Are Blizzard campaigns unnecessarily complicated or am I just bad at world editing?

[WarCortez]

Looking through the original campaigns' triggers to see how things done everything seems extremely elaborate, even stuff I myself did with much simpler triggers. So, if anyone examined official campaign triggers, are they necessary to being so complex, and I just suck?

 

[Dr Super Good]

The RoC campaigns were made with a much weaker, still WIP, editor. The trigger editor was missing many things we now take for granted. They were also made by creative people who might not have been the best at programming, and many of them had little experience on projects of such scale.

TFT campaigns should be higher quality under the hood as the developers had more experience by then, and World Editor was a much more finished product.

Reforged campaigns, or maps touched by reforged, will be all over the place. Some skilled mappers were working on touching up aspects of them, but many of those changes may never have been published. Additionally the few remade campaigns were effectively made from scratch so may have been subject to the developers learning experience using world edit.

 

[Footman16]

Looking through the original campaigns' triggers to see how things done everything seems extremely elaborate, even stuff I myself did with much simpler triggers. So, if anyone examined official campaign triggers, are they necessary to being so complex, and I just suck?

Whilst it is true it is possible to achieve the same thing with "simpler" triggers. The blizzard triggers are designed to be easier to understand and follow since Blizz worked as a team your work needs to be followable by someone other than yourself (although this isn't always the case, but you will see comments and stuff in their triggers). There is also an element of where they did some things in order to avoid some bugs for example they use triggers queues for dialogues in order to stop them from overlapping. The "trigger" trigger is separate to the trigger that contains all the "real" actions as well so there's a distinction between the parts and it makes debugging a little easier.

Also as DSG pointed out, the editor was developed as they worked on the game, so some quirks or differences are the result of that. Also different people worked on different maps so again some of them had their own way of doing things.

You don't suck, we all started triggering the same way, however if you're making a campaign the "blizzard style" of triggering as seen in TFT and in the more developed maps is a "good" way to trigger in terms of keeping things easy and also makes it easier to copy and paste stuff across. For example cinematics are much faster to develop from copying the blizz style of cinematic since they re-use the cleanup trigger for both skipping and the proper end of the cinematic itself.

 

[WarCortez]

Whilst it is true it is possible to achieve the same thing with "simpler" triggers. The blizzard triggers are designed to be easier to understand and follow since Blizz worked as a team your work needs to be followable by someone other than yourself (although this isn't always the case, but you will see comments and stuff in their triggers).

Oh, I forgot about that. I remember even questioning it once if that was made for fans to follow things easier but that makes more sense.

if you're making a campaign the "blizzard style" of triggering as seen in TFT and in the more developed maps is a "good" way to trigger in terms of keeping things easy and also makes it easier to copy and paste stuff across.

I do copy stuff that fits well (although even by copying I could not make a bug-free side-frost trap like in the undead campaign). I often work with trials and errors while attempting to prevent players taking advantage on glitches or screwing themselves over.

 

[Chaosium]

The general rule to remember with the editor:

 

[Resyak]

It's more a matter of order and ease when making changes or adjustments than anything else. Most things can be simplified quite a bit compared to how they are shown in TFT campaigns, but it's equally true that after 6 months, you go back to your (simplified) triggers to change something and you end up drowning in your own laziness for not ordering, separating and naming everything properly as Blizzard did. I personally am one of the latter, I never order things well and I try to compact everything as much as possible, which then becomes a torture when it comes to fixing or making changes.

Regards.

 

[WarCortez]

The general rule to remember with the editor:

View attachment 503143

Yeah, that's why some of my triggers look like duck taped.

It's more a matter of order and ease when making changes or adjustments than anything else. Most things can be simplified quite a bit compared to how they are shown in TFT campaigns, but it's equally true that after 6 months, you go back to your (simplified) triggers to change something and you end up drowning in your own laziness for not ordering, separating and naming everything properly as Blizzard did. I personally am one of the latter, I never order things well and I try to compact everything as much as possible, which then becomes a torture when it comes to fixing or making changes.

I just came back after a long break and it's editor itself that made me stare, drooling. I looked at the various triggers and felt like I must have lost half of my braincells because I have no idea what any of these mean. Took a little while to bounce back.