Next patch (this week) is going to contain:
Note: The market place is not going to be released with the game but after. We are going to support all the map hosting meanwhile :)
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
Grum has been working hard to crack down the terrain format and hyarion made a convenient tool to show and edit it! This is actually an Alpha but it looks very sweet.
Kanaru just made two new models. It's still early but that's a nice start. If you too are doing some 3D or 2D artworks, just post on the forums and will get coverage :)
I am looking forward making a listing of all community fan sites working on mapping. There are many great things done all over the net and I would like to feature them all. I've made a compilation of them but it's far from complete. If you know more please feel free to complete that list on the comments.
English
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Update: Contra Defense has been updated with English strings.
Flash info: greenonex managed to play with someone else on Battle.net on a Custom Map! However the procedure is kinda tricky. You have to know your opponent and replace a normal map in your cache folder by the custom one. Iggyhopper just released a video with 2 people (himself and Terin)! Read more.
Grum while trying to crack down the height map file format (the one that tells every point what height it has) managed to make several interesting and funny pictures. I let you discover them.
After Contra, yuggren has made a remake: Contra Defense. This time you have to can chose between 3 heros and defeat the many waves coming to you. It is using all the latest discoveries about items.
Blizzard said the content patch and editor are going to come in April. We are April 18th and they just announce a ladder reset. We have all reasons to think of the Galaxy Editor to come this Thursday! Let's hope Labmonkey123 the prophet has seen right :) Discuss this theory on the forums.
This one is more random. By looking at the game files they found an artwork with some intriguing numbers on it. 02/16 is the starting of the beta, so we may expect 06/11 (June 11th) to be the release of the game. Discuss this theory on the forums.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
We just opened a new Tutorial Forum where you can learn and share knowledge about various aspects of the game. The first posted one will hopefully help you start editing maps by making an Überlisk as shown in the Blizzcon movies. Hati released a detailed overview of the required files and how he achieved this. Here is a preview of what you will get at the end.
Iggyhopper makes us a demonstration of Stereoscopic 3D version of Starcraft II using NVidia latest graphical cards. I can't test this as I don't have the required glasses but I'm pretty sure it is going to get a better immersion feeling.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
You doubt the Starcraft II Data Editor ... See for yourself what you can do: imitate a World of Warcraft inventory system only with XML files, no coding involved! This looks really promising.
Upcios on the french forums sc2galaxy.net realized that there were videos displayed inside the game as textures. Those are private jokes however that means it's possible to do it! That opens interesting possibilities. The small thing is ... we don't know yet how to achieve that effect ...
See the rest of the fake ads on the forums.
I'm pretty sure there are fans of Basshunter out there, a swedish that made a song about DOTA. He made another clip for it. I thought it would be worth mentionning :)
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
The number of Starcraft II icons is really small. You probably one to use one of the hundreds WoW icons, the process has been explained by Iggyhopper and is now trivial. It takes no more than a minute to convert an icon. Some automated tool will probably come later.
A new tutorial appeared on nibbits written by lurkerbelow. He explains all the steps required to create a new unit based on an existing one. At the end of the tutorial you will have a brand new Dragoon based on the stalker.
You probably use the DDS Photoshop plugin to convert your images into DDS. First of all, you should know that Starcraft II is able to read both PNG and JPG images if you don't want to bother using DDS. If you want to get the best possible compression, ATI released a tool that allows you to try different compression methods and have a visual representation. It also supports a batch functionnality.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
Remember the Uberlisk presented at the Blizzcon? They said it was really easy to do with the Galaxy Editor. It must be really powerful because many of us tried to achieve the same result with less success. Hati managed after many tries to attach one tentacle on the Ultralisk. This is the first step!
In order to complete his project he needs custom models. However he is not only good at modeling he does quite remarkable artworks too.
Recent breakthroughs in Starcraft 2 terrain documentation gave an idea to Technetium: realize a terrain viewer. If you don't know him, he did the first BLP viewer for World of Warcraft and several work on MPQ files. The viewer is atm in early alpha but we can expect it to be functionnal soon!
The Hero Inventory Contest is now over! Renee gave some XML code in the chinese forums and both HPX and Alevice compiled these fragments to make a map off it. I've recorded a video to show what are the possibilities!
This was the first Contest on SC2Mapster and I hope you liked it, more community events are coming. Meanwhile you can understand how it's done and test it yourself:
There are 3 winners today, I want to congratulate them for explaining how they did it!
They are all being rewarded with a 1-year Curse Premium submission.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
MWAEI is a Galaxy IDE created by kazibi. It helps you create AI scripts with a user friendly environment. I want to feature this project because it’s in line with mapster philosophy: develop tools to make map making process available to everyone!
Hero_lief on The Hive Workshop posted a compilation of all the tilesets available ingame. You will be able to chose from the 26 predefined tilesets or … create your own one!
Renee on the chinese forum posted some XML to make it work however he didn’t provide a test map. Therefore, the contest is still running! It should be much easier now. Even if you are not doing it for the reward, this would be extremely valuate to investigate more on the subject.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
Edit: With the correct Base10000 folder the game is in fact playable! It’s a merge of both my Tower Defense and the Micro Defense along with the SC2 Colorizer Tool. Sorry for the video and bad press … But still the video looks fun so I keep it there :P
I’d like to share with everyone the awesome newsletter that Curse sends around on a monthly basis. Want to keep up to date on the various websites of the Curse Network? Whether you post and take part in one or several of the communities, or you only lurk for news, this is a great way to keep informed of all the big news in the gaming world. It’s also super easy to opt-in now that you all have Curse Accounts, so I highly recommend you take advantage of this feature. For a peek at the March Edition, see here.
The Curse Newsletter will be going out again shortly (Around the middle of each month) and we wanted to take this opportunity to remind you to opt-in for the next installment! The newsletter now reaches over 1 million gamers per month, and there are several benefits to opting in.
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The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
geX from sc2mod.com released the first version of a great project. Andromeda is meant to fill every gap that Galaxy left open and to do its best to make scripting SC2 easier and safer. It is written in Java and the specifications look really appealing!
// Implicit Casting text t = "a" + "b" + 45 + "c"; // Explicit Casting fixed f = (int)(fixed)(text)"34.43" // Function Overloading string ToString(int i) {...} string ToString(string s) {...} // Overriding override string IntToString(int i){ return native.IntToString(i * 2); } // Multiple Declaration int l = 5, m = 6, r, q, t = 7; //Define some of them // Implicit bracket if (i == 10) return; else i += 1; // For loop for(int i = 0; i < 10; i += 1) { ... } // Enrichment (like classes) enrich int { static int getZero() { return 0; } static int MeaningOfLife{ get { return 42; } } } int j = int.getZero(); //Method usage int k = int.MeaningOfLife; //Accessor usage
Are you bored of water and want some real stuff? Blizzard added the ability to use custom models instead of water and provided a sample one: Lava. overload119 from hiveworkshop posted a picture of it and Grum found how to do it. It's really easy as it takes only 3 lines of XML.
You can know exactly what changed in the Patch 8 using the git diff by Grum. They moved a lot of strings in the files, they added some icons but nothing fancy.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
Yeah, someone finally edited the user interface files. Corbo was able to move everything around as he wanted. The interface xml files look really familiar from the World of Warcraft ones, therefore if you made addons you won't be lost at all. At the moment, the only unknown is if we can include them inside the map. We tried many different file paths but no one actually worked. Also, we wonder if we can change the viewport for the bottom part to be drawn by 3d.
Grum did an amazing job yesterday understanding nearly all the terrain files. The more challenging was the t3TextureMasks. This is an important one because it represents about half of the map size! It stores the visibility of the different textures in the map. Just to give you a little preview of the complexity, he did manage to turn a noisy image to a crystal clear one!
... to ...
Zoxc made a post on the battle.net forums where he makes a detailed explanation of all the weak points of Galaxy.
And he also made some benchmarks about Galaxy compared to Jass (Warcraft III Map Editor language) and Ruby (considered to be slow). The conclusions are easy to get: Galaxy is better than Jass but still way too slow. Let's hope Blizzard is going to put a real team on the language optimization!
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
This is an important area and so far we've been stuck. The irc ([[irc://irc.freenode.net/sc2mapster | irc.freenode.net at #SC2Mapster]]) has been pretty active last hours, everyone working to crack the terrain format. Corosus, Corbo, Grum, Sholdak and others managed to start getting results. I'm pretty sure it will be landed soon with MilkyWayEdit.
NiNtoxicated01 has been working really hard on model animations. He discovered that they share many things with the MD5 (Doom 3) models. Thanks to that he managed to fix many of the bind poses especially the Zealot one.
Polygon count of various models has been posted by HeliosDoubleSix
The version 1.0 of the syntax validator is out. It enables type checking and various improvements. This tool is extremly useful when it comes to edit the Galaxy files. David Cramer from Nibbits made a web service for the validator which is really handy.
The Galaxy Editor is not out yet however it is still possible to start working on maps. I will show you different projects that have already been started by the Mapster community.
yuggren, a chinese map maker, made the first scenario map: Contra. You control a hero with 3 different weapons and 5 abilities. Your goal is to defeat the various packs of zergs all around the map. It takes its roots from the tower defense and makes great use of all the hero stuff we just discovered. PixelWarrior and I recorded gameplay videos to give you a preview. The english version is not perfect since yuggren's native language is chinese, he is looking for help in that area.
Patch Notes provided by Blizzard are far from reflecting all the changes done between 2 versions of the game. Grum had a brilliant idea, he just used the diff feature of GitHub with the game files. The result is a comprehensive diff of all the changes done in a patch.
The Starcraft Ghost third person shooter now has a name (My Wife Cheated On Me So I'M Going On A "Kicking ass Rampage On Zerg" Suicide Mission) and even a trailer! Check this out, it looks really promising.
