Sometimes I wonder what I would find if I opened up the old SC1 Campaign in an editor, what I would find.

How intricate or simplistic would Blizzard's triggers be?

Has it been done? Can it be done? If so, I would like to see it.

You can extract the original campaigns from the game files. Farty even made a CampaignUtility program for automating the process, which he linked in a similar topic asking about this: http://www.staredit.net/topic/8189/#14

I've reuploaded the program on SEN for convenience: http://www.staredit.net/sc1db/file/3021/

If you're interested in extracting other Blizzard assets, you can always just download WinMPQ and then load up either Starcraft.mpq, Stardat.mpq, or BroodWar.mpq (I don't remember which one) to extract anything from the game (campign missions, music, sounds, etc). Note that in order to properly view the files in WinMPQ, you'll need to load the Starcraft listfile in WinMPQ. Simply open WinMPQ, then go to Options >> File Lists >> Add List File.

Doing this will give you an introduction into modding, if you're interested. I think extracting the campaign missions was the reason I used WinMPQ, and I eventually got into a little bit of modding myself.

To answer the OP, the SC Vanilla maps are generally pretty simple. Quite a few of those missions were just 'destroy the enemy base' after all.

The BW ones were much more sophisticated. But really nothing that complicated in the end.

BW actually has the same fundamental flaws as vanilla. There's really not much going on beneath the surface.

Blizzard has never made a compelling single player experience in any game, much less StarCraft, which largely failed in every aspect it set out to do well in from a storytelling aspect. If you want to learn, learn from someone who's put a little more effort into their project than Blizzard's own employees did.

I thought the storyline in BW was pretty well done. The later Zerg levels were obviously rushed, though.

SC2 is crap, although again HotS was better than WoL.

HotS makes WoL look like a grade-A campaign. I really don't know how you can even pretend to be objective if your standards are so skewed that you mistake hard for the swarm as being anything close to the level of (still piss-poor) quality that wangs of puberty flaunts.

The story in BW is impossible to make work without restructuring the entire Protoss race and removing the infestation of Kerrigan from ever occurring. While these flaws began in vanilla, BW's inclusion of Kerrigan as a main character and shit-tier Protoss lore (Xel'Naga/Shakuras/Raszagal/"infested" but not really infested Protoss) exacerbated these issues well beyond what they would have been initially. The fact that the UED teleport from Earth space to K-Sec in almost no time at all also artificially shrinks the distance between the two areas, whereas before BW it was widely believed that Earth and K-Sec were so far away from one another that the Terrans in either area existed in a vacuum, completely distanced from one another, which is the only reason that they worked at all. Overall, BW's gameplay was slightly improved, but the lore was thrown in the trash since vanilla Zerg map 4, and was already going downhill since vanilla Terran map 4. Oddly enough, vanilla Protoss map 4 also contains one of the most retarded digressions of the entire game's plot, vanilla and BW included, so Blizzard really must have had a thing for 4s.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 18 2015, 3:43 am by Pr0nogo. Reason: xd

I can agree that the Protoss acted like idiots in BW. Trusting Kerrigan and defying Aldaris was a stupid decision on their part, which ended up in Raszagul being executed by Zeratal. I love Brood War, but I can't deny that the characters acted like complete idiots in that campaign. Honestly, the only person I have respect for is Stukov, but he got destroyed pretty early on.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 18 2015, 11:05 am by Dem0n.

In other words, you never actually liked any of the Starcraft lore/campaign to begin with, and weirdly seem to think that a story shouldn't evolve over time and should remain in stasis.

The story should definitely evolve. A progressive story is one that changes and isn't under lock and key by an Arbiter's stasis field. Vanilla and BW's stories evolved in the sense that aspects of them changed, but the quality either remained the same or got worse, which is what I was criticising. I'm really not sure how you gleaned that point when that is so obviously not what I was saying in my previous post.

e: I loved the story of StarCraft. Then I grew up and got some standards, and realised that nothing is perfect - and not only that, but very few things could even hope to come close. Brood War is the best game ever made, but its single-player experience is still very poor and it was coded horrendously ass-backwards. There is plenty of room for improvement, even in the best game in the world, and you're deluding yourself if you really think that the campaign was well-made in any aspect. Likely the only mostly-positive aspect of it was the voice acting performances, and even then, the scriptwriting that gave the actors their lines was really, really bad.