I just figured out how to edit maps in integrated campaigns (campaigns where the maps are built into the mod) and of course I IMMEDIATELY used this newfound skill to fix Vagrants. Mission 6 is no longer impossible to complete after simply reducing the stats of the conclave protoss from 3 to 0 and removing psi storm. The same was done for mission 7 and the zerg AI was also somewhat fixed: It actually moves now but it will ignore enemies until attacked which is a minor bug still remaining but better than doing nothing and spamming the game with spawn error messages. Regardless, these two very simple fixes have had a large impact on the quality of this campaign, raising the overall score from 80% to 85% and making it one of the best campaigns I've reviewed so far.

Download it here! https://mega.nz/folder/IJtQiIZB#UVNLQIAR1YmzhQjQKuEB_w

for reference purposes: here is the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l_ink-CKwo92syCxJmivfh7zeMZu4U0p_q5Ra7HTF4U/edit#gid=0

Original Authors: Snoopy and Rommel

Wow. That's actually my campaign. Snoopy was the alias I was using way back then.
I still have all the data for that one, too.
I wonder if you were able to fix the problem with the hero DTs freezing out for no apparent reason?

Why did you stop making campaigns? Do you even have any idea how good you are at this? Fall of the gods is one of the most polished campaigns and it would really have felt like an official blizzard game if it weren't for the completely incomprehensible plot. With this coronavirus situation now would be the perfect time to create a sequel to vagrants, there's plenty of guys who would be happy to help too.

uh... What?

Thanks for the kind words. I dropped out of mapmaking due to a combination of factors. First off, circa 2006 I've had a change of priorities in real life. Second, both of my completed campaigns I made (yeah, you named the other one...) were rendered broken by upgrading to 1.16 and I never found the way to fix them. They were both initially made for 1.10.

Actually I had a revised version of Vagrants in the works - I don't even remember if I had released it, but since you're talking about mission 7, I guess I have not, because I streamlined it to just 5 missions.

Right now I'm not in a position to say more because I need to take a long hard look at what I've got because I've not looked at anything I had for non-Remastered since, well, ages. My current project is for Remastered.

Oh, and the sequel to Vagrants was hard in the works - it was actually Rommel's campaign I took over, and Vagrants was intended as just a prequel to it explaining the origin of heroes (of the 5 main characters, 2 were his, 2 were fleshed out by me, and the final one was 50/50). It was not finished, to my eternal regret and shame.

FYI, Rommel is my dearest friend to this day, a gaming journalist and author from Moscow, but he's kind of out of straight mapmaking. We still collaborate on many creative endeavours, anyway.

Maybe this all is a way of telling me I really need to take my time and rerelease all the stuff I've worked on these years ago... Maybe it really is.

Oh, yes, and the bug I was talking about was that Dark Templar (non-trainable ones that I used as mooks while making them non-cloaked) have become unresponsive after upgrading the game to 1.16. I tried stuff like grafting the DT stats and appearance onto an unrelated unit but failed too. Since I could not find the bug's origin, I gave up in frustration and cursed 1.16. A similar thing happened to Fall of the Gods, another NPC unit got broken and wrecked the gameplay of mission 2, so I was pissed off and just threw the towel in. That campaign however wasn't due for any more of the substantial updating, though.

Speaking of its plot, it was a faithful adaptation of a book done with the author's permission. The premise was explained on the Star Alliance website (I was a part of that group and had pages up for my projects there) but it's long gone so I can't blame you for calling it indecipherable now.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 2 2020, 7:18 am by IlyaSnopchenko.

So keep them on 1.10, what's the problem? BWAIDowngrader switches seamlessly to this version and no "bcedit /set nx always" is needed.

You didn't release anything after 2006. I thought you were long gone.

I very strongly recommend that you switch to 1.16.1 immediately, or cancel if you cannot switch. remastered is way too unstable, too hardcoded, and constantly getting updates every few days that break campaigns. Just ask UEDCommander about that. He's working on a fantastic campaign and it's being suffocated to death by Blizzard's treatment of remastered. 1.16.1 will outlive remastered, this I promise you.

Eternal? No such thing. Let's finish it together You don't have anything else to do this year, what with idiotic western governments ending the lockdown too early and opening the way for a second wave of coronavirus that creates a lockdown that lasts the rest of the year.

which map in vagrants has the DTs? I don't remember. I need to test this ASAP because I have indeed switched to 1.16.1. If it does turn out that its bugged I need to rebuild this under 1.10 (which by the way isn't a problem at all as far as running a campaign is concerned, with BWAIDowngrader and a BroodWar.iso any 1.10 campaign can be run quickly and without issue, Vision of the Future 3 has a similar problem and is stuck on v 1.10 forever). By the way, have you tried using PyDAT to change which script is used? I had quite a lot of trouble importing the model for the black dream into vision of the future 2 but I got the damn thing to work after setting its model script or whatever its called to use the battlecruiser script. Then again, that's a player controlled unit so yeah... Alternatively, if you could publish your updated version of Vagrants (for v1.10 of course) that would be great and I would replace my files with yours.

I know, it is mentioned in the end of the campaign too. It's the reason why Fall of the Gods got a conditional recommendation instead of a rejection on my spreadsheet.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 2 2020, 9:52 am by Zincoshine.

Well, where to begin...
I'm really not sure if many people would bother fussing with game versions to play obscure stuff like mine? I had updated Vagrants with smoother dialogues (the ones I wrote back in Autumn 2002 when that campaign was made really made me cringe after a while) and less unnecessary maps. Then I couldn't do the tech stuff smoothly and just kinda let it die.

Well, uh, I'm alive. For the longest time I wasn't really giving SC any thought, though I have played SC2 from start to finish. The Remastered brought me out of the woodwork again, and then I found a story I've been implementing as a campaign (see it in the Mods subforum; though I think the thread ought to be moved).

Well no I won't - short of a disastrous event of the whole SC:R modding shabang getting shuttered somehow, and even then it'll be too much of a pain to downgrade. It's not that 1.16 didn't kick me in the nuts already so I have no fond feelings for it like the majority of the community. It'd solve one issue for me - the "shortage", to put it mildly, of custom portraits for SC:R - but I don't wanna deal with the old graphics, the palettes, and whatnot. If I am able to fix my old campaigns, fine, I'd leave them on 1.16 - as they make heavy use of custom portraits, and even some unit graphics - but going forward I'm not gonna stick with that if I can help it.

Well, I'm still working, corona or not, but it's a great thought. Today, of course, with all the new tech available (do all the advanced tools work for 1.16, anyway?) I'd do many things differently, especially in FOTG. I think I went rather safe with AI Scripts, too, AISE or no AISE. But that was over 15 years ago anyway.

Missions 1, 2 and 5 all use DTs as enemy units. Since the player has no detectors early on I made non-cloaked enemy DTs from the vanilla SC DT units.

Let's see what we can cobble together. I have some urgent stuff to sort out and then I'll look at the files. Since I'm meticulous with storing / archiving stuff, I have all the datafiles, down to the wireframe BMP sets. I guess I may even have the 1.10 executables (starcraft.exe and storm.dll) somewhere.

And no I haven't looked at VOTF stuff in ages... since I played the campaign, actually. Though I loved these ships from 3.

Well, I made it for fun, like I'm doing my current project. I know it was a strange idea because the source wasn't even sci-fi, but when I first read it in late '99 I immediately thought it'd be cool to try. The book was action packed and the main characters were relatively few, so with some work I thought it was really pretty easy to adapt, and I hope a couple of missions made for fun gameplay (my personal favourite was the arena part of mission 4B, I really pulled all the stops at making that one).

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 2 2020, 8:31 pm by IlyaSnopchenko.

If it is versions like 1.09b or 1.12b then I can understand why you would feel that way as those are difficult to patch into. However, with 1.10 there is no fuss at all, 1.10 can get gotten and reverted with just a press of a button, with no further changes. I am going to make this as simple as possible for the end user. I'm doing the same with visions of the future 3. You do not need to worry about this. As long as either 1.10 or 1.16.1 all is well and if you prefer 1.10 over 1.16.1 then by all means continue to use that. It isn't a problem at all.


I don't think you understand, you can't actually do anything with Remastered because 3 or 4 days later the mod will be broken and require a patch. This process will repeat every 3 or 4 days. You'll have a campaign that only lasts for 3 or 4 days before it is dead and unplayable. Have a look at the "starcraft alternate" thread by UEDCommander. In any case, I'm adding it to my spreadsheet. Does your campaign have a name yet?

Oh I have a job too, but once the hours are done I don't really have much else to do other than review campaigns... and help you make the vagrants sequel. I got a programming job so I'm pretty lucky, can work from home and maintain job security during this whole crisis.

I'll check this out soon then.

You don't need that, you only need BWAIDowngrader,d 1.16.1, and a brood war iso or cd.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 2 2020, 4:42 pm by Zincoshine.

Well, uh, I've been in this for awhile (since Jan. '19, to be precise), and come on, new patches aren't being released anywhere near "every 3-4 days", and not every one breaks something. Some of the changes have been for the better anyway, like the demise of the .bin format for dialogues, in my opinion.

I've been in touch with Alexey (UEDCommander) here and elsewhere, too. His is a phenomenal project. I'm not aiming for anywhere near the amount of modifications he's done, either, although I ve had a few unpleasant moments when stuff stopped working - but Neiv has always been able to fix it quickly. I'm rather certain that sooner or later the flow of updates to SC is going to stop. If, and only if, the modding community gets caught in a state when nobody will be there (or willing) to keep the modloader up to date, then I'll start thinking about going back to 1.16 for any new stuff. So far, I'm treating the lack of some capability (e.g. portraits) as my own fault, caused by my incompetence, not the fault of the game.

Oh, and my current project is called When One Domino Falls, right after the story I'm implementing (the story is not mine, and it's for the better as I'm always better at doing stuff to someone else's plots). The thread is in the Modding projects section. So far I've created 13 maps out of presumably 28, but for some of these, the story isn't even written yet anyway.

Well it looks like you know what you're doing so I'll stop commenting on remastered modding then... I've updated the spreadsheet to include your project's name by the way. Obviously I can't review it anytime soon but at least when its finished I will be able to

What about that Vagrants sequel though? Since you put a lot of hard work into it, isn't there any way it can be completed? What else have you made but not released? It seems like you have a lot of projects stored locally judging from what you have said earlier....

I've gone and updated my link to Vagrants now by the way... as you can see, it is pretty straightforward for the end user to run a v1.10 mod. In fact, it is easier than a lot of v1.16 mods since there is no antivirus filter or compatibility mode needed.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 3 2020, 4:31 pm by Zincoshine.

's not as bad as people may think - even I did think that modding was finished when remastered came, but it wasn't to be. The most important datafiles are intact (arr\*.dat, scripts\*.bin, rez\*.txt) or even better off now (but all compatible), the compressed sound format may be used, the palettes rot in hell, the strings / backgrounds / sprites / videos / dialogues are all in different but editable formats.

As I've told already, there's no "sequel" to Vagrants: instead this campaign was a prequel to a bigger one called "The Hammerhead Project". It was supposed to be a full fledged mod adding new units to all races. And it did but I botched making the campaign for it; 7 of 8 maps were in various (mostly, nigh-final) stages of completion. And then... something went wrong.

I still have all the data, the maps, the sounds, the whatnot. I'll need to have Rommel go over the plot and we'll update it, then see what needs to be redone map-wise. Then... I hope to finish it and pay my debt off.

It'd be a hassle to port all of that to the Remastered so... 1.16 it will be, for good or ill.

You know, judging from this sentence and the quality of the older version of Vagrants, you have a real and easy chance at claiming the title for the best campaign ever made. You just need to finish those maps and release it I've added this... hammmerhead project... to the spreadsheet in S-tier (If I understand correctly, that's the name of the campaign connected to vagrants that you never finished. I think there might be some translation mistake here...)

re-release? As far as I am aware, you never released your stuff to begin with aside from Fall of the Gods and the old version of Vagrants.

One final thing I should note, the primary aim of my spreadsheet at this point is to end the obscurity of custom campaigns, give them publicity and popularity, let people know starcraft is far from dead and has a massive extended universe below the surface. I'll see to it that your campaigns get played by lots of people.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 4 2020, 6:09 am by Zincoshine.