Yeah, I'd love to try my hand at designing some maps for Demigod.

If you take a look at Starcraft, the most popularly played maps now, many years after the release, are usermade ones.  Giving users the ability to create their own content is the best way to ensure ongoing content for a game, as opposed to continuous expansions from the developers.

i don't know any successfull multiplayer game (mmo obviously don't count) that doesn't have some kind of map editor. Demigod needs it!

And free content at that!  *nom nom nom*

Sins has a map editor.  I'm all fer a map editor as well!!!

You are right WarlokLord, all maps are unique 3DStudio files, the only thing the Demigod editor does is letting you place the flags, citadels, towers et.c

As such making custom maps will be very hard since each one of them require soo much detail.

Gas powered games and Stardock are both a fan of custom mods.  They plan to have mods in the game after release at a later time.   My guess is probably 4 months after release.

And some people specialize in textures anyway. I've seen amazing stuff made mod-wise for games. It's not hard to work off a texture someone else made and alter it or to simply work on a texture and pass it off. So completly new looking levels isn't out of the question for modders, we just need a big enough of a community.

Still, I feel like it should be possible to create levels with some kind of prepackaged level editor a la Super Smash Brothers

Hi all,

My first ever post on these forums, this topic is one that really interests me.  From reading this thread if the maps are done in 3d studio max, and if this isn't going to change, then i can actually make maps with 3d studio max.

However if maps were made, would it be possible to make pathways for the creeps and place citadels on the map.  How could this be done without a map editor?

Furthermore if it does turn out to be that we can make maps this way, which would be longer than a normal map editor, can we then go about making maps with multi levels ?  like multi-platform maps, or maps that ascend up a mountain side, 2 gods on either side with a strategic flag at the top of the mountain for instance ( random thought )

I think when a map editor becomes available that multi level maps are taken into consideration, where the camera would make the upper levels transparent if zoomed in enough for when you units are on the lower levels for example.

Hope a stardock moderator can get bac kto me on this thread about these questions raised,

regards

p.s thanks for reading my first post everyone

From quotes back in early development hear and on GPG's forum, it seems like multiple levels are problematic.  If I recall correctly, the engine is built around 2D perception of reality and 2D physics.  This means that if someone were on a higher level, a ranged character would shoot above and through the floor and hit the person.  Apparently there is no way to prevent fire like this from occuring other than to have the 2nd level far enough away from the 1st level to be out of range.  Also, I doubt the engine supports making the upper level transparent for teired maps.

Hey just joined this forum to comment on this thread. I work as a 3d modeller and game designer. The design and look of the map is possible to be done in 3ds and then have a collision mesh done which is used for the ground but this is highly unlikely as it would result in very buggy and incredibly long times for creating maps. It is much more likely that they created an editor to work with their engine.

The level design is not complex and there is very little intricate details so you would most likely see the developers of this game creating their levels with an editor very similar to that of warcraft 3, and this game being as short and dull as it is will deffinetly need to release and SDK fast to gain a good community. I myself play DOTA on Warcraft 3 quite often and find that to be a much better game, it has about 95 different characters and a couple of hundred items.

I finished a tournament on demigod on the hardest difficulty within a few hours and im not even that great of a DOTA player so don't expect any good dota players to start playing this instead, which was the developers intention.

Iv put this game down now and most likely wont pick it back up until an SDK comes out so that i can build dota in it

As a long time War3 Modder, I can appreciate the value of a good editor, however, in the case of DemiGod, I kind of prefer that it's all official. Maybe a year from now if we dont have new DemiGods delivered as promised I might jump on the editor bandwagon.

Zoltan, other than your post indicating your are a DOTA fan, I wasn't clear on what you were saying.

Demigod does use 3D models for maps, only lightly translated to add things like lanes, portals, etc etc.  Fact.  That's been stated by devs.

Ergo, it's impossible to use a 'war 3 like' map editor, or at the very least represent a huge amount of coding.  Look at the existing maps, and you'll see that even with such an editor, it would be impossible to produce maps of the quality already given us.  To many 3d features, like the pillars holding up the platform in crucible, the canals undercutting cataract, etc etc.