Staredit Network

how is

"give yourself a pat on the back" considered a flame?

i just request that to be taken off, the other part was a flame thou. and anyway i was instigated by them.

yes unfortunatly im a 16-year-old teenager that doesnt take shiz from other people... well...15 ....(psst can i get -20% for my b.day!?!?!..haha j/k )

back on topic..

I personally think that starforge wasnt made so people can hide their triggers from other people from viewing. it was more to make sure people that steal your maps dont steal them. meaning they cant edit it.

If you think that the trigger viewer is "so" bad... Remove the comments from your triggers...


If the person wants to manually go througheach and every trigger, let ;em! It's them who are wasting all of that time... Personally, I'd find it funny if that person spent all of there time trying to look at allof your triggers. Whether it is to learn, or if it is to "steal" triggers. Let them! Because by the time they go through all of the triggers, they could have easily learned it, and gone on to something else...

For the people that agree with Trigger Viewer... Keep "Agree-ing" Because I am on your side. This is for those who do not like it, or want it.

You know that most newer protections remove comments to preserve space...

Even better!

Making the program almost useless.

Exactly.

But, I am still for open source mapping...

I still think if people could agree to not take credit for others work, that would pwn.

But, that would be the same day the world is perfect...

Just don't clean up strings in uberation. Maybe an option when "finalizing" your map, Make Trigger Viewer compatable?

That just defeats the whole purpose rexy. Really...

Nearly, but both sides still win in theroy. However, seeing how anti-Trigger Viewer everyone is, it doesn't serve much purpose. With "final protection" killing comments anyways, there should be some more obvious view of how to keep them, but nuke everything else that's unused.

I was directed here because an unnamed poster wanted a favour from me to tell everyone why we support this kind of stuff.

I'm essentially responsible for allowing and supporting this program on this website. I'll give you my reasoning.

"Protection" was orginally created to prevent people from accessing your map in order to make little or no changes that you did not wish to occur and slap their name on it. Some people attempt to put their name or website on random maps in order to gain "fame", because fame is apparently the greed of some of the most selfish individuals on battle.net today. Unfortunately with the internet, annoymous actions under a screenname means there are no consequences when they take such actions, so they do not care about the work of someone that may have taken hours or even days.

Thus, protection was formed to prevent people from opening maps. At the time there was no solution other than to prevent the map as a whole from opening. Many individuals who looked at maps for legitimate uses cryed out and wanted to open these maps. Such individuals created map unprotectors, and ever since it's been an battle between protectors and unprotectors.

When the trigger viewer was created, I supported it in everyway. It allowed individuals to view maps without the hazard of saving them.

Worried about people copying your map trigger by trigger? I wouldn't be. If someone is too lazy to make their own maps, it takes more effort to copy all the triggers and such to another map.

Want to protect triggering techniques or passwords in the map? It is the only downside, but really, there should be no "secerts" with map making. If anyone knows enough about map making they can easily duplicate the triggers just by looking at the map. If its something new you discovered, WHY would you want to keep it to yourself? The more people who use such a technique, the more fun maps. Could you imagine if kept things like hyper triggers and whichever to ourselves, and only one or two maps on battle.net used these techniques? Staredit.net was created for learning and expanding, not for hording knowledge to ourselves.

In terms of my beliefs with protection vs unprotection, im in the middle. I feel that there is NO need to protect a map other than for a creator to preserve their name for the work they have done. The trigger viewer brings us as close as we possibily can to that point, so people who hate map stealers are happy, and people who want to open up maps just to look around are happy. There may be some disagreements, but its like a democracy. The point is to make the majority happy.

Hope I gave you some insight. I'm signing off until I'm needed next time.

Where the hell did you come from?

And thanks for that piece of mind... And that is acutally, right where I stand.

hes kinda the creator of the site, your overall question was why we support it. he answered why. dont bother trying to give him reasons to take it out. hes retired anyway.

Just because maps are protected does not mean the information is hoarded. Because of our Experimental maps section, our Map Assistance forums, our Concepts forums, and our tutorials database, I don't see how any information is hoarded.
Which is exactly why we have the Map Assistance forums. So the experts can look at the maps with the triggers/special effects or even get it described to them and understand how to make it and pass on the knowlege to others. The only difference is this work is voluntary. The other is invasion of privacy.

Again I go back to the spyware and random surveys analogy.

Alright, im here again to reply to whatever people said.


I don't read the site. But people on my MSN list do, and they give me links sometimes to things they think I should read. One person in peticular asked me to reply here.


I only came in to give my reasons for supporting it. I don't have time to go through 5 pages of this stuff. No need to go crazy on me, I'm just coming in here and explaining why what I did was the most logical course of action. It seems everyone else has either forgotton or ignored my policies and why I set them, so I was just explaining it again.

There isn't. I carefully thought through SENs policies and its the closest you'll get to making people happy. You can never make everyone happy, because there are people who are extreme as to having all maps open and editable, and theres the other side which has people who want maps to be protected and unopenable by anybody.

If we were to make an unprotector editor making all protections useless that everyone can edit, then the side which wants the protectors wouldn't be happy.

If we were to not support map viewers and prevent any type of unprotection and viewing type program to edit the website and such, then that would make the people who want to view and edit maps unhappy.

Really. There is no way to make everyone happy. So, you try to make everyone happy. Even the both extremes can agree its better than nothing. Having a map viewer makes the protectors go "well, okay, as long as they dont edit it", and the unprotectors go "well, okay, at least I can view it to learn whatever from it".

I'm not saying we're hoarding information. But if someone developed a cool new trick or technique, and they left their map protected, it would be impossible for anyone to find out how to do it. If the person who discovered hyper triggers protected their map and decided to keep the technique to themselves, because it was "their" triggering technique, we wouldn't be using that in all the maps we have today.

I will show up occationally, but my future project is more important. I'll only come when I'm directed by someone on my msn list, so if you really want to get a hold of me, make a topic in null or something, and eventually I'll find out.


A lot of the policies you see here were CAREFULLY thought out and I weighed the benifits vs the bad. I managed to generally make everything for the majorities benifit, although not everyone may have realized it when I first put these things in place.

As I've said many times before and Yoshi has said the same:

Staredit Network's main purpose is to help people learn how to make maps, get better at making maps, discover new mapmaking techniques and just have a good time. If you are here for fame, you my friend, are in the wrong place.

Guys, before you continue on with this discussion, let me ask you this: have you TRULY tried using this program?


Stop complaining about the trigger viewer, there's no reason to be against it!! Do you HONESTLY believe that people CAN use this for bad purposes? Try using it on a map. Do you really expect this trigger viewer to bring you much insight and expand your knowledge of the map?? I honestly do not and cannot imagine how anyone can truly learn from the tcurrent or past versions of this trigger viewer.


- First of all, you can only see the triggers. Not the map, not the units, not the placements, not the locations. Only triggers. And as we all know, you need to see the whole map to fully understand triggers, especially knowing where locations are.
- Second of all, triggers are formatted just like how SF does it. It only sorts them by comments. You have to click on every single trigger to see what it contains. And lots of triggers had their comments reset for compression purposes, which brings me to my next point...
- Third of all, all the strings, like trigger comments, locations, and switches are reset for most maps, especially for those maps that supposedly are suppose to blow you away since these maps tend to be larger and the map maker would probably want his map size smaller. It's literally impossible to understand triggers if the locations and switches aren't named.

I take it that most of you for/against this trigger viewer haven't truly tried to use this program. I was initially against this program because I didn't truly try to use this program. But after I tried to use it on a map one day, I found it to be of little use and help.

ADDITION:
Now once a newer version of this trigger viewer comes out, THEN there's reason to discuss about it.

There is nothing to argue. The aspect of unlearned knowledge far outweighs the aspect of keeping secrets hidden. Also, the only thing against Trigger Viewer is the sort of end game thing such as "email me to recieve a prize", but far little maps have that. Regarding other map secrets, who cares? People may find them by cheating, but since there should be no secrets that unbalance gameplay, they are only ruining it for themselves.


I have another version ready for release that lists all locations used in a trigger and their location on the minimap. I am debating whether to release it.

Not quite...

I have used the program. I helped make it...

It sorts them by trigger number and displays only the comments to help it load faster.

I don't like map unprotecting and I know sen isn't really supporting it. by the way... Yoshi's active again?

I can view the locations because I have the old version.

They are?!?!?!? sweeeeeeeeeet someone telll me where to find a map unprotector. It just gets me sooooooooo angry when you try and try for 20 hours to beat an rpg, and there's a simple bug in there. Also if you get stuck on an rpg, you waste like 30 minutes trying to find out where to go etc. If you had the map unprotector RPG's would so much more fun, not to mention there's more room for creativity, and different versions.