SC2Mapster

Two days after the end of the Blizzard Custom Map Contest deadline we have no news. We don't know if they just forget or contacted the winners already but without letting them say they won!

Gamespot during an interview managed to find leads on the Heart of Swarm (first expansion) release date. It's planned around March or April, 2012

Bounty Hunters Tournament by Tenshi

The latest Bounty Hunters Tournament was a lot of fun and Tenshi is organizing another one :) Come on for some epic matches this Saturday!

Freax Tower Wars by WiiKing

I don't know you but I really liked Tower Wars in Warcraft 3 and I was really disappointed not seeing much of them in Starcraft 2. However WiiKing heard my prayers and did one called Freax Tower Wars. You want to give it a try if you are in Europe!

Hotel vs Zombies by Bounty_98

Bounty_98 has a lot of crazy map ideas and this time he made a map called Hotel vs Zombie. It's a really simple arcade game that lets you kill a bunch of zombies! It features custom models :) It's only a preview.

NotD Commentary by JohanPoN

JohanPoN has decided to shoutcast custom maps and the first one I want to share with you is NotD :)

Blue Posts

Another round of questions related to the Starcraft 2 Editor is out :) As usual, if you have some please post them here.

Quote:

(Zaraf) - I would like to hear from Blizzard with regards to what exactly the differences between Modal and non-Modal dialogs are.

Modal trigger dialogs currently aren't implemented and we're planning on adding support for them in a future patch.

(nickmp) - the prob is this:i need tychas' shrreder gernade discription to account for level up spell bonus damage.

Tooltips can dynamically display data values using a tag like <d ref="Effect,BonesTossGrenadeDamage,Amount"/>. We're adding UI in 1.2.0 for inserting these types of tags.

There is also the info tag which will dynamically display information for a unit based on which fields have the InfoTooltipPriority field set. For example <info id="Marine" types="W,D,A,B,Un,UpP,UpR"/> will display the types of units a Marine can attack along with information about his abilities and upgrades. (W=Weapons, D=Detectors, A=Abilities, B=Behaviors, Un=Units produced, UpP=Upgrades produced, UpR=Upgrades Received)

(Reynold) - OK, i just got a little problem about the editor. The problem is ... it loads very very slow, i need to wait for 30 or maybe 40 seconds to open a new map.

We're aware of certain areas in the editor with less than optimal performance and will be working to improve them as time is available.

(NuneShelping) - From what everyone knows so far, it is impossible to use this functionality without using the native UI; that is, there is no way to trigger the "Placement System". We suspect this is because this particular system is handled client-side, but I digress.

You're correct that this is currently handled asynchronously and adding a trigger to enter placement mode would be not be a trivial task. We'll do our best to support this in the future or provide sufficient alternatives.

(NuneShelping) - What are "console commands"?

Console commands are tools that we use internally to debug the game. We're working on exposing more of our debug tools without making the game more vulnerable to hacking.