Staredit Network

Personally, I don't use SCMD2's trigedit for creating triggers from scratch, I use classic trigedit to make the trigger, and if its part of, for example, a binary countoff, then I would go to the trigedit to use copy/paste/replace, anything.

The fact that SCMD2's text triggers are all together and you can work with more than one at a time, gives it a huge edge over SF text triggers.

And a little knowledge of VB can let you create a program to duplicate whatever you want, like trigger duplicator, yet outputting text rather than straight to a trigger in a map.

SCMDraft+Starforge>SCMDraft>StarForge>SCX-Tra>StarEdit

Starforge has an excellent trigger editor, once you get used to it, but is horrible at terrain, unit placement, and all those extra features.

SCMDraft has a terrible trigger editor, but it's unit placement, terrain, and all it's extra features work perfectly.

X-tra allows stack, has the old-fashioned mediocre click, click, click trigger editor. It has mediocre terrain (isom. only). It has terrible unit placement, no stack, no grid lock. It also has no extra features except colored text.

Staredit, well, it's pointless. Exactly the same as X-Tra, but there's no colored text, and the buildings lock into the grid.

I like to use a combo of Starforge and SCMDraft. I use SCMDraft for all my units, properties, terrain, and extra stuff like stretching. I use starforge because of it's trigedit, it's the best one out there. I guess SCMDraft's trigedit would be useful for making universal changes

I find SF's trigger editor only useful in cases where each trigger you are making is unique and different, which would eliminate the point of having all triggers shown at once (SCMD2).

However, there are many cases in which several similar triggers are needed, and being able to edit them all at once is a great time saver. Also, many complex systems rely on series of triggers which are very repetitive and things like binary countoffs only change by the value of the death counter. This is where SCMD2 is used.

And personally I don't find SCMD2's regular classic trigedit too bad to work with. It's idiot proof and easy to look at in it's sentence like format.


Also, I agree with Desperado, saying SCMD2's trigger editor is "terrible" is a big overstatement.

SCMDraft 2 has two trigger editors. The first is the same as StarEdit except it lets you use any units and all players in trigger editors. The second trigger editor is styled like a real programming language. Claiming that this is "terrible" is as big a display as ignorance as you can get. Are you saying that all programming languages are terrible? Are you saying that all programming is a bad thing? Are you saying that all software is a bad thing? Are you saying that computers are horrible worthless things? Because this is what you imply. By saying it is terrible, you are claiming that the very existence of electronics is a bad thing. Anything that uses electron spin to represent a zero or a one is in fact bad to you. Language, itself, is bad to you. You have implied that communication between anything, even people, is a bad thing. You don't want people to be a functional species. You are saying that we should be reduced to single entities, which never interact. Monkeys interact. You are saying we are less than monkeys. You have insulted dozens of mammalian and bird species with your ignorant claims. You have insulted the human race itself.

Scmdraft2 could use a good briefing editor.
Other than that I don't think X-tra has anything worthwhile.

I like SCMDraft because you can view pure sprites. SCXE just deletes pure sprites.
Edit: I use SCMDrat for terrain making and SF for the actual map.

This is just a matter of preference for me, but I cannot stand using the trigger editor (trigedit, and classic) in SCMD2. They just dont compare to the stability of SCXE. Classic was a step forward, towards SCXE, but its hard to use and isnt nearly as fast. Starforge is also in my opinion a better trigger editor, mostly because it has autocomplete already implemented in it, which saves time. Trigger editing in SCMD2 is hard and slow. Also, the syntax is very locked down, and not very forgiving. Im currently making a mix of Starforge and SCMD2 style triggering on my own, that will be able to switch inbetween the two, or mix them. Also, the syntax will be highly configurable and even be able to mix actions and contions in the same section. Currently it outputs perfectly, but IM working on having it input perfeclty too.

I haven't checked this since I added my post, and many people have been saying how SCMDraft2 won't mess up anything, which is true usually, but my brothers maps terrain was screwed up by using its hex tiles and the map resizing.