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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Amazing news! Though I didn't play it competitively, StarCraft was a big part of my life -- my friends and I made custom scenarios to be played in 'Use Map Settings' mode, like dozens of iterations of tower defense and the like.

Given the impressive list of tune-ups, I'm hoping that some improvements will be made to mapmaking -- or perchance, even "modding", which was never really supported aside from third-party hacks. On the low end, support for mp3, Vorbis, or some other compressed audio format for custom sounds would be nice instead of .wav, but if they aimed higher they could rejuvenate a player-generated content community for years to come.

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Around 2005, I converted about 3 AOE2 playing friends into StarCraft players. I had created some melee and team based maps over the years prior if I had an idea, but it wasn't long before everyone was making their own maps. For a while, there was a new one about every other week. We would call each other about every night asking if we could get on B.net, then wait 20 minutes if there was a new patch.

The Starcraft 2 modding is incredibly in-depth* and that scene is slowly dying.

* I am pretty sure that Blizzard actually made an entire other game, Heroes of the Storm, using those same tools

HoTS uses a different engine and completely new netcode to SC2.

It does use the same engine as StarCraft II. It originally started as Blizzard All-Stars and was supposed to be a custom map for the SC2 arcade, but the team ran into technical roadblocks that pushed them into making HotS a separate game.

>the team ran into technical roadblocks

The "technical roadblocks" were no easy way to monetize it as a map.

Just to take you back even further, it originally started as "Blizzard DOTA".

Do you have sources on this? The conventional wisdom in the community is that it's the SC2 engine -- a view backed up by the game's origins as an SC2 map, similarities in internal file formats, folder structure, the nature and availability of video settings, and this 2014 article by Polygon that confirms it outright [1]. Other articles from 2014 [2][3] talk about how the same team handled the development-until-release of SC2 and Heroes of the Storm.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/21/5735230/heroes-of-the-storm... [2] https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/6778-heroes-of-the-st... [3] http://heroes.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/heroes-of-the-st...

And all of those mods are available to play for free! There are a lot of fun multiplayer mods.

http://us.battle.net/arcade/en/

The paid product is for competitive multiplayer and the single-player campaigns.

Those are NOT mods. Those are custom maps.

>MedianXL is a mod. Desert Strike is a map.

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