StarCraft 2 Editor - Wish List

[wc3shady]

Most everyone's ideas would be great, and I'm definitely not going through all of those posts, but here are two things that would help a lot:

- Pathing - I want Pathing to be a lot more versatile. You have a choice to completely path everything on your own, by creating an area by moving points around. Because that would take a while, you could path certain areas that way, or you could just choose to keep it the way it is. I just hate placing pathing blockers, and the way they work. And the fact that they take up doodad count.

- Easier Object Rotation - You are about to place a doodad. But, if you decide that you want to change it's direction, you have to go into the object editor, change the rotation value, look at it again in game, and then if you don't like it you have to go BACK to the object editor. While placing a doodad, you should be able to rotate them normally, or rotate them upside down and the such.

 

[black.sheep]

How about being able to "buy" booleans, reals, integers and strings on the blizzard website that can be used in the game.
If you don't understand me, heres how it would work.
Say I brought a string that I would update every time I made anew version of my map. If the string matched the version then nothing would happen. But if it was diffrent then a messege would come up telling people that their version was outdated.
Of course, it would probally be quite cheap and would not be vital for a maps success but it would be a nice option.

 

[Prometheus]

How about being able to "buy" booleans, reals, integers and strings on the blizzard website that can be used in the game.
If you don't understand me, heres how it would work.
Say I brought a string that I would update every time I made anew version of my map. If the string matched the version then nothing would happen. But if it was diffrent then a messege would come up telling people that their version was outdated.
Of course, it would probally be quite cheap and would not be vital for a maps success but it would be a nice option.

^this minus the cash

 

[BlackRose]

No hidden models like in WCIII, some of those hidden models look good!

 

[Bloodcount]

Really easy usage of floating text and multiboards. Multiboards that support buttons, and pressing them.

Items that can be modified in game. You know, the diablo sockets.

more flexibility when coming to changing the actual asset of the game. For example turning scII into a 2d hack and slash map.

 

[rover2341]

Really easy usage of floating text and multiboards. Multiboards that support buttons, and pressing them.

I agree, multiboards for most peoples uses, require more work then they should. I think you should be able to code them as you like but theres no reason that you shouldn't just be able to drag it to the size you like, at least in the editor.

 

[Darthfett]

- Easier Object Rotation - You are about to place a doodad. But, if you decide that you want to change it's direction, you have to go into the object editor, change the rotation value, look at it again in game, and then if you don't like it you have to go BACK to the object editor. While placing a doodad, you should be able to rotate them normally, or rotate them upside down and the such.

Are you talking about facing angle type rotation? All you have to do to change this in the editor, is select and object, hold control, and click a direction.

 

[black.sheep]

Being able to chose the facing direction of buildings.
Also making bluffs have actural effects on units and being able to put them on units. Would cut down on atleast half of the dummy casters in Wc3.

 

[Prometheus]

I agree. A direct buff attach sounds good.

 

[HydraRancher]

Make Advanced spells easier to make, like a sliding dummy dealing dmg via certain stats on collision, instead of 3 triggers, why not one?

 

[Chuff]

How about being able to store information on a server (e.g. Blizzard's). Not sure if this can be done with Wc3, but it would be pretty useful (although privacy concerns may arise ).

For example, being able to store a high-scores list, and check/update it at the end of every game (on bnet) - something like that would be handy.

 

[quraji]

More of a game feature than editor, but I can only dream about support for joining in-progress games... <3

 

[Chuff]

Also, the obvious - garbage collection, an AI editor that's actually useful, ability to make truly custom abilities* (which I believe has been somewhat confirmed). Stuff like that that they'd be insane not to fix It would also be great not to have to add events via actions when I want to use a variable in there.

*Using the actual ability editor, not resorting to fancy scripts

Edit: What about a way to see lines of sight in the editor (detection circles)? I'm pretty sure WorldEdit can't do that, and it would be very handy to just have a toggle for it.

 

[MEWTWO_o]

i know im late with this post but "TheDamien" annoyed the cr*p out of me. Here we go:

TheDamien on the question "how does the removing of the GUI support mapmaking?"

In three ways: the first, as already outlined, is by allowing people to make very bad maps quickly. Presumably, if the GUI did not exist such people would not be inclined to make maps before learning how to trigger them (there is no appeal in making an inert melee map). This doesn't mean that there will be no low quality maps, but it does mean that the standards will improve.

The point of GUI is to allow people to skip the learning part (there is no appeal in learning a whole language in order to see one's imagination on screen). You are right not even correct when you say that standards will improve because in the GUI one can do almost everything that one can do in jass.

The second reason is that the GUI can never be as expressive as a scripting language. Often GUIers will have to resort to roundabout ways to achieve things which would otherwise be extremely simple in Jass - this has negative penalties on performance, map size, code reuse and development speed.

Ok... So why not just force people to learn jass just so that they can save some time when making the actual map... Performace will be the same, at least for small / mid-sized maps.

The third and most important reason is that the GUI impedes the personal progress of the mapmaker. Most people start with a "sure, I can use GUI forever and still be just as good" mentality; many go on to learn Jass, but some remain using GUI and thus needlessly limit themselves. The removal of GUI would be for the good of everyone.

Not everyone are as religiously devoted to mapmaking as you seem to be. Or as devoted as you seem to think them to be. Making maps is not about personal progress. Not for the casual mapmaker who's just playing around.

Final words:
Opening as many doors as possible for mapmakers is better in every way than closing as many doors as possible. If you give people both the coding language and the GUI, the people preferring the GUI will use the GUI and so on. Had the person preferred using the pure code, he would have chosen it anyways. Say we have two doors, door A and door B. Now lets say we close door A, and only allow people to pass through door B. Everyone who wants to make a map walks through door B and it's all good. Now we open door A aswell and ask our mapmakers to pass through again. Now, the people preferring door A over door B will naturally pass through door A instead of B.

My blurry point being that giving people a choice does not "lure" them into choosing the wrong way of making maps. It helps them to find the way they LIKE making maps, rather than narrowing it down and forcing them to do it a certain way.

On another note, forcing people into learning things like a new language will often (i think) discourage people from making maps (it sure discouraged me, learning jass is hard), especially when there's no other option. People will go "f*ck this, I don't feel like learning C++ only to make my SC2 map"

Which brings me to my next point. I've never programmed anything besides jass, and learning it was (and still is) hard. I can't imagine having to learn C++ which is MUCH more complicated than jass. Jass is almost like regular english. If i had to learn C++ in order to make SC2 maps, i'd quit as a mapmaker. Without a doubt. But hey, that's good for the community, right?

I'm rambling incoherently

 

[Chuff]

Hahaha

He annoyed the crap outta me too! I just didn't want to start a war.

I can understand the point. JASS is clearly more powerful/flexible, and makes for much neater, more efficient code. That's fine, there's nothing I love more than clean, efficient code, but please realise there's more to it than that!

Blizzards view is "easy to learn, hard to master" and I believe providing GUI and JASS does exactly that. Remember not everyone has an affinity for programming or wants to spend hours learning to program just to bring their idea to life. Heck, I program in C#, but I sure as hell don't have the time or energy to learn JASS just to make a few maps. Think outside the square - limiting who can make maps only damages the map-making community by reducing creativity, the wellspring of ideas from which the best maps are formed. Imagine how many less people would be making maps if GUI never existed. That's never a good thing.

In conclusion, yes, I agree JASS is 'better' than GUI in terms of programming power, but that certainly doesn't mean GUI should be removed, or that it has no benefits over JASS. If you can't see that, I'm sorry to say that you are a closed-minded fool.

</Rant> Now let's get back on topic!

 

[Ice Bane]

Multi-user function.

This would be an enourmous modification of the Starcraft 2 Editor I guess, but being able to have several users creating a map in the same instance would give the modding society a REAL boost.

 

[Chuff]

More and more I wish they would allow us to save custom map data easily. Just some simple functions would be fantastic. Although it would need some sort of encryption to stop people hacking it. Or as I said in a previous post, allow it to be saved to a server; that would make it much harder to hack provided the server is set up properly. It'd also allow it to be loaded from any computer. Come on Blizzard, you know you want to

BTW that multi-user functionality sounds AWESOME. Or if they can't implement that, how about some way to merge other maps into one? Each person works on a different part of the map then merge every so often. This could probably be done by exporting/importing each part in Wc3 but a simple 'merge maps' button would be easier (that is, if multi-user can't be put in).

 

[Tru_Power22]

Multi-user function.

This would be an enourmous modification of the Starcraft 2 Editor I guess, but being able to have several users creating a map in the same instance would give the modding society a REAL boost.

Never gonna happen. Not enough people would use it.

 

[chanta45]

Enough unit models to make sure it can compete with warcraft 3's amount of models!

 

[Tru_Power22]

Enough unit models to make sure it can compete with warcraft 3's amount of models!

Well they are including lots of star-craft one models in the game. Hopefully they will have lots of other little tidbits to play with.