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And he's not alone, either More people can do it, but right now they have to do tedious hex-editing stuff. (And yes, as long as StarCraft can open it, people can open it). Making something that's capable of loading-saving opensource would make it too simple for a few people to turn this into a program, and then everyone and their dog can open protected maps. That would be bad.

EDIT: This was in reply to urmom. I messed up doing the quote somehow.

What's so bad about not protecting your maps?

I mean, are you seriously scared of people opening your map, changing the Credits to himself, then spreading it to other people? For one thing, he's helping spread YOUR map. Or are you scared of people finding out the little tips and tricks you've accumulated over the years mapping?

Personally I'm not that much against protection, but I'm not one of those who would support unprotection programs either.

Think whatever you want, it'd be tough to persuade people who've relied on map protection programs to protect their maps from... whatever they think they're protecting the maps from.

If there's no swaying anyone from ignoring map protection completely...
I'm assuming that there's a line of code in the Open function where, if the map was detected to be Protected, an error message would appear. Can't you make the program partially Open-Sourced so that function would not be able to be modified?

'Course, I had no idea what I would support for, so I voted for Old Version Open Source!

pcfredz, for some people having people unprotect your maps and change all your hard work is like when you were young and youd make an art project then someone would come along and ruin it youd feel sad because it was like that much time that you worked on it was taken out of your life. i dont care if people unprotect my maps to get help but not copy triggers(i sometimes unprotect maps for curiosity) but it feels awful when you see your map all over b.net with someone else as the author.

sorry but i couldnt think of another example at the moment(an art project) what was i thinking?

umm, SF being open source wont let you look at my code...

Yeah, but I was thinking of Heimdal getting isom right on target, making his code open-source, and it would make everyone in the world know the way isom is structured.

There's less than a handful of people left in the active SC community that do programming well enough to make anything of source code, so I don't recommend it.

Should you decide to make a Starforge X here are my suggestions of things to fix or replace: Move up and down triggers, dont necessarily make an auto-save but an auto-revovery, the minimap so that the colors match staredit's colors, (i dont know if this next one is only in my copy of Starforge 2.2 because I was having some problems getting it started at first) make it so that in the triggers the custom unit names are recognized. When i make a trigger that says Current Player Bring 1 Bounder to Location, it does not recognize the name bounder and I have to reset the default name settings for that unit. And maybe have a doodad layer so that trees come whole instead of a base and a sprite. (But still keep the old stuff so that we can do just that base or just the sprite) Fix the "unused players do you want to set as inactive" window that comes up with autosave.

Although unhappily, i've got to agree with this, personally i think, from a second view, just release a better version than currently on offer, which is more effective and efficient in all ways that StarForge isn't.

1 Line of code in 5000 to make it open unprotected maps? Interesting.

Don't wanna it to be opensource ! There WILL be an version who open protected maps and this will sux, i explain u why i dont like people to unprotect :
my first cat&mouse in jungle :
i made it open source and now it's ed up ! some people eidt it for MAKE IT UNFAIR !!!!! THAT OMFGING and now people usually play my "ex-map" who is UNFAIR like a !!!
now i'll always protect maps and i dont want them to be opened !

Here's an idea, if it hasn't been mentioned already: If you simply must have open source, then make the file loading/saving features seperate from it (like in a seperate DLL or as a compiled link file or whatever). That way people can doink around with the fun stuff, and we can all avoid the ridiculously overemphized issue of map protection altogether.

theres alot more than 5 thousand lines of code in it lol. I remember them saying there was 10,000 lines and that was many versions ago. Arn't there like ways to search though the code though or you think it would be structored or commented well enouth to find it somewhat easly. Then again i don't know what im talking about here.

PS. Can we please not make this a unprotection debate thread.

With most programs, less than 1% of the actual 'lines of code' end up doing 99% of the work, so yeah 1 line out of 5k (or more) is pretty common. Sometimes even less (as in removing lines, changing existing ones, or nesting them).

I used to think that. Then someone took a map I made, removed me from the credits, changed some stuff around and started spreading it like mad. In no time was the map up to version 5.0, while I was still at 0.98.

Whoever did it, used an early version that contained lots of bugs, and no one believed me I made the original map. So after that, I started protecting my maps, for good reason.

I see. Personally, it's never happened to myself, so I don't have firsthand experience. Well then, I guess open-source would be out of the question then.

well, i guess, seeing as not all of the sc community is like us and dont steal maps, those newb bas as long as we keep it into the sc community i dont see why we shouldnt have open source...but i doubt that is possible

Dlls r0x of course

Personally I'll be content without an open source version because I'm not programming-literate enough to help contribute to it, and I doubt many of us here at SEN would be able either. Sure, there are quite a few, but you might as well make it open-sourced to those few people... which, in the end, isn't really open-source anyway.

Actually if you ran the Open Source version it would be so much slower i doubt it would run effectively, but Tux has it right, create a separate library for the write section and therefore stop that process. However, with open source, all that the would-be person do would be add the code for unprotecting and opening maps, and linking to the write library parts.

"So much slower..."? Are you trying to bull people so they vote closed-source? If it's the same exact code, and the source to it gets made available to the public, I don't see any reason why it would be affected.

...or are you trying to tell us that Tux will not work on the program as much as he would have if it was closed source? I fail to see the logic here.

Have you worked with Programming before? If you don't compile the program before running it, which shouldn't be done if you are testing A single feature, then you can debug it using a Interpreter, which works at one line at a time, converting that line of code into Machine code to read, and checking it performs correctly, then moving the next. Therefore it will run slowly.

Getting back to ther other issue, about the open-source. If you look at it from the prespective of Tux, who rightly said that it could be used for malcious intent and i agree.

[EDIT :: POST 1,500!]

Yes, actually, I have, have you?

...and my point was, the source code usually comes SEPARATE.

As for "...which shouldn't be done if you are testing A single feature...", the fact of the matter is: if you're testing a feature, you're probably not going to care about the speed of the program.



You made it sound as if though an open-source version would make the program slow PERIOD. You made no mention of people running the source of the program in the compiler prior to compiling it. Besides, you agreed with Tux that there are very few people that are even going to bother with the source. So, if those "very few" people are the only ones that will run the source from the compiler, why bother mentioning it at all?

um, a debugger does not work as a interpreter =p

Personally, I think it would be a bad idea to make this application open-source. This is a very widely distributed application, and anyone can go in, change a few things, save it as the same version, slip a trojan in, etc... and re-distribute it under your name. This will give StarForge a very bad name... Please don't do this - Call me paranoid, but it I think it would be a very bad idea.

Sorry, was ed up at the time of writing my post. Appears i made many mistakes within it. I meant that you could use a syntax debugger beforehand to test it then something etc.

Ah hell, go for Closed-Source, everyone will just use it for the maps, and what else can most peopel add...

Here's some things that need to be put in with the next Starforge:

-Allow to set player race to "Random"(So it has 'Random' greyed out instead of Terran/Protoss/Zerg).
-Allow to use Unit IDs in triggers and briefings(0-65535).

and the most importent one of all

-Allow to use the arrow keys to move through Players/Units and be able to click on the little boxes and keep using the arrow keys without having to click back in that white box thingy.

lol?