Q&A 39 (another Map Maker series) has been posted on SCLegacy. There's lots more, but this one stuck out at me: looks like we finally have confirmation of modding support. Hot damn.

Awesome!

One more reason to buy SCII

Finally, a good reason to use mods. They are so hax0r, but I never found reason to use them because almost no one else can.

Wait, so like you can create your own race on Map Editor using unused units and current units and add it as a 4th race? Or...
Blizzard is okay-ing mods for SC2?

Seems both to me.
This is a great step for modding comunity.

It seems that the SCII Staredit is a dual maping\modding tool.

But still, yay modders!

I noticed that too. Cool.

Blizzard has never been against mods, why would they change their stance in SC2? Especially since WC3 has numerous mods made through the map editor.

... You guys have never played on WCIII. It had full modding support. Why would SCII not?

WC3 has decent mods? I've never seen one.

Worldedit had no "modding" support. It was a map editor. The second you tried to step out of the bounds of map editing you were on your own.

However you could backdoor this by loading the map files into a secmpq.

So this is the first sign that Blizzard has actually begun to recognize what modding actually is - not restricted to maps.

The thing is, that Blizzard is now integrating everything you can do in modding into mapping.

So you're telling me that changing stats and stuff in SE counts as modding?

Everything you do in a map doesn't suddenly make it a mod. Dota is not a mod. It's a map. Mods are global. Yes, they're upgrading what mappers can do - cool. That's what they did with WE. But implementing these changes into a mod has always been a pain in the ass.

SC2 looks like it's going to have a data loading menu like what supcom has. That's the first step towards supporting mods that they've ever taken, except maybe softcoding dlls in diablo 2.

Some maps have their own unit techtree, gameplay and interface.Some others have completely new races and models.These are mods for WC3.

A map is a map is a map. If it ain't global, it's not a mod.

Of course, this means that there's going to be over 9000 games being hosted that are all using n00b mods that suck. Like every server on Halo PC trial version.

Yeah, I had missed the distinction before. I had an idea on 'templates' which are not only mods but possibly triggers and locations which can be applied to different maps and I posted about it, and am hoping someone saw it .

I think that modding and mapping will become a big blur in SC2, since both will be downloadable over B.net I assume, this is going to be epic