How to do it ?

[Chucky]

If I wanna make a mod in SC2 like a medieval conversion, I'll have to import every model in my map with icons and make the spells and stuff...That would bring my map minimum over 60 MB and I don't think that's playable...not even on LAN. I've seen these guys around here on hive doing their mods but how would I go to do it ? Will I have to stuff all that into an MPQ and use something like MPQDraft ? I don't even know if that works on SC2...Any thoughts ?

 

[Kalekin]

You would seperate art content into various SC2Mods, upload them to Battle.NET and reference them as dependencies in your map. Each mod can hold up to 21MB(??) of data and a map can include up to 10 mods, giving you a grand total of +-200MB to work with. Something to note however is that although you can reference 10 mods of 21MB each, you can only store a total of 105MB on your own account, meaning you will need at least 2 accounts per region and distribute your mod files amongst them.

Alternatively, I believe there may be a few public content mods that contain ported WoW assets that may already be uploaded to Battle.NET, you could make use of these. The danger with these however is if the owner of the mod removes it from the Battle.NET service, it will break your dependencies.

 

[Chucky]

Thanks

 

[Dr Super Good]

not even on LAN

Which is prety implicit seeing how LAN and multiplayer in SC2 are the same functionality.

The problem with mods currently is that you can only use mods you have uploaded. This defeats the real purpose of mods but does give you 105 MB to play with. I think this was done to prevent 1 person removing a commonly used mod and breaking 100s of maps that referenced it. It does mean that data parallelisim is still a concern.

I am hoping HotS will change these limits slightly. Perhapse if your maps are popular enough blizzard will distribute it via their marketplace service for free with no data limit.

 

[MGCǂSpectre]

At least maps have excellent compression. I happened to import around 12MB and the map is just 7 MB. Like a 2MB texture doesn't make your map 2MB but under 1MB. But loading it all from a mod is a good idea, in this way the stuff stays outside your map and you have a low map size. But as DSG said, it has some issues.