Where to start?

[Darkshooter1986]

Getting into map making and have tons of ideas i want to create in the world editor but lacking experience in map making. I'm guessing i should start with GUI triggering in my maps first but would like to try an advanced way of triggering and map making like lua. I hear lua coding is somewhat better than jass or GUI but not sure where to look for coding guides or tutorials. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading! Also, let me know if this is the right place to ask about coding

 

[ThompZon]

Getting into map making and have tons of ideas i want to create in the world editor but lacking experience in map making. I'm guessing i should start with GUI triggering in my maps first but would like to try an advanced way of triggering and map making like lua. I hear lua coding is somewhat better than jass or GUI but not sure where to look for coding guides or tutorials. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading! Also, let me know if this is the right place to ask about coding

I did GUI stuff for quite a while before transitioning more and more towards jass/vjass. I chose jass-route because I had a ton of jass in my map by the time I really wanted to code, and I didn't feel like trying to port everything to lua.

I'd recommend not really rushing it, because you kind of need to understand what tools are available, and GUI shows many of the available tools, although some more powerful ones are not available.
I tried to "force it" before I really had a feel for what was possible, and kind lost the spark for it for a while (everything took so long to do and it wasn't really fun. It's important that it's fun imo).

I'd say you can ask here or regular World Editor Help Zone.

Shameless self-plug, check out my map and the abilities I've made to maybe get some inspiration (although some of them are fairly technical and/or convoluted in their implementation).

 

[Pyrogasm]

A comprehensive guide to Mapping in Lua

The presentation of this guide is optimized for the Nightelf style of Hiveworkshop. I recommend swapping to that style before reading. Use the small style-button on the bottom left of the site (scroll down to the grey bottom bar). If you are reading on mobile, I suggest using landscape mode for...

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I would recommend you start with Lua (at the very least set your map to use Lua instead of JASS for GUI) and don't touch JASS unless you really have to. There are some incredible resources to enable many more things in GUI than used to be possible, and to do them easily/intuitively. Most of these new things do not require you to actually know how to program in Lua to use, they're neat tricks enabled by Lua. The main user on this site that supports/develops such things is @Bribe, so pinging him here may help. Here are a bunch of his threads that may be relevant for you:


Lua-augmented GUI:

[Lua] - Lua-Infused GUI + Automatic Memory Leak prevention

Lua-Infused GUI + automatic memory leak handling Modernizing the Trigger Editor for a brighter future for GUI. This resource, among many things, converts locations, groups, rects, forces and even the GUI versions of Hashtables into Lua tables, making it so that you never have to remove them (as...

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[Lua] - Event [The Future of GUI Events]

You've seen Event, Event, Event, Event Listener, Event Dispatcher, Lua Variable Event, Pseudo Var Event, Evaluate Code, but you've not seen: Event Welcome to the future of event handling. Automatic recursion prevention, as introduced in Damage Engine 5. Automatic integration of Lua events...

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[Lua] Function calls with GUI

An idea came to me yesterday, as I was in the process of bringing some of my vJass Spell System demo spells over to the Spell Event I'm making for Lua: create GUI functions using the GUI "Player Group" API (of course not actually using real player groups), instead of needing separate GUI...

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[Lua] - Action [The future of GUI actions]

GUI just got another incredibly powerful tool added to its arsenal - I present to you: Action. Action allows you to treat GUI as a modern interface, with modern garbage collection, loop structure, perfect timing, local variables, and function subroutines. You read that correctly, but did you...

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[Lua] - GroupInRange (Automate GUI Group Enumeration and Filtering)

This was originally a part of GUI Spell System, but I wanted to separate it into its own resource. The attached demo map has a custom Divine Shield which uses this filter. --[[ GroupInRange v1.0 by Bribe What it does: 1) Collects all units in range of a point and adds them to...

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Lua-specific coding stuff:

[Lua] - Total Initialization

Total Initialization Allows you to initialize your script in a safe, easy-to-debug environment. Allows your map's triggers to be arranged in any order* (similar to JassHelper). Enables functionality similar to Lua modules and vJass libraries. Provides helpful tools to hook into certain key...

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[Lua] - Hook

Hook moves Lua's core development forward by providing users with vJass-esque hooks that allows manipulation of parameters, return values, the ability to call the original native, plays well with other hooks, and beautifies and simplifies the syntax as much as possible. Hooking "BJDebugMsg"...

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[Lua] - Timed Call and Echo

--[[-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timed Call and Echo v2.0.1.0 by Bribe, special thanks to Eikonium and Jesus4Lyf Allows automatic timer tracking for the most common use cases (one-shot timers, and repeating timers that...

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Other GUI:

GUI Spell System v1.8.0.0

GUI Spell System version 1.8.0.0 About: Spell System revolutionizes the spell making process. It handles spell indexing, end-cast events, timed triggers, configurable unit-in-range filters, memory leak management, gives you access to a part of a global hashtable and reduces your variable and...

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[Bribe]

Thanks for the shout-out! I'll add the best one, which sits at the core of what makes a lot of those possible:

[Lua] - Precise Wait (GUI-friendly)

Are you frustrated with your waits taking too long to finish, finishing too early or generally being random in how long they take? This resource is the silver bullet solution to all of these problems: your GUI waits will now wait the exact length of time - no earlier and no later than expected...

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Without this, waits in GUI are imprecise, have a minimum wait of 0.1 seconds, are always inaccurate and can be off by as much as half a second.

In the old days, you had to use JASS or some overly-complex timer system to get precise timing. With Precise Wait, it literally transforms Wait into something that actually works.