Rum, tum, tummmm! Somebody linked me this thread and I thought I'd throw in a Retera's two-cents-worth.
I side with Dr Super Good a little bit in one sense -- when Starcraft 2 came out, I think it was the forums that killed it for me. It felt too complicated, like performing basic tasks that I felt I already understood in concept were suddenly hard. When I went online and googled things related to this, I quickly found myself in a culture of people saying 'blahhh this editor is awful and terrible why why why' and even just a quick google of "Retera Starcraft" brings me to pages that are almost shameful because they remind me that I joined the bandwagon back then:
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/248425213
Before Starcraft 2 came out I had had some imaginary vision of a superwarcraft, where I could make everything I wanted to make but with even more creative freedom, where the old logical limits and boundaries of the editor ('locusted unit missle systems', 'Illidan's channel dummy abilities', etc) did not exist.
I think the people who made the Galaxy Editor wanted to make exactly what I just described and probably did a much better job than I would have done in their place, but the Galaxy Editor taught me 3 lessons and I have almost never returned to that program, I currently don't even have it installed.
1.)
Change is hard. I tried to make devour using the Nydus Network's load and unload function back around those days, and it never worked. Seeing something ('Devour', a basic WC3 ability) that I could not replicate in SC2's engine made me feel more powerless, like it was a different and not better system. I am not trying to claim Devour could not be made in SC2, on the contrary I imagine it's been done for those recent WC3 in SC2 mods, but it was merely more difficult than a Warcraft modding kid (probably ~16 at the time 5 years ago) could figure out in a day's work.
2.)
Do not underestimate your future workflow, which you invent when you write a Graphical User Interface.
Have a look at this recording of me livin' it up back in High School:
https://www.youtube.com/v/t1-kF63y4eg?start=396
Three words for that:
what the flux?
(Not sure if swearing is allowed on here so I figured I'd go for a WoW reference)
The entire software pictured there was written by me prior to recording the video, also while in High School, and it certainly shows it. The design is a mad cluster of boxes, text, and more boxes, and for this reason people are turned away by something that really shouldn't be that complicated. And it's because I made my 'dream program' that 'does everything.'
Here's another example:
When I learned WC3 heroes could only have 5 hero skills, I decided to show myself I was awesome when I was 14 years old and
redesigned the entire hero skill system in pure JASS. I named my creation
HeroLevelsG. However, you
had to literally make 6 abilities for each single 'hero ability' because I believed in polishing what the user saw to exactly what I wanted. As I recall, these were:
- The actual ability
- The Research icon, as a separate multilevel ability, to go inside skill list
- The spellbook that was to be Disabled to 'add' or 'remove' the research icon
- The disabled research icon, as a passive ability
- The spellbook to be Disabled to contain disabled research icon
- Some sixth item that I don't quite remember
(Obviously, with modern warcraft 3 modding systems you could probably reduce this number or generate the abilities with LUA)
This project taught me a valuable lesson:
I never wanted to use HeroLevelsG because designing content for it was painful at best. The efficiency of clicking "New Hero Ability" and then setting a "Learn" tooltip with "%d" vastly outdoes making a custom "Research" ability, picking a unique Base Order ID for it, and using 'Auto Fill Levels' to fill in a multilevel tooltip for learning each level of the ability.
When I opened up the Galaxy Editor, I had heard tale that it 'supported heroes'. I thought Warcraft heroes were cool, so this was exciting! After finding out that each level or each ability had to have separate ability objects and its own separate Command Card icon object made for it (or something like that), I think I had nightmares of
HeroLevelsG and just decided I never wanted to make a hero in the Galaxy Editor.
3.)
If you actually understand how Starcraft 2 is built, why don't you write your own instead of learning the Galaxy Editor? This sounds like a cliche bad joke, but in retrospect... I actually did this. Meet 'Planetary War', when Retera writes his own Starcraft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KB60bXttJc
That made a really fun hobby a couple of years ago, and I've been meaning to revisit it and rewrite it recently but have been behind the times. And no, I still haven't bothered to learn to use the Galaxy Editor, because teaching myself how to write a networked LAN game using Java, TCP sockets, and OpenGL apparently struck me as more fun and interesting than learning the Galaxy Editor back in those days.
So where am I going with that? I guess I'm not sure. The Galaxy Editor taught me who I am; a Warcraft modder. Yeah, the Galaxy Editor might be good, I wouldn't claim to know. But I am never going to dig up
HeroLevelsG from whatever dark abyss that map fell into after I worked on it.
That I do know.
There was a time when I thought
HeroLevelsG was a good idea:
https://www.youtube.com/v/TLzhlsEFcVQ?start=202&end=208
(Post script: I read online the other day that they have an M3->XML converter now, which sounds like as beautiful a secret as unlocking the MDL. Matrix Eater for Starcraft, anyone? Seems like Starcraft could benefit from making a Marine-headed-zergling or something, like how we can make a Grunt-headed sheep in only 3 minutes for WC3.