StarCraft 2 Editor - Wish List

[BlowingKush]

The current WAR3 editor, although powerful, has some severe processing limitations. If you wanna make any sorta action style game, the processing time and delay in the trigger engine makes it difficult to get fast reaction times or handle unit counts >200. I realize it will never be like Unreal or Quake 3 or any first person shooter reaction time, but I think there is definitely room for improvement.

I wanna see a type of continuous trigger processing instead of this every .01sec event nonsense. It would open a new realm for custom games and allow games like Worm War, or arcade like shooters, or games that use the arrow keys to be much more possible.

Trigger based systems/event queuing carry a certain degree of baggage in the form of protocol overhead. If you do much game programming, you will understand what i'm talking about.

 

[Prometheus]

Better FPS support, you mean?

I'd also like to have a built-in handle counter. And a PUI instead of messing with Get and Set UnitUserData. And the debugging thing that newgen has, that tells you about double frees and such.

 

[rover2341]

Hmm, Not to comment on somthing i am unsure of.

But FPS might not be the same thing..

Because one is how fast it visually updates the other is how fast it sends command.

And i think the reason they set it so low before is that all games run the same stuff on each computer, even if fog of war is on ect, Thus On the slowest computer the Const for that has to be bet slow enough to run.

If i am off, thats very possible. I am going from what i think, not from what i know.

 

[Drakethos]

The ability to change any of a select unit, or unit types stats through a trigger action that would bring up the object editor and any change made to it would be done by the trigger. Then there could be a trigger that resets it to the maps starting unit data.

 

[hunterrravyn]

Ahhh wouldnt it be nice to have all thoose functions so much easier to get....

it would make life alot easier...

 

[WilliamPa]

Some kind of automatic leak removal. Attack/takes damage events for general unit action(or sumthin like that) event.

 

[Strilanc]

I'm not going to include obvious suggestions like "editor not crashing when you forget endif", or "add cool function x". I'm going to focus on the stuff that would be really, really useful and really, really cool.

- Object editor without 'special behavior' for every. god. damn. thing. spell Targets Allowed never behaves consistently, some spells have hardcoded effects, etc, etc, etc.

- Full access to object editor data at run-time, for displaying unit costs, shadow sizes, whatever.

- Map signing. Requires: a) associating a public key with your bnet account, b) ability to sign map with private key, c) wc3 actually checking and displaying the signing account name. Stops cheat insertion into semi-popular maps, because cheated maps will not be signed by the correct account.

- Garbage collection [no memory leaks]. They already do reference counting for handle indexes, I can't believe they didn't just include the data as well.

- Custom map options selectable in lobby or at game creation [eg you enter "-arem" when creating the game instead of after starting it].

- Some way to save a small amount of data to the hard drive, or to the bnet account, SOMETHING. Put a strict limit on the amount allowed, add a confirmation dialog, I don't care, just let us get rid of save codes.

 

[Beetlebomb]

I'm not going to include obvious suggestions like "editor not crashing when you forget endif", or "add cool function x". I'm going to focus on the stuff that would be really, really useful and really, really cool.

- Object editor without 'special behavior' for every. god. damn. thing. spell Targets Allowed never behaves consistently, some spells have hardcoded effects, etc, etc, etc.

- Full access to object editor data at run-time, for displaying unit costs, shadow sizes, whatever.

- Map signing. Requires: a) associating a public key with your bnet account, b) ability to sign map with private key, c) wc3 actually checking and displaying the signing account name. Stops cheat insertion into semi-popular maps, because cheated maps will not be signed by the correct account.

- Garbage collection [no memory leaks]. They already do reference counting for handle indexes, I can't believe they didn't just include the data as well.

- Custom map options selectable in lobby or at game creation [eg you enter "-arem" when creating the game instead of after starting it].

- Some way to save a small amount of data to the hard drive, or to the bnet account, SOMETHING. Put a strict limit on the amount allowed, add a confirmation dialog, I don't care, just let us get rid of save codes.

- 'Compile Map'. Creates a map with only the information necessary to play it, and converts the script to some sort of intermediate byte code. Effectively the only protection you can reliably provide.

I agree 110%.

 

[D.V.D]

You can't remove leaks if you make any program based of C++ and C# because C++ and C# have leaks you need to remove because the creators never thought of removing them. You would need to reprogram C++ and C# to remove leaks.

 

[Romek]

You can't remove leaks id you make any program based of C++ and C sharp because C++ and C Sharp have leaks you need to remove because the creators never thought of removing them. You would need to reprogram C++ and C Sharp to remove leaks.

And you don't know what you're talking about.

Those are good points Strilanc. Those, and accurate waits would be great.

 

[D.V.D]

Yea I do, my dad is a programmer and he knows C++ so I think he knows better than you romek about C++ and leaks. Your probably saying I don't know what I'm talking about because I said C Sharp not C#.

 

[Artificial]

D.V.D, may I ask how C++ and C# are related to whether we have to clean leaks when coding in the language there'll be in SC II or not? It's based on C (not C++ nor C#) anyway, isn't it? Or at least that's what the batch said.

Then again, maybe I'm just too stupid to see the connection between those languages (which actually is why I asked that question ^_^).

 

[D.V.D]

I thought Wc3 and Sc2 were made from C++? Anyways, the programs have leaks because the creators didn't think it would be a problem. To remove the leaks, you would need to reprogram those languages. Now the similarities are they both use the same functions. The differences is that C# is more advanced and has more functions to add more possibilities.

 

[Artificial]

You know, I think you should know that when we're talking about leaks in WC/SC maps/codes, we're not talking about the leaks the program itself creates. We're talking about stuff like

call CreateGroup()
call CreateGroup()
call CreateGroup()

. That leaks 3 groups because we don't remove them. This however:

local group g = CreateGroup()
call RemoveGroup(g)
set g = CreateGroup()
call RemoveGroup(g)
set g = CreateGroup()
call RemoveGroup(g)
set g = null

doesn't leak (at the level of Jass at least), because the data is removed, the handle indexes can be recycled, etc. What Strilanc was referring to with the garbage collection was that the leaks like these would be automatically cleaned, so we could use the first option instead of the second without any fear for getting memory leaks (which leads to slowing up the game over time).

 

[Strilanc]

Yea I do, my dad is a programmer and he knows C++ so I think he knows better than you romek about C++ and leaks. Your probably saying I don't know what I'm talking about because I said C Sharp not C#.

Your dad probably said something reasonable, but what you just said is stupid and wrong.

If you think you can't make a garbage collected variant of C or C++, you're wrong. If you think a scripting language like Jass can't be garbage collected, you're insane.

 

[D.V.D]

It can be, but then everyone in blizzard would need to get used to it and SC2 was being made for like 6 years. If they were to put in the Jass without leaks, we would have another long delay till the game comes out.

 

[Strilanc]

It can be, but then everyone in blizzard would need to get used to it and SC2 was being made for like 6 years. If they were to put in the Jass without leaks, we would have another long delay till the game comes out.

Why in the world would Blizzard employees need to "get used to it"? You don't get used to anything, you just don't use cleanup functions anymore. Things get easier, not harder.

I don't what you think garbage collection is, but it doesn't take 6 months to implement it [think more like: a week of one programmer's time]. They already do garbage collection via reference counting in wc3, but only for handle indexes, not handle data.

Frankly, your comments are incredibly ignorant.

 

[Gwypaas]

You can't remove leaks if you make any program based of C++ and C# because C++ and C# have leaks you need to remove because the creators never thought of removing them. You would need to reprogram C++ and C# to remove leaks.

Ever heard about the keywords called new and delete that you can use in C++?

 

[Cheesy]

How about we stop arguing over handling leaks in other languages, and even languages we haven't even seen yet, and get back to the point of this thread?

I would like to see the ability to turn units into heroes, and vise versa. Also maybe the ability to create custom animations IN the editor, or maybe a second program packaged in their, similar to the Source SDK.

[edit]
Also, VERY good points to be added Strilanc, I would especially love the idea of saving data to a BNET account, of course without proper construction of this feature, it could cause some issues, for example, viruses.

 

[Romek]

Also, VERY good points to be added Strilanc, I would especially love the idea of saving data to a BNET account, of course without proper construction of this feature, it could cause some issues, for example, viruses.

How about just saving the Sc2 gamecache equivalent?
Should be safe. And it's all that's needed anyway.