Starcraft 2 Galaxy Map Editor - Change the Size of a Building



This tutorial shows how to change the size of a building in the Starcraft 2 Galaxy Editor.  In this example we will modify a Supply Depot to be of size 1x1.  This requires editing 3 different data types for the Supply Depot: the Unit, the Actor, and the Model(s).

To get started create a new map and set the type to custom.  Go to View->Show Grid and check the small option.  Now we'll be able to verify that our new Supply Depot is indeed 1x1.  Once that's taken care of hit F7 or go to Modules->Data Editor to fire up the Data Editor.

Unit

In this section we're going to create a new Supply Depot called Tiny Supply Depot.

1) Select Data Type: Units and find the Supply Depot unit.  You might see several Supply Depot Units with different Sources.  Pick any one, they are the same.

2) Right click the Supply Depot and click Duplicate Unit... Leave Supply Depot checked and don't check anything else.  This will tell our Tiny Supply Depot  to share all of these "things" with the existing supply depot.  We'll end up duplicating a few things ourselves later, but leaving the boxes unchecked prevents the creation of a lot of unneeded junk.  Click OK.

3) A Supply Depot Copy unit has been created.  Double click it and change the name to Tiny Supply Depot.  Hit the Suggest button to set the ID, then click OK.

4) The last thing we need to edit is the unit's footprint.  Navigate to the Movement tab, and scroll down.  Change 'Pathing Footprint' to 'Footprint 1x1 (Contour)' and 'Pathing Footprint - Placement' to 'Footprint 2x2'.  The Pathing Footprint sets how much space the structure will take up on the map, while the placement footprint indicates how much size the structure needs to build.

Model

At this point the data for Tiny Supply Depot exists, but there is no data about how it should be displayed.  The next step is to edit the models.

5) Select Data Type: Models and find the Supply Depot model.  You'll see a few different models for the supply depot, Build, Death, Placement, etc.  Ultimately you'll want to duplicate all of these, but for now we'll just focus on the regular Supply Depot model.

6) Right click the Supply Depot and click duplicate.  Leave everything unchecked and click OK  Rename the resulting Supply Depot Copy model to Tiny Supply Depot, Suggest an ID, and click OK.

7) Scroll down about halfway through the options and you'll see the model section along with a picture of a white ball.  We don't have a model file for our Tiny Supply Depot, so change this to SupplyDepot.m3.  You should now see a picture of a Supply Depot, good.

8) Scroll down a little further you'll see the fields Scale Maximum and Scale Minimum.  If these values are different every unit generated with this model will get a random size in-between Scale Maximum and Scale Minimum.  We want all our Tiny Supply Depots to be the same size, so we'll make sure they're the same.  The default scales are set to 0.6 and we want our Tiny Supply Depot to be half the size of regular Supply Depot in each direction, so set the X and Y fields to 0.3.  You can change the Z field also, but I like to leave it as is.

Actor

Last step, create the actor for Tiny Supply Depot.  This will allow us to view the Tiny Supply Depot and actually place it on the map.

9) Select Data Type: Models, then find the Supply Depot, duplicate, and rename as before.

10) Most importantly we need to associate this actor with our Tiny Supply Depot.  At the very top of the options you'll see the Unit Name field under Token.  Change the value from Supply Depot to Tiny Supply Depot.

11) Lastly select the Art tab.  Change Model and Model (Editor) from Supply Depot to Tiny Supply Depot.  If we had duplicated the other types of models we could set the other artwork here as well, but we didn't (or did we? you overachiever you).

NOTE:  There is a scale option in this menu that can also be used to change the structures size.  I highly recommend against using this.  This scale will only affect the main model, so you'll still have to edit the model scales for the build and placement models.  It's best just to do all of your scaling in one place, the model section.

And We're Done!

In just 11 easy steps we've created a smaller supply depot, amazing!  That's all there is to it, or is it?

You may have noticed that we didn't do anything to handle the Supply Depot's lower ability.  That's right, if you do a lower on your new depot you'll see that it doesn't do what we want, because we haven't told it to.  If you want to correctly configure lowering and raising you'll have to go through this same procedure for the Supply Depot (Lowered) Unit, as well as create duplicates for the 'Supply Depot - Lower' and 'Supply Depot - Raise' abilities.  Have Fun!

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