StarEdit

StarEdit is Blizzard Entertainment's official level editor for StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War. The editor's trigger system allows users to change maps radically and create custom map scenarios. The StarCraft community has constructed new editors and functionalities that grant users even more power to modify the game. The company Microstar sold a CD with new levels created with the StarEdit feature, but was forced to stop when Blizzard won their court case against its distribution.

Scenarios are generally either melee or Use Map Settings (UMS) games. Melee games start all players at a random location with only their main base building (command center, hatchery, or nexus) and four mining units. This is the most popular type of game, used in tournaments and ladder games. Most casual melee games are played on "money" maps, maps with extremely large amounts of immediately available resources. Initial mineral and gas deposits are often set to cap of 50,000 or more units to eliminate the need for expansion sites. "Money maps" have been criticized for failing to challenge players to develop key skills such as order-building and expansion-taking, favoring weaker players. Defenders of money maps claim that the game still requires strategy and skill. However, no professional leagues exist for money maps.

Use Map Settings games are less structured and often incorporate liberal use of specialized triggers and setups to change gameplay. Scenarios based on 'genres' have surfaced, including Defense maps, StarCraft Diplomacy, RPG's, Maddness, Bounds, and LotR/Lotrish maps. Single-player "campaigns," long scenarios played out over several maps that have been edited together with StarEdit, have gained prominence. Following the lead of the Antioch Chronicles, many campaigns include modifications that add new "heroes." Mapmakers create new art files, creating completely new units and characters, which StarEdit can't do. Popular campaigns include Campaign Creations' The Fenix, Legacy of the Confederation, Life of a Marine, and StarCraft.org's official campaigns, The Shifters and Fields of Ash.

Custom Scenarios

Scenarios are created with entirely different sets of rules, objectives, and units. More popular user created scenarios include Evolves, StarCraft Diplomacy, Golem Madness, Turret Defense, Sunken Defense, Nightmare RPG, and the ubiquitous Tower Defense. Maps set in the story lines of popular television shows are also widely used. Android Menace is a particularily developed example, taking place in a large portion of the Dragon Ball Z story line. Maps with infinite minerals are also very popular, examples including "Fastest Map Ever" and "0Clutter." Many real-world events, including the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II and the American Civil War, have also been used as a base for StarCraft maps. There have been recent StarCraft maps depicting single or multiple scenes from books and movies, such as Troy and The Lord of the Rings. These maps include The Battle for Pelennor Fields and The Battle for Helm's Deep. In addition, a large amount of StarCraft players are also engaged in large, multi-player "Lord of the Rings"-type based maps, with each player controlling and developing a whole nation, complete with heros and units. Instead of the building their forces from the ground up, players are given control of pre-built cities and armies. Units are periodically created at a special point, called the "spawn point". The purpose of these maps is usually to destroy a certain building that, when destroyed, disables an enemy's ability to spawn units. These maps range from the traditional Lord of the Rings v. Last Alliance (LA) to newer maps such as The Rings of Power (TRoP) and After Lord of the Rings (After-LotR). Older maps include Lord of the Rings version GOLD, which many accept as the origination of the "castle building" idea, and Middle Earth version Pre Lord of the Rings, which introduced the concept of hero units that were dauntingly stronger than standard the units in a standard army, shifting the focus of the game from large-scale battles to single unit strategy. This includes the strategy of operations, or "opping", which involves using one hero unit to achieve a goal, such as the destruction of an opponents spawn(s) or heros.

The popularity of custom maps is not limited, however, to only online gaming. Because StarEdit allows the mapmaker to "link together" several maps, single player "campaigns" (which are long scenarios played out over several maps, hence the name "campaign") have become prominent in the community. Popularized by the revolutionary The_Antioch_Chronicles Antioch Chronicles, many campaigns even come with "MODs" that feature new "heroes" (i.e. the mapmakers create new art files to be imported in to StarCraft, thus creating completely new units and characters - something StarEdit alone could never do). Popular player-made campaigns include Campaign Creations' Legacy of the Confederation, Life of a Marine, The_Antioch_Chronicles The Antioch Chronicles, and StarCraft.org's official campaigns: The Shifters and Fields of Ash.

Some custom maps and campaigns, including StarCraft: Insurrection and StarCraft: Retribution, were released commercially via third parties. These add-ons met with mixed criticism and did not sell well.

Third-Party Editors

More powerful, third-party editors, including the StarCraft X-tra Editor, StarForge, and SCMDraft, allow users to "stack" multiple mineral fields and buildings on top of each other, change player colors, use hidden AI scripts, protect maps from common theft, run size-less sounds directly from the StarCraft disc, change the color of text, and compress their map. In more advanced areas, users can place raw sprites, sprite-units and disabled units.

Most of these editors (excluding "StarCraft X-tra Editor") are designed from scratch, eliminating most of the limits of the original StarEdit, the "StarCraft Campaign Editor." Many of these 3rd-party programs have revolutionized StarCraft map making and new discoveries as to what different sprites or unit numbers do to the game, or as the most effective way to cloak certain units are discovered virtually every day.

Many revered StarCraft fansites including StarCraft.Org, Staredit Network, StarCraft Index, and StarCraft Map Makers Guild (SCMMG) have been built around the capabilities of StarEdit and its respective third-party editors.

External Links

• StarEdit Utilities - An exhaustive resource of StarEdit Utilities and add-ons.
• StarCraft Map Makers Guild (SCMMG) - A well known and revered StarCraft map maker's community.
• Starcraft.org - Official Blizzard fansite and large custom map repository.
• Campaign Creations - A long-running SC campaign site, home to some of the most popular and highest quality StarCraft and Brood War campaigns.
• StarEdit Tutorial