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Comment by cmcd | Hacker News Reader

I remember everyone saying Blizzard would release map making tools for Overwatch like they did for Starcraft and Valve did for TF2/CSGO. Seems like a great way to add longevity to the game and the community content can even help fund the game.

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The StarCraft map making tools were probably my first experience using triggers and and events to make things happen. It was such a cool feeling to be able to make things happen and just mess around with everything. It helped get me into stuff like rpgmaker and flash and learning how to program in general. I miss the days of modding tools. The neverwinter nights one was also pretty amazing. I spent a lot of time playing around with that one too.

Workshop was huge, albeit late, addition for the community, even without a map editor.

But even Blizz couldn't reliably make maps using their internal tools that kept Reaper where he was supposed to be.

Was definitely a step in the right direction, they like to say their map making tools are too complex to release which is almost offensive. If employees can learn them then surely dedicated community members can figure out enough to get by. Community maps are never expected to be perfect and if one was ever picked up for the official rotation they could clean it up as needed.

I only do hobby gamedev, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but when I think of a tool that's "too complex" to release, I imagine not just a conceptually difficult thing, but a dangerous thing. For example, the editor lets you shoot yourself in the foot with a bunch of a esoteric considerations that don't really make sense, but the internal people know how to work around them more or less, like making sure that there's a dummy Bar for every Foo on the map, and that they are named in some crazy way, and that the name doesn't contain the "%" symbol, and you have to do that all manually and if you don't the host computer hard locks. Internally they solve this by hard-won intution about how to use the tool, plus a huge and thorough testing scheme.

I think that's the key -- if the tool allows you to harm the user's computer in some way, then it's not a tool you can really release without polishing a lot more, to prevent the failure modes. And it's particularly bad if it's hard not to mess up.

I would be very surprised to hear Blizzard has an internal tool with issues of that magnitude.

Then you would be very suprised at a lot of what happens in game dev. Many in-house tools are mere skeletons, fleshed out just enough to get the job done. The bug squashing is focused on the primary product. Developing end-user ready tools is basically a paralell dev process. Difficult, rare, expensive but often immensely valuable and rewarding.

This is the rule in game development rather than the exception. It's why polished commercial engines like UE4 and Unity have been so successful. In house tools even at some of the biggest most successful game developers are rough and undocumented. They are also generally made by engineering teams an order of magnitude smaller than Unity or Epic.

A tool that works perfectly fine internally but is risky to release publicly doesn't make it a bad tool...

they never said they were too complex (for people to understand) to release

they said the tools are too tightly integrated into their authoring and content delivery systems

if you watch a couple of videos where they reveal how it all works: this excuse seems plausible

They're getting back into map making tools with the warcraft 3 remake.

More ambitiously, I think the results would be amazing if Blizz made a public version of WoWEdit available and added an “arcade mode” to WoW to showcase said maps. People did downright incredible things with just a lowly 2001 RTS engine (WCIII) — what could they do with the most polished MMORPG engine on the market?

I think a server browser and the ability to run community servers would be essential alongside that. Back when I was big into multiplayer PC games that whole scene was amazing fun, and is the reason even games like WolfET still survive in some form today.

Valve have also more recently done it in Dota 2, which itself like tf and cs was a mod, though in warcraft 3 instead of half-life/quake

Dota 2 is its own engine, and has nothing to do with dota 1 which was a warcraft 3 map. How they even got the IP in the first place is... a pretty bad look for Valve.

What are you talking about? Firstly Dota 2 started in source 1 and was the first game ported to source 2. It has nothing to do with dota 1? It is made by multiple of the original developers of the warcraft 3 mod, your whole comment does not make a whole lot of sense.

It was made by the third (3rd) maintainer of Dota Allstars, the warcraft 3 mod. Eul was first, Guinsoo was #2. It had quite a large community attached. Valve hired Icefrog. Icefrog did not invent MOST of the characters, IP, nor mechanics, nor design the map. He DID balance a lot of the characters and interactions. I was an admin for Team Dota Allstars at the time and helped run the semiprivate leagues on battlenet and the dota-allstars forums.

So Valve hires Icefrog, makes an IP claim for the dota name, all the characters, and starts creating dota 2. It felt like a "oh, I'll have this". It didn't feel right at all at the time. Still doesn't. Nothing was ever said for the community that formed around creating and enjoying the game in the first place.

https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Defense_of_the_Ancients

Both Eul and Icefrog assigned their copyright of to valve while getting employed at them, Guinsoo assinged them to Riot who then transferred the rights to Blizzard. And as far as I know Valve have only only done any kind of claim jointly with Blizzard as they are not the sole owners of the copyright. They are though owner of the Dota 2 trademark.

Also a nitpick there have been more maintainers than those three they were the major ones for example the original developers of Dota Allstars Meian and Madcow. Guinsoo worked on the game for around 2 years until early 2005 and then Neichus took over and worked jointly with Icefrog who became the lead after Neichus left.

Main source: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3726401/Blizzardv...

I didn't know Eul was involved with Valve, interesting.

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