StormGate's Map Editor unveiled - Exclusive sneak peek inside!

Description

 🌟 StormGate's Map Editor Unveiled - Exclusive Sneak Peek Inside! 🌟

🔍 Explore the Uncharted Territories of Game Development!

🎮 Are you ready to embark on a journey behind the scenes of FrostGiant's upcoming masterpiece? Join us for an exclusive sneak peek inside the highly anticipated Map Editor, where creativity meets innovation in the world of game design!

🚀 What to Expect:

🗺️ Map Editor Unveiled: Witness the unveiling of StormGate's cutting-edge Map Editor, a game-changer for both seasoned developers and aspiring creators.

🎨 Endless Creativity: Dive into a realm of limitless possibilities as we showcase the powerful tools that empower you to craft immersive and breathtaking game worlds.

🌐 Exclusive Features: Discover unique features that set StormGate's Map Editor apart from the rest. From intuitive controls to mind-blowing visual effects, get ready to be amazed!

👀 Why Watch?

Whether you're a game development enthusiast, a seasoned developer, or simply curious about the future of gaming, this exclusive sneak peek is your golden ticket to a world of innovation and inspiration. Get a firsthand look at the magic happening behind the scenes at StormGate!

📢 Join the Discussion:

Have questions or insights? Drop them in the comments below! We'll be engaging with the community to answer your burning questions and hear your thoughts on the future of game design.

🚨 Don't Miss Out! Hit Subscribe and Ring the Bell!

Stay tuned for more exciting updates, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes content. Subscribe now and be the first to witness the evolution of gaming with StormGate!

🎮 Connect with StormGate:

🌐 Website: www.playstormgate.com

🌩️ Unlock the Power of Creativity with StormGate's Map Editor! 🌩️

Transcript

hey guys I've got some exciting stuff to share about a new RTS game called stormgate it's still in closed beta so everything is super secret but I'm going to reveal a sneak peek at the in-game editor trust me you don't want to miss this one the reason I'm excited about stormgate is mainly for the in-game map editor I am a gamer but I'm more of a coder and if you know anything about Warcraft and Starcraft they spawned entirely new game genres like tower defenses and mobas simply because of their map editor stormgate has promised to have an equally powerful editor so we can make awesome custom maps just like before I would love to keep making maps for Warcraft but because blizzard has failed on a lot of their promises recently particularly with Warcraft 3 reforged The Gamer Community has canceled them and so there's not a lot of players left I don't want to make a map that no one's going to play maybe that will change under Microsoft we'll see but I feel like stormgate is doing a lot of things right and that's got me really excited to build Maps again if this is interesting to you hit that subscribe button to see my future content I'll be doing tutorials on how to use stormgate editor as well as hosting all of my custom apps for free open source on GitHub so in case you don't know anything about stormgate let me just give a quick overview this is from a popular Warcraft 3 streamer named scrubby and as you can see stormgate is still under closed beta which means anyone who has access to the game has signed an NDA which means they can't stream or broadcast or even capture screenshots of the game however grubby received special permission to stream in order to advertise their Kickstarter so I'm going to use his footage to explain the basics of the game and afterwards I'll give you a sneak peek at the editor okay I'm just going to hit play and explain a few things as it's going so on the left side here we have luminite which looks similar to a gold mine from Warcraft and in the center is the command post which would be similar to a town hall and these workers are called Bobs which would be similar to peasants so it's your typical RTS and then on the right side we have theum which to me looks like a mix between minerals and VES and gas from Starcraft so the idea behind stormgate is it's ex- blizzard employees who've made a brand new company and they want to make a spiritual successor to the Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 games so the elements are going to be a mix of both as well as adding their own flare on top of it the first thing that I really like about what they're doing is they're trying to improve on the genre not just make a copy for example over the luminite and ethereum you see workers 8/12 and 0/5 that tells you how many are currently assigned to gather resources as well as the maximum previous games did not have that you had to count and you had to memorize what the maximum was it's a minor detail but it makes it a little bit more user friendly in addition you can't see it on this screen but if you watch enough gameplay you'll notice that this bottom right corner that has all the buttons it will show icons that are Rel relevant to the currently selected unit if something is selected but it's also available for quick access to all your commands without selecting anything at all here's an example where he's using it so you'll notice he has nothing selected he's just picked the build button and he's going to pick a habitat which is basically a house he did not first pick a worker and what's cool about this is once he picks where to place the building the closest worker will automatically walk forward build the building and then go back to what they were previously doing so I like this because RTS games are very complicated they require High actions per minute and I think this simplifies it a little bit for new players okay so this is basically the look at the Vanguard faction I'm not going to go into more detail because this video is really going to be about the editor but just so you know here's another video with grubby playing the second faction which is infernals and there has been a third faction confirmed but not yet announced so we don't know the name of the faction or what it'll look like and they've rumored that they're going to be making a fourth faction in the future so this game will be free to play and it will be improved upon over time with new maps campaigns factions units Etc over time the only thing that will be DLC or paid content will be campaigns and skins so the base game will be free for everyone so I think this in faction kind of reminds me of Zerg and the previous faction the Vanguard kind of reminds me of Taran but definitely plenty of differences and one thing to keep in mind some people have looked at the graphics and been disappointed that they weren't as good as they'd hoped don't get too caught up on that just yet the game is still in beta and I think the reason Frost giant doesn't want people streaming the game yet is they know that there are pieces that are unfinished and are not really ready to be critiqued yet so so I think things are definitely going to continue to improve in fact just comparing this beta to previous betas there's already been huge improvements made okay let's quickly skim over the kickstarter so we can see what they've announced about the game and then afterwards I'll give you a sneak peek at the editor so stormgate is a free-to-play game but despite that they've got almost $2 million in the kickstarter and almost 20,000 backers and they've still got a ways to go that has me excited because if that many people are interested in pay paying for a free game I bet exponentially more people will be interested in playing a free game and the more popular the game the better because that will give us continued updates over time as well as when I make my own custom maps I'll have people interested in playing them hopefully another thing I'm excited about is right here they claim that their game is three times more responsive than Starcraft 2 if that's really true I'm really excited because I love playing Tower Defense games with tons and tons of units so if they can support that that that will be awesome along with the kickstarter they've announced some of the features that will be coming I'm not going to go over all of them but a few I'm interested in the weekly mutators if you watch a stream from asmin gold it shows him playing three versus the AI and there were two choices he could either be Vanguard or he could be a separate faction called blockade blockade is actually not its own separate faction it's a small spinoff from the base Vanguard faction with some minor tweaks one of those tweaks is it gives you access to a hero which can gain levels through experience and has really powerful abilities I don't know what other mutators they'll have in the future but being able to pick which tweaks to add on to an existing map is pretty cool to me in addition this new player assist tool I'm assuming that's kind of like a tutorial but as I've already mentioned RTS games require High actions per minute but they're reducing that by automating some of the repetitive or obvious actions so you don't have to click as many things to accomplish the same goal goal I think this will be nice because it's really hard for a new player to get into an RTS also this expanded bot personalities I think will be interesting in Warcraft 3 for example you had easy normal and insane basically the only difference was that insane got extra free gold without even having to mine it and that allowed it to send armies at you faster it's not really fun to play against a bot that you know is cheating against you with stormgate they're making the Bots more personality based so you might play against a bot that's passive you might play against one that's aggressive you might play against one that Turtles in their base and builds turrets to defend itself Etc another thing I'm excited about is the engine itself so the base game is built on unreal which I think was a smart choice because it's open source and it's well proven since it's been used in so many other big game titles and most importantly by them not building their own engine they could focus on the RTS gameplay itself but on top of unreal they built their own RTS engine called snowplay and one of the features I think is really cool about it is this roll back essentially if you have really fast internet low ping you probably won't even notice this but for anyone that is playing on Wi-Fi this will make a huge difference essentially it's going to simulate the game on your local PC and separately simulate it on the server and whenever they syn up as long as nothing has changed you won't notice any difference and so you will feel like you're playing zero ping but occasionally if something is different it'll behind the scenes roll back your local simulation to match the server and then replay all of your actions and so you might notice a very small stutter in that situation the thing about an RTS game though is a lot of times you're building your own base separate from your opponent and you're not interacting all that much so during those times even if you had high ping there will not be a reason to roll back because nothing your opponent did would change any of your actions so the only time that you would notice a small amount of stuttering when you're playing on high ping is just in a really big action-packed fight the vast majority of the time you're not going to notice anything at all it'll feel like zero ping I think that's a pretty cool concept and because they're able to simulate low ping they've actually said they're going to get rid of region specific servers so instead whenever you play A ranked match it will find the server that's in between both players that that averages out their ping to be equivalent so for example if I queue up and I get matched against someone in China instead of my ping getting really slow because I have to play on a Chinese server or vice versa than playing on a North American server it'll pick a European server so that it's equid discent between us and we'll each have the same ping so if there is a small amount of stuttering we'll both experience it the same which won't give either player an unfair Advantage I think this is pretty cool okay and then last thing before I show off the editor these are heroes they're not not going to be in the one versus one ranked mode but they will be in the 3 versus 3 the 3 versus Ai and the campaign and basically they are Advanced stronger units that have special abilities and they gain experience and levels which they call veterancy now for the moment you've all been waiting for this is the in-game map editor now I'm pretty sure stormgate was not ready to reveal this yet because they've intentionally made it a a tiny thumbnail and they sped the video up really fast and made it blurry so you can't really see what's going on it's enough to get you excited but not enough to see the fine grain details and I think that's because it's still in beta and they don't want you to nitpick little things that are not finished yet but don't worry I've copied this video off as a separate clip and I'm going to go through it frame by frame and zoom in and show you everything there's also two other places you can find videos related to the editor one is on their YouTube and one is this video at the very top of the kickstarter around like the 4 minute Mark but you don't need to go search those up on your own I've combined all three clips into one so we can watch it together this is the first video which came from the kickstarter I'm just going to hit play and put it in slow motion after it's done we'll look at individual frames and zoom in on each button and talk about how they're going to work this is the second video which came from YouTube same thing I'm not going to explain it until after it's done playing. okay I don't know about you guys but just watching that video gets me so excited I can't wait to get my hands on it so let's just go over every little button and talk about how it's going to work and what we can learn about the game from it first of all you can see from the top left corner that the editor is called y edit I think this is kind of going off of the Yeti theme since that's the main logo of the company second of all we can see that the file extension is called ydi and this is obviously a proprietary file extension even though they're built on top of unreal all the RTS specific game elements needed to be coded specifically for stormgate so same thing with their custom apps they're going to have their own file extension next let's look at the top of the screen we have multiple tabs right now we're on terrain then we've got triggers data abilities and import unfortunately I analyzed every frame of footage and I was not able to get a screenshot of all of them but the ones that I don't have a screenshot for I think I can guess pretty well what they do so terrain is is obviously the screen that we're on right now where you're going to draw the world as well as place down units objects Etc triggers is where you're going to write all of your custom code so that'll be things like when a unit enters a region unlock a treasure chest open a gate play a sound Etc data is where you're going to edit the attributes of your units so things like their base Health their movement speed what faction they belong to Etc and abilities would be similar to that I'm not sure why they're separate tabs but a worker is able to construct a building a hero is able to cast a spell those type of things would be considered abilities as well as things like passive Buffs and debuffs on your units or enemy units finally import is where you would get custom 3D models or sound effects or music and put them into your map I'll go into each of those tabs in more detail in a minute first first let's go over the current tab we're on terrain so here you can see we're selected on terrain and we have five different tools we can use the first one we're selected on is called Cliffs I think a better term for it would be ramps this is for spots that allow you to rise from one elevation to another next is a paintbrush and that's what we saw earlier in the video where they were drawing a dirt road on the ground so that's essentially the textures that are painted onto the landscape next this is a height map tool so this is what I would think of more as Cliffs whereas the other I think would be ramps but looking at this spot of the map you can see that there are different levels of height of the mountain but there's not a ramp that you can walk up so this is what you would do with the height map button you'd only use the cliff button when you're ready to build a ramp and I'll show screenshots of how the paintbrush and height adjustment tools work in a minute but next we have this icon which I don't have screenshot of it being used so I'm just going to have to guess but based on the look of the icon I would assume that is for editing the Ping of the map in particular also because that's a feature that should be in the editor that I don't see anywhere in the existing screenshots so pathing is the idea that you have land units water units air units and each of them can only walk on certain types of terrain and not others so it's specifying where there are obstacles that c certain types of units can't walk through I don't think stormgate has mentioned anything about water units but we have seen water drawn on the ground so obviously a ground unit should not be able to go into the water last although this icon is the same as the pathing icon we know for sure this is actually the water icon I think they just have it as a placeholder and they'll swap out the icon later uh I'll show you the water screen in a minute okay while we're in the cliff mode you can see a bunch of buttons across the top I'm not going to go over each of them individ ually but just imagine therefore determining the slope of the cliff how wide it should be Etc you also can pick the shape of your brush either a circle square or Diamond most of the other tools have the same feature you can also pick the size of your brush and then I think this Terrace height is essentially a mix between the height map and the cliff so it would kind of be the slope of your ramp how quickly it should get to the top or how tall the top should be and finally we have this Cliff art this would be similar to like a tile set or the texture that's being painted on the ramp obviously we've got a mini map here on the bottom left it says here contrl Z and control y will do undo and redo which obviously would be the same as the top right corner here the back arrow and forward arrow and then also says left and WR brackets to change brush size so on your keyboard right here if you hit the left and right bracket Keys it would quickly adjust that okay let's move on to the next screen this is the texture painting screen so right now you only see eight textures available but don't worry there's much more than that at the very bottom you see a tile set so it's selected on Forest Autumn right now so you could change to a different tile set to have different textures they're essentially grouped so that if you're building a castle all of your textures would be similar to that castle but if you're building a spaceship your textures would change to that so within each tile set it looks like there's around eight textures and grass the shape component is the same as what we saw previously the size changed slightly so it's hard to see but this says 13x 11 so that would be the size of your paintbrush but with the cliff it was just different dimensions different scale and then intensity I'm assuming that that means you could blend two tiles together on the same square and so the intensity would determine how much they blend together I'm not entirely sure on that that's just a guess and then this looks kind of interesting it looks like there's a button to turn on and off Dad painting so I'm wondering if you can actually paint on top of dads I'm not certain about that but a dad would be something like that giant skull you saw in the video or also there's a big rock we saw as well those are like non-interactable objects with a unit or a building you can command them to do something with a doad you can't but a doad still Blocks Your Paving if you try to walk into it so a doad is more like scenery okay let's move on to the next screenshot here we're looking at the water icon the first has a water table and it seems like it also has a concept of a tile set like the painting did because we're selected on Forest Autumn so I imagine if we change this dropdown we could pick a different look for the water I'm not sure what that would entail maybe they have one that looks more icy or something next you can see water types here we are selected on River it's hard to read but I don't know what this other option is I'm going to assume it's something like ocean or lake because there might be slight differences in how water works in those scenarios but I'm not sure we've got the same shape and size as before but we also have another option which is the water height so I'm assuming where you look at this Cliff here you may want the water to go all the way to the very top of the cliff or you may only want it to go halfway up the top so I think that's what this water height would be for and I'm assuming this bridge here was created under doodads it obviously doesn't look very good it has no texture yet I'm sure that's just a placeholder and they'll come up with something better in the future okay next screen ignore the fact that we're on the water tab this screen is just to show a zoomed out view of the entire map so here you see we have a health Camp a Speed camp and a Siege Camp those are neutral creatures that you can kill that give you a bonus after they are killed so obviously if you're playing with a hero killing them would Grant veterancy which increases your experience level but the Health Camp creates a giant green Mist that you can stand in which heals your units the Speed camp is similar except it gives you a speed boost and both of those last for a couple of minutes so you might clear out a Health Camp before you go attack the enemy with the plan to retreat back and heal your army after the fact and then The Siege Camp actually grants you a catapult you can't control it and it's on a timer it will automatically go attack the enemy base but it'll announce it to them as well so that they know it's coming and it will stand at the outskirts and throw rocks at their buildings and units to help you break their base I'm assuming that they're just experimenting with this kind of stuff right now it doesn't necessarily feel good to me like it belongs in an RTS but this is the map editor we can customize Maps however we want I think they're just testing out the technology because they want to have neutral camps that provide bonuses I'm assuming they don't exactly know what bonuses they're going to use yet maybe they'll keep these in the game we'll see so those would be added from the units tab the other things that I think would be added from the units tab would be these resource camps of luminite and ethereum as well as obviously any units that you want to start in the game rather than being constructed by the player things like your starting eight workers your command post or in a custom game if you wanted to build a tower defense or something you might pre- the towers or the creeps that are spawning or something other things that would be considered units would be things like your army and your buildings you would only need to access them from the units tab if you're going to pre- them on the map before the game starts say you're building a tower defense and the enemy creep waves are going to spawn as you're playing you would not click them from the units tab you would spawn them through the triggers tab instead and if you're just designing your units you you would do that in the data and abilities tab if you think about object-oriented programming you have a concept of a class which defines the basic concept and then you have an instance of the class which is like a clone that has its own values for each variable other terms for this in unreal would be like a blueprint or an archetype or in other video game engines like Unity it would be a prefab so let's think about a worker unit the class or the archetype blueprint prefab it would have the base information about the worker the fact that it can build buildings the fact that it can gather resources what its Max health is what its 3D model looks like etc those things are equivalent across every single worker for that faction but an instance of an individual worker would have their own variables for things like their current health their current location a on the screen how much resources are in their backpack waiting to return back to the base Etc things that are specific to each individual unit okay let's move on to the next screenshot this one we can see we're on the units tab there is a drop down to filter for which player a drop down to filter for which faction this button is grayed out it's a little hard to read but it says edit and I don't know what other options it would have inside of it under brush we have this weird Arrow icon I'm not sure what that would be for but then we have delete and insert those are pretty self-explanatory and then I don't know why the shape and size controls are different compared to the other screens but if you'll notice here the unit they're selected on is a tree normally you would think of a tree as a doodad but in stormgate it actually is somewhat interactable because there are certain units who have an ability to destroy a tree by attacking it or or doing ability on it they don't get chopped down as a resource like in Warcraft but I think because they can be destroyed they're not purely an obstacle and that's why they're considered a unit so in that case having a size of in this case 5x five makes sense because you might want to put down a clump of trees all at once and the shape makes sense for that same reason as well but if you were selected on a worker I don't think you'd want a grid of 5x5 workers in a diamond pattern maybe you would it just seems a little bit odd and along with that rotate I think just randomly rotates the unit to be facing a random Direction and that just improves the natural look and feel so if you look at these trees if they all were rotated the exact same way it wouldn't feel very natural okay so we have a filter here that they picked tree and then a list of all the different trees they could choose from almost all of them are destructible but this one says a resource tree I'm not entirely sure what that is because resources are things like luminite and ethereum you don't gather trees in stormgate as a resource so I'm wondering if that's something that they still coded into the engine as in case they want to use it in the future I'm not really sure because for example they mentioned that their heroes are only going to have abilities not items but they know people when they make custom games are going to want to have items so they're still coating it into the engine to make it possible for modders to use items even if their maps are not going to have them and I imagine they'll probably use them in the campaign as well and here you can see the actual brush that's going to place down the tree so that would be the 5x5 size that's this green square we see on the right okay let's move on to the next screen here I just wanted to point out on the right side we have a map drop down that they opened on this Frame so we can have a little sneak peek of what's under there unfortunately it's cut off off on the right side I have a separate screenshot that's not cut off but the text is blurry so I'll show both and we can talk about them okay this screenshot came from the animated gif from the kickstarter and unfortunately it's lowquality blurry and small so I had to zoom in but at least it's not cut off so from the cut off version we can see the top option is save map the second option is save a and by looking at the blurry version I know that that says copy so that would be for like cloning the map if you want two copies and then you've got a refresh button and a bunch of symmetry buttons I'm guessing that the refresh and symmetry buttons won't be in the final version they don't seem necessary uh I don't exactly know what they do but it seems like if the editors kind of locked up or not updating then you would click those buttons but really you would expect in a professional tool for something to just know when it needs to be refreshed and to just automatically do do that so I think the only real interesting option is the save a copy because definitely while you're working on a map you'd want to back up your work frequently and you might have multiple versions of your map saved separately but otherwise I think you're generally just going to click this save all button at the top instead okay let's move on to the next screenshot this is the doad screen and you can see that they filtered for skull and these are the choices based on their filter you have almost the same shapes as before but for some reason there's not a diamond Choice the size looks similar to the previous screens but then we've also got this button called stagger I assume that that is similar to the rotate button we saw under units which is probably like randomizing something about the dudad to make it look more natural okay but here we've got something really interesting on the right side is a new toolbar we haven't seen before and if you look really closely here it says selection mode that has not been seen before and the clue that we're in selection mode is this blue border that's all the way around the render screen we've also not seen that before either so selection mode is they've basically highlighted this skull and on the right side they can modify the attributes of the currently selected item so under transform we've got location rotation and scale I think it's obvious what each of those mean but then this seek terrain and generate Collision I think are pretty cool so generate Collision would be if you have a unit that you're walking around the terrain if the dudad generates Collision your unit will not be able to walk through it but if it doesn't generate Collision then it would basically just be background art that you could walk right over now for something like the skull I don't know how it would look if you walked into it without Collision I'm imagining you would disappear in inside the skull I don't think it would be smart enough to actually have you walk up the top of the skull so I think in general you would want Collision unless it's truly just eye candy on the ground and that would typically be for smaller objects I think but then the seek terrain option I think is also interesting so I'm imagining what that would do is when you are moving the location of your doad let's say you try to pull it down through the floor the floor is terrain so as soon as you hit the floor I think it would stop moving and not let you go any further so that way the bottom of these teeth of the skull are always going to be at the top of the terrain if you had that option turned off I think it would let you actually go through the terrain so the teeth would be covered they would actually go underneath the ground so depending on what aesthetic you want you may want that turned off or on I think that would probably allow you to have like floating buildings or units as well if you turn that option off and dragged up I'm not sure we'll see okay but this toolbar on the right side is interesting because right now we're just clicked on dads but what if we clicked on units went into selection mode and picked a unit I bet you could edit all the unit properties so I mentioned before that data and abilities is where you would modify the archetype of the unit but I think on the right side is where you would edit a specific instance of a unit so if I want one individual worker to start with half health I think I would click on him in selection mode and edit his properties on the right side but if I wanted all of my workers to increase their Max health I would do it under the data tab I don't know what all the properties would be on the right side for a unit but I would imagine you could change its faction maybe the color it's rendered as maybe the veterancy what experience level it is ETC and we haven't talked about this button but before but there is a button that says toggle properties I'm pretty sure that's what would open this toolbar on the right side and then this map info button I don't have a screenshot of that but I'm just going to pop up a similar screen in the Warcraft 3 world Editor to show you what it probably is going to look like I'm imagining it's going to be similar so here is the map property screen in Warcraft you can change the name of the map give it a description change how big the map is ETC I'm not going to go into depth here because stormgate may do something completely different but I'm assuming that's what this map info button would do and then obviously this build map would be similar to save but it would probably also compile all of your triggers which is your custom code and if for whatever reason there were errors in your triggers I think they would show up here on the bottom right corner under logs okay let's move on to the next screen we've mostly already seen this before it's just editing a dudad you can see right here there's a giant rock which is selected called Mossy Rock dudad 1 and they are in edit mode and it seems like they're in selection mode because there's this blue border but it's strange because it's not across the entire render screen and we also don't see the toggle properties window open I don't know if that's a bug or what but if you watch the video right now they're rotating this rock and you see these little purple circles next to the Rock and actually if you watch really closely I think somewhere around here there's a purple error text that shows up as well and in fact you can even see an error on the top left here in red it's so blurry you can't even read it so that kind of shows what they're mentioning here that this is still in beta so I think we can expect the editing experience to be a little rough around the edges in the beginning and that's probably why they're not allowing us to look at it until the future when they're really ready to launch but it's still exciting to get a sneak peek okay there's one final screenshot I wanted to look at now this one's a little bit confusing and unfortunately it's a little blurry because it came from the animated gif so you can see that the entire y edit program is encased inside of the unreal editor itself so the Chrome for the unreal editor is here on the outside and here on the outside I'm assuming they did this by mistake while they were recording but I do kind of wonder if we'll ever have the option of opening up the game itself inside of the unreal editor hopefully that's not really necessary because I think the ideal would be that the editor is a primary tool that even their own employee developers are using because that would mean it'll be fully powerful and all the bugs and Kinks will be worked out because their developers are not going to deal with a bad tool but I'm wondering if right now because the editor is unfinished they're having to use both but but there may be a scenario for advanced modders if there's something that their editor doesn't allow maybe we could open it up and unreal itself edit some more advanced properties and do even more advanced Maps I'm not sure if that will be possible or easy but something to think about so you'll notice I did not go over any screenshots for triggers data abilities or import that's because I wasn't able to find any screenshots in any of the footage that Frost giant has released in addition there's this regions tab I could not find any screenshots for either so let me just explain how I think those will all work just to give you an idea so regions is essentially coordinates in your 3D world that are assigned to variables and the reason for that is you're going to want to use them in your triggers to activate certain things when the player interacts with those coordinates for example if you're building a tower defense you might create a region which specifies where the creep wave spawns from and a separate region for where the creep wave is supposed to walk towards the trigger is where you would code that actual functionality but the region is where you would specify the coordinates so let me just show you in Warcraft how it works I'm betting in stormgate it will be very similar so here's a blank map in Warcraft if I go into the region pallet and click add I can just draw a little coordinate on the screen then if I go into module trigger editor you can see a visual coding language and I could just rightclick on actions and do new action and choose search and type create for example creating a unit this would be useful in a tower defense game as I mentioned earlier it defaults to create one footman for player one red at Center of playable map facing default building degrees each of these Blue Links can be clicked on to change so instead of creating one footman I can click the blue and change it to five footman and and hit okay so the part that's the region is where I defaulted to center of playable map instead I would click that link and then click the link for playable map and pick my region variable that I created which is essentially this blue square that I've drawn so now my trigger has been changed so Frost giant has said they will have a visual or gooey scripting language so that means for someone who is not an advanced coder doesn't feel comfortable typing code themselves they'll have this drag and drop concept similar to Warcraft so that I think is very cool but for someone that does want to code inside of Warcraft you can click edit convert to custom text and this gives you actual code here's an example of something I'm really excited about stormgate in Warcraft 20 years ago they came up with the Jass programming language and at that time there wasn't a lot of languages that were better so there weren't too many complaints but over time other languages got more and more features and J got left behind and now nobody really likes Jass anymore when reforged came out they picked Lua as the new scripting language people can use if they want and that's a fine Choice a lot of people like Lua but I personally really like C and so I don't want to be forced into using Lua if it's not my preferred language what Frost giant has done with stormgate is they've announced that they're going to use web assembly now web assembly is not actually a programming language it is a compiled executable and it's designed to run on a web platform so basically inside of your browser but it doesn't have to run inside your browser it can also run through the nodejs platform which is basically a headless browser so think of headless as an executable that's running in the background with no UI so by stormgate supporting web assembly there's two really cool things that that enables number one when you're coding in a low-level language like C++ you have to code it separately for iPhone and separately for Android and separately for Windows every device is so different it has to be coded differently with a highle language that's not an issue but with highle languages like I mentioned before not everyone has their same favorite language web assembly I think is a great compromise because almost every popular language can be compiled to web assembly and web assembly is designed to be crossplatform think about your web browser every device has a web browser and they all can render the same website almost identically so this opens up the possibility that they could run stormgate on any device that Unreal Engine supports so I'm imagining a possible port to the Future to other platforms like maybe the Xbox game store we'll see the other thing is somebody that likes Lua can code in Lua and compile to web assembly but where I like C I can code in CP and compile the web assembly and most importantly because web assembly is a compiled language it should run very fast whereas an interpreted Language by default is going to be slower so the scripting and Trigger editor for stormgate I'm very excited about next let's go over the data tab again I don't have a screenshot so I'll show you what I think it's going to look like in Warcraft 3 if you go to module object editor we can click on a unit like a peasant and see all of the different attributes about the peasant and remember this is not an individual peasant that's on the screen this is their archetype which defines what a peasant is that's going to get cloned for each time an individual peasant gets created so for example we could change the 3D model we could change how fast it moves what abilities it can cast Etc I'm guessing stormgate data tool is going to be similar to this but probably a lot more user friendly with search buttons to help you quickly find the attributes that you want to edit next the abilities tab I'm not entirely sure how that's going to be different than than data I honestly can't even really speculate in Warcraft they do have separate tabs for units and abilities but they're quite similar it's just the list of properties that you can edit is a little bit different if stormgate abilities tab was basically just a data tab of only abilities that wouldn't really make sense to me because then why do they not have a units data Tab and a dads data tab like Warcraft has so I'm assuming abilities is going to be completely different than that I'm really interested to see what it is maybe it's more defining custom spells that in Warcraft had to be done through triggers so in Warcraft any ability that was built into the game you could clone onto an existing unit and make very minor modifications but anything really Advanced you had to do in triggers and it was very complicated and games like DOTA almost every single ability was completely custom and all had to be done in triggers I'm hoping that with stormgate this abilities tab allows you to create custom abilities without having to copy an existing ability and without having to code it in triggers we'll see finally we have this import tab in Warcraft I think the equivalent would be this asset manager so here's where you would drag in 3D models and sounds and music that you want to use in your game my assumption is stormgate will allow you to drag in any file format that is common so 3D Studio Max blender fbx Etc but it probably will convert it to Unreal format which is called a cooked asset and that would just optimize it for the Unreal Engine so that it'll run faster in the game that's my assumption we'll see but something a lot of games don't support is custom 3D models and I think it's because they're worried about lawsuits if you take a copyrighted asset like Mario and import it into your game then the company has to worry about getting sued by Nintendo I'm not sure how storm Gate's going to work around that Warcraft basically just ignored it and I'm not aware of any lawsuits and they have all sorts of cool custom apps with Pokemon and anime characters Etc so I'm guessing there will be something in the stormgate terms and conditions that says if you're a map Creator you promise not to use copyrighted assets and then people just choose to ignore it but then at least stormgate is not held reliable however I do know they've hinted at allowing map creators to sell their Maps as DLC which is nice because typically map creators have to go to separate platforms like patreon to ask for donations I think if it's built into the game itself people will be much more likely to donate which in turn will allow map makers to spend more of their free time improving their Maps so I'm guessing even if the terms of service for free maps is not enforced if you're a paid map creator I'm sure if you choose to use copyrighted assets your map will get banned because stormgate has to protect themselves but I'm betting there'll be some kind of underground Community where people can Sid load maps that are not officially sanctioned by Frost giant to get around those copyright issues we'll see what happens but just the fact that the import tab exists at all is very exciting cuz a lot of games just simply don't have that at all built in but one really cool thing I forgot to mention is they've already said that this editor is built in inside of the game itself so with other games like Warcraft you actually toggle back and forth between different executable programs you have a world editor that's completely separate from the game and that makes debugging and testing really annoying because you're constantly having to quit out of the game reload wait for all the 3D Graphics to load into your video card and then in order to get back to whatever state you're testing with you might have to skip ahead by like typing and cheat codes to get all of your resources and really quickly build everything just to get to the spot that you wanted to test well with this if you can just toggle back and forth at any time I'm imagining that it's going to keep your game State going and so you could be halfway through playing a map decide you want to tweak something and toggle back and forth that's what at least what it sounded like when they've talked about the editor so that is really exciting to me they've also kind of said that their developers are using the same editor for the maps and campaigns so they want them to be first class citizens with all of the features working well that has me excited because a lot of games you can tell that whatever editing tools they give for modders is like a dumbed down version that doesn't have access to a lot of stuff that the real developers that work for the company have so I'm I'm hopeful that that's not going to be the case and we'll have all of the capabilities in the editor that the developers working for the company actually have last but not least I want to announce that I'm going to be creating a series of tutorials for how to use the stormgate map editor as well as I will live code my own custom maps that I will release to the community as open source so you can learn by watching and then make your own Maps the first map I'm planning to work on will be a mix between a Warcraft 3 map I like called survival chaos and the team fight tactics game from Riot which is is part of the League of Legends franchise it's essentially an auto battler so I'm going to combine those two genres together if you aren't familiar with survival chaos it's kind of like a tower defense except instead of building towers and upgrading your Towers you control the minion wave and upgrade your minions so I'm super excited to give you more details on that as soon as I can and hopefully Frost giant releases the editor as soon as possible so if you're interested in that content please subscribe so that you can get updated but in addition I do have a GitHub sponsor page where you can support my work some of my past work that you can take a look at and sponsor is I made a Warcraft 3 map de protector which essentially allows you to take an old Warcraft 3 map which no longer works in reforged or has been abandoned by the author and resurrected essentially the original author probably protected it so it can't be opened in the editor this allows you to open in the editor make what whatever changes are necessary to get it working with reforged or add new features to improve the game and then release it to the community now that does have a little bit of a bad rap because people don't want to have their work stolen or they don't want to have hackers and cheaters ruining games don't worry my tool specifically has protections for that so I think it's only going to be used by people who want to improve the community and resurrect old dead Maps so as soon as I'm able to I will feature my stormgate work on here and if you're able to make a donation to buy me Mount and do so I can stay up late coding all night that would be super helpful and most importantly whenever I receive a donation it just tells me that people appreciate my work and it motivates me to do more one of my sponsorship tiers says that I will give you a shout out in my next YouTube video so if you want to be famous click this button but no honestly in all seriousness thank you guys so much my latest sponsors are RAR gate Michael dubsky moralc and Zoro 2121 honestly guys you give me so much motivation to keep going thank you so much for your donation I couldn't do it without you stay tuned for updates on my custom stormgate maps thanks for watching!