1.5.0 Arcade Development Support

[Dave312]

Some of the Blizzard developers are providing help on the Battle.net Custom Maps forum in regards to the Editor. Their introduction thread is here and there are quite a few interesting questions/answers.

Here is a small selection:

Some of my actors aren't working as before. I'm using a action actor for an impact, with a event that creates it when a damage effect starts. Now the actor isn't even being created. Before 1.5 that method worked fine, am I doing something wrong?

Try removing the offending event from the actor and adding it again from within the editor.

Here's our guess at what's going on: your actor derives from a parent actor that defines the event, but your actor overrides the value of that event. The index for the event that is being overridden is from the previous version of the game, which is now stale. Refreshing it as I described above should fix it.

If you use the XML view on the culprit actor, you’ll be able to see syntax like index="3" that shows which parent event the event with the "index" syntax is supposed to override. When the pattern of the overridden data changes, this index does not get automatically updated to account for the change, which means the child event may no longer be overriding the event in the parent that it was originally intended to override.

This issue can show up in other areas in data where you override the value of a single element in an array whose index has changed. Unfortunately, there's not a great fix for it on our side, but we're actively investigating it.

Hopefully this fixes your actor, though!

My current issue, although minor, is that I seem to be unable to edit the loading screen tips.. Manually changing the field under Map -> Loading Screen -> Help only displays one tip, where a editing them under Data -> Game UI doesn't seem to do anything. (The original tips still appear)

Hi TheSkunk, I just tested creating custom Loading Screen Help in Game UI data and was able to reproduce what you're seeing, where the original tips still appear. We will research this further and try to provide a solution to the community for randomized loading screen tips in the future. Thanks for bringing it to our attention

with the newest 1.5 patch it seems like its not possible to open custom maps by dragging them on the starcraft.exe file anymore, since it seems like the new launcher is somehow overwriting the map load.

Is it possible to re-add support for this feature? It was very useful to quickly test a map without having to open it with the editor.


Hi Mille, I don't believe we intentionally removed support for this and I am a big fan of drag and drop for opening maps as well. While it looks like there is a workaround by using the switcher instead, we'll look into what can be done to re-enable support for this.

Can you expose the property lists of all UI Frame types? This would be very helpful for the UI Editor users. For example:

CFrame: Width, Height, Anchor, RenderType, Enabled, Visible, AlphaMaskTexture...
CButton: Shortcut, Text, Label, HitTestFrame, NormalImage, HoverImage, ClickSound...

We are working on additional UI editing support for 2.0, and hopefully this information will be available directly from the editor. But I've compiled a partial list for you in case it may be useful:

Fields for: Control
Field: HighlightOnHover
Field: HighlightOnFocus
Field: ClickOnDown
Field: RejectsFocus
Field: Shortcut
Field: FocusNext
Field: FocusPrevious
Field: Muted
Field: ClickOnContextMenu
Field: AllowedButtons

Fields for: Frame
Field: Visible
Field: Enabled
Field: Color
Field: Alpha
Field: DisabledAlpha
Field: AcceptsMouse
Field: Unclipped
Field: CollapseLayout
Field: BatchImages
Field: BatchText
Field: Batch
Complex Field: Anchor
Sub-Field: relative
Sub-Field: offset
Sub-Field: pos
Field: Height
Field: Width
Field: TooltipFrame
Field: Tooltip
Field: TooltipAnchorPosition
Field: TooltipDelayed
Field: UseAlternateTime
Field: RenderPriority
Field: RenderType
Field: PreserveAnchorOffset
Field: AlphaMaskTexture
Field: IgnoreParentAlpha
Field: IgnoreParentColor

Fields for: Desc
Field: DescFlags
Field: RequiredDefines

Fields for: Button
Field: NormalImage
Field: HoverImage
Field: Label
Field: HitTestFrame
Field: Text
Field: Style
Field: Toggleable
Field: ClickSound
Field: HoverSound
Field: DisplayType

Fields for: Tooltip
Field: FadeTime
Field: MaxWidth
Field: MinWidth
Field: MaxHeight
Field: MinHeight
Field: Insets

Fields for: Image
Field: LayerCount
Complex Field: Layer
Sub-Field: TextureType
Sub-Field: Texture
Sub-Field: Tiled
Sub-Field: TextureCoords
Sub-Field: StateIndex
Sub-Field: StateCount
Sub-Field: LayerColor
Sub-Field: LayerAlpha
Sub-Field: LayerVisible
Sub-Field: Animating
Sub-Field: ManagedAnim
Sub-Field: AnimColumns
Sub-Field: AnimCount
Sub-Field: AnimTime
Sub-Field: AnimDuration
Sub-Field: AnimIndex
Sub-Field: LoopingAnim
Field: Desaturated
Field: DesaturationColor
Field: DesaturateOnDisable
Field: Rotation
Field: BlendMode
Field: ScaleWidthToTexture
Field: ScaleHeightToTexture

Fields for: Label
Field: Text
Field: Style
Field: Options
Field: WriteOutText
Field: WriteOutTextDuration
Field: BlendMode

 

[X-maul]

Sucks that this is not reachable with a EU account o.o
Would some of you please post a reply for me?
I want to point out a bug:

When you are creating the actor event: "Selection Update (Local) / (Sync)"
You are not able to select a Source Name. You will have to change to "XML View" to change this.

 

[Dave312]

Sucks that this is not reachable with a EU account o.o
Would some of you please post a reply for me?
I want to point out a bug:

Posted. I'll try to check it periodically to see if you get an answer.

 

[X-maul]

Thank you Dave If you get the time (I saw they were reviewing requests) you could suggest the option to scale the "Checkbox" dialog item proberly, instead of only scaling the hitbox.

And after the 1.5 update the search function was removed from the Text Editor.
(But do it if you get time)

 

[Dave312]

No worries.

There seems to be quite a lot of bugs with the new editor. One that I have just noticed is that terrain textures that have a value specified in the Height Map property (in the Data Editor) cannot be placed in the Terrain Module. An example of this is the Mar Sara Concrete texture.

 

[X-maul]

uhm - that sucks - well hopefully they will fix it

(Btw, what is your name on the forum? )

 

[Dave312]

Its Dave (imaginative huh?)

That texture problem can easily be fixed by deleting the Height Map value, but the only problem is that I don't know what that property does, so I could also be disabling something else.

 

[X-maul]

Its Dave (imaginative huh?)

oh, yeah would never have figured that out Lucky that you could get that name though

That texture problem can easily be fixed by deleting the Height Map value, but the only problem is that I don't know what that property does, so I could also be disabling something else.

Ok, well you might just ask in there and see if you get lucky and get an ansver

 

[Dave312]

oh, yeah would never have figured that out Lucky that you could get that name though

Well that is the stupid thing about the SC2 forums, the names are not unique. It is just the same name I was using for SC2.

Ok, well you might just ask in there and see if you get lucky and get an ansver

I did

 

[X-maul]

Well that is the stupid thing about the SC2 forums, the names are not unique. It is just the same name I was using for SC2.


I did

Odd - well.. yeah that seems a little odd to me :b

 

[X-maul]

Oh, another suggestion

Making Terrain Objects act like doodads, so you could be able to rotate them as you want (for instance the Braxis Alpha Bridge Arrow rotates in a verry strange way).
Being able to open a small window for the Terrain Object where you could set the position and rotation, would make it a lot easier to work with Terrain Objects.

 

[Dave312]

Thank you Dave If you get the time (I saw they were reviewing requests) you could suggest the option to scale the "Checkbox" dialog item proberly, instead of only scaling the hitbox.

And after the 1.5 update the search function was removed from the Text Editor.
(But do it if you get time)

The reply from one of the developers:

Hey Dave, thanks for the heads up! I'll look into this and get some eyes on both of these points.

As far as rotating the Terrain Objects go, Terrain Objects actually replace the standard terrain cells which are square tiles. As such, Terrain objects can only be rotated by 90 degree increments in order to align with the terrain cells. If you look at the Braxis Alpha Bridge Arrow, you should notice there are two types, a 0 degree version, and a 45 degree version. This is because they can't rotate a Terrain Object by 45 degrees to make it diagonal because the cell footprint won't align with the Terrain Cells.

 

[X-maul]

The reply from one of the developers:

Thank you Sounds good.

As far as rotating the Terrain Objects go, Terrain Objects actually replace the standard terrain cells which are square tiles. As such, Terrain objects can only be rotated by 90 degree increments in order to align with the terrain cells. If you look at the Braxis Alpha Bridge Arrow, you should notice there are two types, a 0 degree version, and a 45 degree version. This is because they can't rotate a Terrain Object by 45 degrees to make it diagonal because the cell footprint won't align with the Terrain Cells.

well, it's more that, it doesnt seem to rotate the right direction when i [Ctrl] click above it (90 deg) I would just love to have the option to modify it's values, to either 90, 180, 270 or 360 degrees, instead of having to [Ctrl] click and use 1-2 min on rotating it the right way

 

[Dave312]

One of the changes with patch 1.5.0 is that they have added a rotate button (located below the object list) which allows you to rotate it in 90 degree increments prior to placement. You should no longer have to click and rotate it using the mouse.

 

[X-maul]

Oh, lovely havent noticed that - well this certainly solves my problem