbly not be succesful. And thats the thing when you start making a map, you better have a good idea, because if you dont pretty much nothing you do will make your game succesful. You can change things, but it gets to a point where you are basically starting over and making a new game, maybe you can salvage a few assets or something here and there but your basically starting over and you wasted most of your time and effort.
So how do you come up with a great idea, this isnt something everyone can do. In fact it would seem most people cant do it. I can give you tips on coming up with a good idea for a game, or coming up with an idea that is more likely to be successful. For someone such as yourself, it would seem you do not have alot of the technical ability aspect in map development. You can develop that later over time, but given that this seems to be the case i would reccommend a truly original idea. For example if you were trying to make an app that would sell well and make you alot of money, you wouldnt want to do something like make a peresonal planner/organizer app, becuase there are literally hundreds if not thousands of these apps out there that have been made by people who have far more ability than you do, you cannot compete with them.
Making a cookie cutter tower defense or survival map probably isnt in your best intrest as there are many out there that are of a higher quality than anything you could produce, in order to be successful you need to make something that no one has seen, that has no analogs, and that people will like in order to compensate for the likely mediocre if not poor production quality. You could do something like make a survival map if your really set on it, but it really has to be differnt, like alot differnt than anything else out there. Certain genres like for example tower defense for example, the games themselves even though they are differnt are still quite similar, its just the restrictive nature of the genre, survival games are similar. Compare that to something like a strategy game, there is a much wider variety, things are not as restrictive and defined as a tower defense or a dota map which have much of hte game play aspects set in stone just for it to be a part of the genre, its a more specific genre.
So if you want to make a survival game you really need to set it apart from every other game, look at existing games and think to yourself what could you do differtnly, what is missing, what dont you like about the existing games. You do not want to copy or take too much from other games or the general cookie cutter survival game becuase it will not stand out, and as ive said there is likely another cookie cutter survival game that is of much higher quality than what you can produce. You need to atleast come up with several major features or differences, things you will do differntly in your game to distinguish it from all of the others. Think outside the box, you dont have to have to do things in the conventional way. Of course coming up with these differences is the hard part, and as i said not everyone can do it, if everyone could youd see alot of unique games, but you just dont, especially not in the survival or tower defense genre for example.
If you make a good game with the arcade system your map will most likely become popular to some degree at some point. With the old popularity system even if it was good that was no gaurentee, im not saying arcade is good but its alot better than pop system was.
Something that can also help alot, if your map is good, is advertising. Really the best way to do this, is to make sure you get a really good cover picture for your game, and write a good game description so that it entices people to try the game, but if its not good they will try it and just not play it anymore.
Another form of advertising is your map getting attention on youtube or something. For example i put out a map in 2011, with the old pop system still in place. It didnt get alot of play time. Then HuskyStarcraft saw my map, liked it alot, played it and put up one of the replays with his commentary on youtube, and it got 150,000 hits. My map went from being barely played by a small number of people to being ranked #2 on NA literally overnight. This guy as well as i assume other youtubers make videos on custom games, although husky mainly does i think pro gaming commentary not custom maps but sometimes he does customs. If your map is good ask about one of these guys maybe playing your map and doing a video on it, they need content.
Heres a link to it
As you can see from the map, I at the time obviously didnt have alot of technical ability. The map is simplistic and not of a really high quality, but the idea is unique and very good. This wasnt origonally my idea, i got it from a map from WC3 and based it on that making some changes to try to improve upon it. And thats another thing you can do, if you cant come up with an idea look to other games for good ideas, even board games and stuff, if its good and it hasnt been done in SC2 yet it could be viable.
And in response to what others have said about unlockables and acivements. They do increase a games life, if that is your onyl goal. For me personally i would rather people play the game until they get bored of the game, not continue to play a game they are bored of just to get a top hat or something. The only custom game i really played much in SC2 was mafia, a game which has been in many ways adversilly affected by unlockables/achieves. Often times you will have 1 or even 2 players basically afking for points which can ruin games especially if they survive till they end. If you didnt have this stuff these people wouldnt be there ruining the game, and i dont know for sure, but i had thought the banks which store players points was what was causing 1-3 players to drop from almost every game, which in itself ruins games. There have been times where i had to join 4 mafia games before i actually got one that didnt break up at teh start due to drops.
For me personally Mapster is a place i go to get questions answered for map making. Even if there was only one guy per development forum who answered questions every day that would be enough for me, this site is a tool for helping me develop my map not a social networking site or something.
Not sure if it would be of any help to you, but i created a unit balance test tool for a map im working on. So i threw it into a little map and put it on mapster if you want to take a look at it. I dont know if it has to be approved before anyone else can see it or not.
Not sure what your asking exactly, give an example. But a record in programming is something like a struct in the C programming langauge. Basically say you want to have a collection of information on a group of 30 people. You create a record or struct like this:
This can be done by making a new record by clicking the record in the trigger editor and then adding variables to the record. Now you have a struct called person, this is not a variable in of itself, it is a new type of variable that you have just defined. In order to use this you must declare a variable of type person. In starcraft you could make a variable called Friends[30] and make it of type -record which can be found at the very top of the list and when you select that i believe you will get a new category called Record: and here you select the record type you want to use for the variable in this case person. Then if you wanted to change your first friends hairColor you would write Friends[0].hairColor = "Brown"; or change their height Friends.[0].height = 6.25 or friends[0].weight = 200. If you know anything about databases a struct can be thought of as a record in the database, each record has a name, height, weight value etc.
Records/Structs can be very useful, even if you have no need for storing any of this kind of information, you can still use records to keep the number of global variables down. In a map im working on now, there is a lot of code and i have to store all my globals in respective records or whenever i went to use a variable i would have to find it in a massive list, it would just be very unorganized. If you use a record properlly as i have just desecribed i dont think you will have any of the problems your talking about.
Havnt really looked at your code but for this problem you need to know, when a player clicks a button have they already clicked it and what button is the current button that they just clicked. What you could do is when a player clicks a button have an array playerButtonClicked[player - 1] = 1 so if player 1 clicks button1 then index 0 of playerButtonClicked[] will be set to 1. If button 2 is clicked its set to 2 etc.
For this particular button lets say its button 3, every time a button is clicked after it sets the value i just went over go through the playerbuttonarray and increment a counter each time you come across a value that is not button3, if the counter is atlesaet 50% of the value of the total number of hte players in the game then enable the button otherwise disable. With this method your always keeping track of which player has pressed which button and on each button click your checking that 50% condition to enable or disable the button3 as needed.
Of course if by unclick you mean you can unclick a button so your not selecting any button, then when they click for example button2, check that players current button clicked value in the array and if it matches set the value to 0 for unclicked or seomthing otherwise set it to 2. And then you would only increment the counter i talked about in the above paragraph if the number wasn't a 3 or a 0.
Custom games were mostly killed by the popularity system right from the get go. Things have improved a bit, but still most people join games through bookmarks or the most played in their favorite genre. These features while convient kill the custom games community becuase it makes it very difficult for new games to become popular as no one sees them because most do not look at the scrolling list of games wereas people did in wc3 becuase they were forced to. I think the unlikely hood of a persons game being played due to these things turned alot of potential map makers off right off the bat. Even in my case, i had learned abit about the map editor in WC3, came to SC2 and saw the popularity system and i thought making a map would be pointless so i didnt for awhile. Then i eventually just decided to anyways and it ended up doing pretty well at best ranked #2 most played on NA for a short period of time.
And to think because of the popularity system i almost wasn't even going to attempt to make a map, im sure many other potential map makers made that choice.Ya the data editor is harder and scares people away, but i wouldnt think it would scare anyone away anyone who actually had the ability or the needed will and determination needed to complete a good map. There was alot of excitement in reguards to custom games approaching relase, the popularity system wiped out a huge portion of it very quickly, and custom games in SC2 will never recover from it. Its a shame too custom games were my favorite part of wc3 and they kept wc3 going as a popular game for years.
Hi, i have an image that has alpha in it already, its a wow texture for a horse. I made a few of the parts of the horse alpha to show team colors but then the other alpha parts also show team colors, so i get a model with a tail that has team color around it and stuff like that. Is there anything i can do to prevent this?
Thanks for these they are very nice. How did you get this effect, how did you get them to look like this? I use gimp but any direction would be nice. I already have units made and have team colored them similar to my buildings, i may go back and redo their team colors to match these if i decide to use them so knowing how to do this would really be nice.
thanks again.
Edit: I thinki figured it out, doing something like colorify white, retinex, invert colors, color to alpha, and then invert colors again will get you an effect similar to this.
As for doing team colors the regular way i guess you just colorify white, and then convert color to alpha with an appropriate value, i used a shade of gray.
Thanks very much for the reply, could you elaborate more on that i know very little about this stuff. What should i change the emissive blend to it is on add as you said. What to you mean convert black to transparency. I made the roofs light colored as if they were black the color was visible underneath the team color. How do i convert black to transparency.
Edit: I tried changing the emmisive blend but it didn't help.
Hi, so i have some buildings from wow, ive added team colors to the roofs. Problem is it looks like there is colored seran wrap over the roofs instead of the roofs themselves looking like they were painted that color. Looking at SC2 buildings they look like they were painted the team color, how do i get this effect. I just applied alpha as team color in 3ds max for the roofs so not sure why this is happening. As you can see in the pic on the yellow one can barely see the roofing on parts of it.
0
when i try to run test maps my game doesnt even load most of the time, the client just crashes.
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@Ahli634: Go
yes its the trigger one, yes its the help social menu buttons.
0
Hi, How do I make a UI Dialog appear ontop of the menu buttons instead of it being underneath them. I try to bring up a UI dialog on the part of the screen with the menu buttons and it shows up underneath the buttons so i cant see it. Is this doable with triggers or is this a UI SC2Layout file thing?
Thanks.
0
@ZeShmoutt: Go
Ah i wasnt aware of that yes it is sufficient, thanks.
0
Hi,
I have a UI i made, its a box with a button on it, when the players mouse hovers or moves over the box i want the cost of the unit to appear in text on the UI. So my problem is, is there an event that fires when the players mouse hovers over a UI button, if not is there anything i can do, would i be able to do something in galaxy to get this effect. I know that SC2 has this built in with their unit cards, but of course im not using the SC2 unit cards im using my own UI box.
thanks.
0
IMO there are two main aspects to map making. Theres game design ability and technical ability. Game design is most important as you can aquire techinical ability, game design is to some extent more of a given talent. More specifically, within game design, there is the "idea". You need to be able to come up with a good idea for a game, that is more important than anything. A great idea can even make a game that is poorly executed succesful, and a bad idea even if executed very well still will probabbly not be succesful. And thats the thing when you start making a map, you better have a good idea, because if you dont pretty much nothing you do will make your game succesful. You can change things, but it gets to a point where you are basically starting over and making a new game, maybe you can salvage a few assets or something here and there but your basically starting over and you wasted most of your time and effort.
So how do you come up with a great idea, this isnt something everyone can do. In fact it would seem most people cant do it. I can give you tips on coming up with a good idea for a game, or coming up with an idea that is more likely to be successful. For someone such as yourself, it would seem you do not have alot of the technical ability aspect in map development. You can develop that later over time, but given that this seems to be the case i would reccommend a truly original idea. For example if you were trying to make an app that would sell well and make you alot of money, you wouldnt want to do something like make a peresonal planner/organizer app, becuase there are literally hundreds if not thousands of these apps out there that have been made by people who have far more ability than you do, you cannot compete with them.
Making a cookie cutter tower defense or survival map probably isnt in your best intrest as there are many out there that are of a higher quality than anything you could produce, in order to be successful you need to make something that no one has seen, that has no analogs, and that people will like in order to compensate for the likely mediocre if not poor production quality. You could do something like make a survival map if your really set on it, but it really has to be differnt, like alot differnt than anything else out there. Certain genres like for example tower defense for example, the games themselves even though they are differnt are still quite similar, its just the restrictive nature of the genre, survival games are similar. Compare that to something like a strategy game, there is a much wider variety, things are not as restrictive and defined as a tower defense or a dota map which have much of hte game play aspects set in stone just for it to be a part of the genre, its a more specific genre.
So if you want to make a survival game you really need to set it apart from every other game, look at existing games and think to yourself what could you do differtnly, what is missing, what dont you like about the existing games. You do not want to copy or take too much from other games or the general cookie cutter survival game becuase it will not stand out, and as ive said there is likely another cookie cutter survival game that is of much higher quality than what you can produce. You need to atleast come up with several major features or differences, things you will do differntly in your game to distinguish it from all of the others. Think outside the box, you dont have to have to do things in the conventional way. Of course coming up with these differences is the hard part, and as i said not everyone can do it, if everyone could youd see alot of unique games, but you just dont, especially not in the survival or tower defense genre for example.
If you make a good game with the arcade system your map will most likely become popular to some degree at some point. With the old popularity system even if it was good that was no gaurentee, im not saying arcade is good but its alot better than pop system was.
Something that can also help alot, if your map is good, is advertising. Really the best way to do this, is to make sure you get a really good cover picture for your game, and write a good game description so that it entices people to try the game, but if its not good they will try it and just not play it anymore.
Another form of advertising is your map getting attention on youtube or something. For example i put out a map in 2011, with the old pop system still in place. It didnt get alot of play time. Then HuskyStarcraft saw my map, liked it alot, played it and put up one of the replays with his commentary on youtube, and it got 150,000 hits. My map went from being barely played by a small number of people to being ranked #2 on NA literally overnight. This guy as well as i assume other youtubers make videos on custom games, although husky mainly does i think pro gaming commentary not custom maps but sometimes he does customs. If your map is good ask about one of these guys maybe playing your map and doing a video on it, they need content.
Heres a link to it
As you can see from the map, I at the time obviously didnt have alot of technical ability. The map is simplistic and not of a really high quality, but the idea is unique and very good. This wasnt origonally my idea, i got it from a map from WC3 and based it on that making some changes to try to improve upon it. And thats another thing you can do, if you cant come up with an idea look to other games for good ideas, even board games and stuff, if its good and it hasnt been done in SC2 yet it could be viable.
And in response to what others have said about unlockables and acivements. They do increase a games life, if that is your onyl goal. For me personally i would rather people play the game until they get bored of the game, not continue to play a game they are bored of just to get a top hat or something. The only custom game i really played much in SC2 was mafia, a game which has been in many ways adversilly affected by unlockables/achieves. Often times you will have 1 or even 2 players basically afking for points which can ruin games especially if they survive till they end. If you didnt have this stuff these people wouldnt be there ruining the game, and i dont know for sure, but i had thought the banks which store players points was what was causing 1-3 players to drop from almost every game, which in itself ruins games. There have been times where i had to join 4 mafia games before i actually got one that didnt break up at teh start due to drops.
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For me personally Mapster is a place i go to get questions answered for map making. Even if there was only one guy per development forum who answered questions every day that would be enough for me, this site is a tool for helping me develop my map not a social networking site or something.
0
Not sure if it would be of any help to you, but i created a unit balance test tool for a map im working on. So i threw it into a little map and put it on mapster if you want to take a look at it. I dont know if it has to be approved before anyone else can see it or not.
http://www.sc2mapster.com/assets/unit-balance-test-simulator/
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@fishy77: Go
Not sure what your asking exactly, give an example. But a record in programming is something like a struct in the C programming langauge. Basically say you want to have a collection of information on a group of 30 people. You create a record or struct like this:
Struct person{ String name; String hairColor; String eyeColor; String job; double height; int weight; };
This can be done by making a new record by clicking the record in the trigger editor and then adding variables to the record. Now you have a struct called person, this is not a variable in of itself, it is a new type of variable that you have just defined. In order to use this you must declare a variable of type person. In starcraft you could make a variable called Friends[30] and make it of type -record which can be found at the very top of the list and when you select that i believe you will get a new category called Record: and here you select the record type you want to use for the variable in this case person. Then if you wanted to change your first friends hairColor you would write Friends[0].hairColor = "Brown"; or change their height Friends.[0].height = 6.25 or friends[0].weight = 200. If you know anything about databases a struct can be thought of as a record in the database, each record has a name, height, weight value etc.
Records/Structs can be very useful, even if you have no need for storing any of this kind of information, you can still use records to keep the number of global variables down. In a map im working on now, there is a lot of code and i have to store all my globals in respective records or whenever i went to use a variable i would have to find it in a massive list, it would just be very unorganized. If you use a record properlly as i have just desecribed i dont think you will have any of the problems your talking about.
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Havnt really looked at your code but for this problem you need to know, when a player clicks a button have they already clicked it and what button is the current button that they just clicked. What you could do is when a player clicks a button have an array playerButtonClicked[player - 1] = 1 so if player 1 clicks button1 then index 0 of playerButtonClicked[] will be set to 1. If button 2 is clicked its set to 2 etc.
For this particular button lets say its button 3, every time a button is clicked after it sets the value i just went over go through the playerbuttonarray and increment a counter each time you come across a value that is not button3, if the counter is atlesaet 50% of the value of the total number of hte players in the game then enable the button otherwise disable. With this method your always keeping track of which player has pressed which button and on each button click your checking that 50% condition to enable or disable the button3 as needed.
Of course if by unclick you mean you can unclick a button so your not selecting any button, then when they click for example button2, check that players current button clicked value in the array and if it matches set the value to 0 for unclicked or seomthing otherwise set it to 2. And then you would only increment the counter i talked about in the above paragraph if the number wasn't a 3 or a 0.
0
Custom games were mostly killed by the popularity system right from the get go. Things have improved a bit, but still most people join games through bookmarks or the most played in their favorite genre. These features while convient kill the custom games community becuase it makes it very difficult for new games to become popular as no one sees them because most do not look at the scrolling list of games wereas people did in wc3 becuase they were forced to. I think the unlikely hood of a persons game being played due to these things turned alot of potential map makers off right off the bat. Even in my case, i had learned abit about the map editor in WC3, came to SC2 and saw the popularity system and i thought making a map would be pointless so i didnt for awhile. Then i eventually just decided to anyways and it ended up doing pretty well at best ranked #2 most played on NA for a short period of time.
And to think because of the popularity system i almost wasn't even going to attempt to make a map, im sure many other potential map makers made that choice.Ya the data editor is harder and scares people away, but i wouldnt think it would scare anyone away anyone who actually had the ability or the needed will and determination needed to complete a good map. There was alot of excitement in reguards to custom games approaching relase, the popularity system wiped out a huge portion of it very quickly, and custom games in SC2 will never recover from it. Its a shame too custom games were my favorite part of wc3 and they kept wc3 going as a popular game for years.
0
Hi, i have an image that has alpha in it already, its a wow texture for a horse. I made a few of the parts of the horse alpha to show team colors but then the other alpha parts also show team colors, so i get a model with a tail that has team color around it and stuff like that. Is there anything i can do to prevent this?
Picture below.
thanks.
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@Daara87: Go
Thanks for these they are very nice. How did you get this effect, how did you get them to look like this? I use gimp but any direction would be nice. I already have units made and have team colored them similar to my buildings, i may go back and redo their team colors to match these if i decide to use them so knowing how to do this would really be nice.
thanks again.
Edit: I thinki figured it out, doing something like colorify white, retinex, invert colors, color to alpha, and then invert colors again will get you an effect similar to this.
As for doing team colors the regular way i guess you just colorify white, and then convert color to alpha with an appropriate value, i used a shade of gray.
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@Kueken531: Go
Thanks very much for the reply, could you elaborate more on that i know very little about this stuff. What should i change the emissive blend to it is on add as you said. What to you mean convert black to transparency. I made the roofs light colored as if they were black the color was visible underneath the team color. How do i convert black to transparency.
Edit: I tried changing the emmisive blend but it didn't help.
0
Hi, so i have some buildings from wow, ive added team colors to the roofs. Problem is it looks like there is colored seran wrap over the roofs instead of the roofs themselves looking like they were painted that color. Looking at SC2 buildings they look like they were painted the team color, how do i get this effect. I just applied alpha as team color in 3ds max for the roofs so not sure why this is happening. As you can see in the pic on the yellow one can barely see the roofing on parts of it.
http://tinypic.com/r/do2r94/5