Hey beautiful people, ckknight here.
Went to BlizzCon this year and got a bunch of good info regarding StarCraft 2. I'm going to be touching on the map-related info, as that's what this site's about.
- Authors will be able to publish maps directly to Battle.net.
- This means that this site will not try to focus on being a user distribution site, but rather a developer resource.
- The map editor is going to be far, far more powerful than even the Warcraft 3 editor.
- All features of the WC3 editor, including items (which are not in the SC2 campaign or multiplayer), are going to be available.
- 3rd-person shooter play is possible, with demo.
- Swapping parts out on units is very easy, including weapons and all other things.
- Importing one's own models is possible.
- Creating new abilities and providing abilities to units that don't normally have them is possible.
- Adding custom UI elements is possible. This means unique buttons and all that good stuff.
- Premium maps are going to be available.
- This will allow map creators and even professional studios to sell their maps at a premium.
- They will make it as hard as possible for people to plagiarize other works.
- I suspect this will mean a compilation process of some sort.
I wasn't able to ask my question about maps in code repositories, but that will be available, for at least binary versioning.
I will enable closed source projects being able to be created here on SC2Mapster, so that if you wish to use our code repositories, you won't have to share your source with the world, hopefully helping plagiarism. This will be opt-in.
Non-map related stuff:
I played some of the campaign and a skirmish as zerg. I was really blown away at the UI of it. It's an evolutionary step beyond Warcraft 3, but it really is very nice. For example, to make 3 zerglings, I selected my hive, clicked "Select Larvae" (which had the number 3 on it, since I had 3 larvae to select), pressed "Z" three times. Each time morphed a single larva into two zerglings. This would've allowed me to do Z-D-Z to make four zerglings and a drone.
There was also a separate rally point for drones and military units, so I stuck drones on minerals (which they mined right away) and zerglings to the middle of the map.
The game itself was strikingly beautiful. From the campaign's TV report (cinematic) to the observation room where Raynor was hanging out, but most especially the gameplay itself. Zooming in works like Warcraft 3, and when I do, everything is crisp and beautiful. When I zoomed into the creep, it looked very different from Starcraft 1, more like a mesh of spider webs. It was very cool.
The sounds of everything were amazing. Don't play with the game muted, you're missing a lot.
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