Fantasy Friday XV - The Scenario Design Editor

[Justin]

Another question I had is will people be able to protect their maps or something to stop others from editing them?

[HolyPollo]

This is outstanding. I can't wait to create a devastating 4 player survivalist scenario. Waves upon waves of units that ends in an all out fight for your life. You'll all love it!!

[Andy Joslin]

Originally Posted by The Witch King of Angmar

Wow this looks cool! I really liked the raining fire thing. Can you decide how long that goes on for or does it just continue throughout the entire period of gameplay on the map?

Thanks

FX have a "TimeToTurnOff" property, or you can with scripting tell them to turn off any time you want.

[Alex Walz]

are savegames going to be attached to the scenario or are they going to be separate? something that bugs me with scenario design is having to play through from the beginning of a scenario or doing some hackish workaround just to test something that happens late in the game.

When you playtest, you'll start from the beginning of your scenario. But to skip over this, just temporarily disable your first cue and trigger the one you want to test.

how does scenario development work? is there one giant lua script per scenario or are things broken down into pieces?

We'll talk more about Lua later on, but most of our scripters opt to separate their scripting into classes - like NPC patrols, individual quests, special fx, etc. Then each of these classes will have its own page so you can be as organized as you want.

Invisible bridges, I like the sound of that, how does it work with user created scenarios ingame, can we only use them for scrimmages against other players or something?

Invisible walls and bridges are used in the majority of our maps. You can use them for whatever.

Will there be an area where we can share our maps? And are the files small enough so we can Peer to Peer share them before the game? And is there a lobby where can say something like, "hey, lets battle on my scenario?"

We'll have a lobby where you can share maps. We'll also select some of the best fan-made maps and add them to the next patch. And then there will be external sites like DOFH and DOFS that will encourage scenario and mod sharing.

...Wow. Just...wow.
I CAN MAKE RAINING COWS!
I cant wait.

Hehe, nice idea. I haven't done a lot of scripting, but I would assume you can transform the rain drops into cows. You can't do it by just editing the attributes though.

Another question I had is will people be able to protect their maps or something to stop others from editing them?

You could script a clever protection feature, but at the moment, we don't have any built-in protection.

[Justin]

Originally Posted by Alex Walz

You could script a clever protection feature, but at the moment, we don't have any built-in protection.

I'm not that clever

[Alex Walz]

Heh, you'd be surprised with how much creativity the editor can inspire.

[blackfang]

also its fun when others edit your maps if they do it better... I once made a warcraft 3 map and it was very flawed, but a guy i played with a lot thought it looked cool and fixed everything even made a better version of it... I didn't mind as long as my name was in the map descriptions

[nickson104]

This seems like something I would enjoy doing, but ultimately fail at... Maybe just maybe, I may have the attention span to finish the map using the default terrains and such. (is there a wide variety of terrains available by default?)
I would really enjoy using the bridge tool, especially making trees walkable and such (must we place the tree, for example across a chasm then make it walkable or just draw a bridge and have it spawn a walkable tree?)
But ultimately my map would fail as it would be just that, a map, not a scenario... I have never been able to script anything so my maps would be static... But I guess that in itself is not bad, they could then be used with normal gametypes I guess...

[Justin]

Originally Posted by blackfang

also its fun when others edit your maps if they do it better... I once made a warcraft 3 map and it was very flawed, but a guy i played with a lot thought it looked cool and fixed everything even made a better version of it... I didn't mind as long as my name was in the map descriptions

Yeah, I have no problem with others editing my stuff as long as I get credit for the original in it, I have gotten the sore end of the deal in that regard multiple times though is why I would like a feature that allows protection.

[Sauron_9Gods9_Ldr]

As an aom designer and considering there's some old aom designers on the DOF team that i think i know of where any of these "map edditor" tools taken from nottud?

NOT THAT ITS A PROBLEM but I'm wondering if you used any of his great interventions/tools? I hope this post will not cause any trouble arrh.

On topic: this looks pretty useful but will the boxes/uncolored walls be there when the games released or will there be actual models. So if we where making a Helms deep map We could tell what type of wall We were using and such.Oh and this might be off topic but will there be a large verity of "Gaia" units?