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The Map Editor: Problems and Suggestions

Feb. 20 2:29 PM by Matt Delman

So Blizzard is talking with the StarCraft community about the map editor for SCII. Kudos to them for starting that conversation -- it's important to design an editor that will allow for a lot of creativity. My favorite map from the original game was a user-created behemoth that had the best chokepoints on the planet. But this is supposed to be my suggestions for making things better, so I won't wax lyrical on my favorite maps from SCI.

One of my major complaints about the original editor -- and excuse me if the memory's a little fuzzy -- is that things were too free-form for my liking. I understand you want to give a mapmaker as much freedom as they need, but you can have too much of a good thing as well. Start with a very basic, blank slate of a terrain and you have to add resources, land features, triggers, and random animal life among other things.

Let's face it, having a basic terrain and then having to add literally everything to every corner of the map took a longer time than many people were willing to spend. There was a great idea on the Battle.net forums about being able to input percentage variables and having a realistic map randomly generate. That would be more useful as a base for the aspiring mapmaker to work from.

Another issue is the mass amount of triggers/variables. It felt like you needed a bachelors degree in mind-reading to figure out how the hell to make the triggers and variables make sense. Add in a help file that explains what all the different triggers/variables do and how they work. If there was one in the original game, then I obviously didn't find it.

While we're on that topic -- make the map editor so people without programming knowledge can use the feature without ripping their hair out. I have no programming background at all, so to ask someone like me to learn a programming language simply to use the map editor effectively is more than a little elitist. Please make the user interface functional and easy to use. I can't stress enough how many more custom maps you'd see if someone without basic programming knowledge could create their own map or campaign.

I guess the main point here is to make the map editor much more user-friendly than it was in the past. My apologies to people with a programming background, who probably see the editor as really easy to use already, but like I said before -- as a casual map maker I really don't want to learn a programming language before I can have fun with a great map editing tool.

Versatility is the key to a good SCII editor; it needs to be powerful enough so that expert map makers can create masterpieces but easy enough to use so that casual map making fans can pick it up and have fun too.

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