Lately I’ve been thinking about writing a browser extension for my beloved teamliquid.net, which is my main source for all things StarCraft. I’ve already created a set of Greasemonkey scripts specifically for Team Liquid,  but that was before I learned how to write a proper browser extension. After writing Zearch for Firefox and Chrome, I feel a lot more confident in cutting Greasemonkey out of the equation and going straight for a proper Team Liquid extension.

As far as desired functionality goes, it’s a given that the two existing scripts will be integrated. Although, I really should fix the banned user script first… that only seems to work for me about half of the time. In addition to the sidebar updater and banned user linking, I will add some functionality for the stream list, at the recommendation of my dear friend Will. I will allow customizing of the featured streams list, and sorting by race.

In order to do this, however, I need to figure out how to set and retrieve configuration options in both Chrome and Firefox. Unlike Zearch, this tool will need some long term data storage. Not only will I need to save user preferences for featured streams, but I’d also like to allow for some configuration, like which features to enable / disable and other miscellaneous settings.

The newest iteration in my StarCraft II Build Order Calculator is a minimalistic approach, in comparison to the previous builds. Unlike the last few ambitious builds that attempted time and resource calculation, this is an attempt at the absolute basics. It is also my first build calculator that is somewhat usable right at the moment, as opposed to merely offering a glimpse at where I want to go with this system.

This calculator contains all units for all 3 races and allows for race changing and resetting the build. It also begins to toy with styles and the UI, although I didn’t spend much time other than getting elements in the rough position that I would like them to be.

I dropped back to a more minimal approach because I felt like the more advanced approaches I was working on were going in the wrong direction. I’d ultimately like a more advanced system, but I want to rewind a bit and go back to basics and consider alternative approaches to the other systems, that relied heavily on large data structures to store data, at times storing it repeatedly for different purposes.

I completed the third JavaScript iteration of the StarCraft II Build Order Calculator this morning and put it online. It took a few days longer than I expected, but I also drastically changed how the data is being stored for the build order. In my previous builds, I stored the data with the time as the lowest level element, whereas this build stores the unit as the lowest level element. This makes it easier to see what the unit is doing (and thus, what it is allowed to do), but makes it harder to display the timeline.

I also stored unit actions (such as build Probe, warp in Pylon, etc.) as functions within each unit. As I wrote the functions, it quickly became apparent that a huge number of functions are identical and should only be written in one place.

This build shows me the viability of storing unit actions within the function and keeping track of unit timelines within the unit, but also shows the weaknesses of displaying the timeline when I have to scan every unit for every second to see what has been done. It still does not take into account that you need a Gateway before you can make a Zealot, but I chose to not pursue that in this build when all of the flaws of this build became apparent. It does, however, take into account queuing and will not let you build more than 1 Probe from a Nexus at any one time.

I will begin my next iteration very soon and hope to have that online within the next few days. Each iteration definitely teaches me a lot about what will and will not work. I am still very far from a final build, but I still think it is possible to get the final build online before the game launches on Jul 27, 2010.

In my last update on the StarCraft II Build Order Calculator, I said that I was going to have this next version work on building queues, but I decided to work on the URL sharing instead. The newest version of the S2BOC still doesn’t account for queues, but you can now send someone the URL to share build orders.

This URL sharing is one of the most critical requirements of this system. This calculator is designed to aid strategy discussions and a key part of that is showing a friend your strategy. As you update your build order, the URL will be modified, so you can send the build order at any time and anyone going to that URL will see what you see.

This calculator also allows you to switch between Terran, Protoss and Zerg, albeit in a clunky way that will be addressed before the final build. In order to change race, change the URL to start the build order string (from # to the end of the URL) with T, P or Z. In both FireFox and Chrome, I had to refresh the page after changing the URL before the new race properly appeared.

StarCraft II Build Order Calculator

Sample Build (9 Pylon / 12 Gateway Protoss build)

I have finished the first interactive prototype of the StarCraft 2 Build Order Calculator and placed it online with the rest of my iterative development tests. This JavaScript prototype is just a proof of concept and is missing many required features, but it does show the possibilities of the system.

This build is the first JavaScript prototype of the S2BOC. I decided at the very start that I would be building this in a client side language to reduce server strain, and so doing tests in PHP is very impractical. It uses the jQuery library and contains a custom extension to generate the build order. It shows off the abilities of the system to add units and calculate the amount of minerals available at any given time, as well as calculate the earliest moment that a unit can be built.

My next iteration should be online and viewable this weekend. This iteration will contain features not shown in this version, like taking queues into account and building requirements. I estimate there will be another 10-12 iterations before I consider writing the final version.

I’ve recently begun work on a new project that should see the light of day in time for StarCraft II to launch on July 27. The project, being hosted over at http://sc2build.com, is the StarCraft II Build Order Calculator. The project aims to take the ease of use and share-friendly nature of World of Warcraft talent calculators and apply it to StarCraft II build orders.

The project is just beginning the iterative development phase, with some small scale tests of single aspects of the system. I began writing my notes on the site in plain text, but it quickly became apparent that I will have enough notes to require a full fledged blog.

Expect to see a flood of posts in the coming days as I think aloud on how to build this system and test various methods of implementation. I will be building it through iterative development, and as such there will be many micro tests in the coming weeks of single aspects of the system.

The first test that has already been pondered upon and attempted once is how to store the build order data in a URI without that URI becoming ungainly in length. You can see my notes on that test and see a sample of this one attempt in the iterative development section of that site.