DarkBlizz

I can't launch any other map than Shakuras.

I always get one of two errors; either an "array index out of range" exception or "illegal character in path". Are there any known solutions to this? If not, I can post the error log.

Great news

I would really appreciate if you let us know what settings you changed in order to achieve that.

Look at this thread for locking Terran AIs:

http://darkblizz.org/Forum2/general-discussion/select-your-race!/

Do you mean a map that only includes AI players?

It is currently possible to lock AI players' races to Terran only. That should work in every map.

u32 means unsigned 32 bits = 4 bytes, where 1 byte is representable by two hex digits (16 ^ 2 = 256 = 2 ^ 8 ).

But this kind of discussion should not be in this thread, I think you should open another thread for understanding the basics.

EDIT: of course it is 4 bytes, not 8...was late yesterday

Sure, it could be that these things in the Attributes file are only for the UI, but XML files are for example also used by the AI, so it would be foolish to think that XML = cosmetical.

I actually have no idea what the different game types mean, maybe you can enlighten me.


@ DFA: the map files for Blizzard games are actually MPQ archives. In the Starcraft II ones, there is a file called MapInfo that is the main concern of this thread, and opening it in a hex editor and modifying it on the byte level is exactly the way we work with it.

Update on the player colors:

The decimal values for the colors (taken from replay files) are:

255,180,20,30   (red),
255,0,66,255    (dark blue)
255,28,167,234  (teal)
255,84,0,129    (purple)

Translating these into hex values and putting them into the map file unfortunately did not change the player colors at all (standard colors were the outcome). I also tried reversing the hex blocks, but no success either. White remains the only color I can set apart from the standard ones.

Quote from: Theta][Sigma on March 05, 2010, 07:59:38 PM
Hah.  And Blizz said that SC2 wouldn't have customizable keybinds.

That would be kind of unfair, because US and EU versions have different hotkeys by default.

Making an observer map is easy, I can provide a Lost Temple observer map when I come home from work (I guess Blackcode has better things to do, as he seems quite advanced in his research on hacking the game).

What I didn't figure out yet is how to load two different AIs in order to compare them. The only way I see is including them in the map, which seems quite uncomfortable as you would need to repackage the map after every change to the AI. But maybe that's the best we get, seeing that the map files also include things like player color that change every game...although I feel that the feature of including AIs in the maps seems more suited to custom maps like DOTA.

I posted my findings about setting the color in another thread (http://darkblizz.org/Forum2/general-discussion/select-your-race!/) - to summarize: I also think that this u32 is the color, but values like 00000001 just give the default color. Setting it to 00000000 results in white. Read my whole post though (#3 in the linked thread) please.

EDIT: I'm not sure if asdf is right about the player count - this was set to 00 in my Kula's Ravine (4 player map) that I use for testing and it works flawlessly.

EDIT 2: I also played a bit with the player name, but nothing I tried changed the ingame name. The map worked though, although I inserted 7 bytes as the name.

I would definetely be interested in how the ingame race changer was done.

I also played around with the hex values a bit. Your race changing thing only works as long as the user does not want to play - setting the "observer flag" to 01 gives you (but not your enemies) a random race.
If those FFFFFF sections are set to 0, the concerning player's color is set to white. Putting anything else in there results in the default colors.

Out of these observations, I came to the following conclusion:

1. either the values you have to enter are not 01 or some FF, but constants defined by Blizzard we can't manually find out, or

2. MapInfo is rather a kind of trigger file that enables the settings of another file. As you already noticed, there is the Attributes file. It contains sections labeled with strange numbers. According to http://darkblizz.org/Forum2/ai-development/map-disassembling/ (nice read btw), these numbers stand for things like the players' and the AIs' races and colors. You can set values for "slots" that could represent the different players and AIs.
What I assume is that by the flag settings done here in this thread (setting AI race to terran and player/AI colors to white), we tell the game to not use the defaults but those values defined in the Attributes file. I tried to create the appropriate sections there, but I lack the numbers (the races and colors are some decimal constants). There are some of these constants used in that file - I only tried the first one (7955827) but it did not work (again Terran and white). We could try the other ones, but I doubt that they work; it's more probable that we have to use constants here that we do not know yet. Or maybe I'm just completely wrong

Has anyone had any experience in this work for WC3? Maybe Blizzard kept the formats for the file we need and we can just look up the constants in some WC3 maps.