I do not have time and motivation to go through all the maps and test them, but I just got the information that someone wanted to use Atma in a tournament, but had to remove it from the mappack because the obs version was totally buggy. And I know there are plenty of maps by mappers with ambition out there which
a) do not even _have_ an observer version
b) are protected (A big no-no IMO)
c) Have bugs in the obs version, like some spells are disabled, obs are user-selectable races, no triggers....
Well to make a long story short, please do some f'ing quality control on your own maps, this is embarassing.
Hmm, it should be possible to write a small program that sets all the needed stuff for obs maps; meaning that it puts the triggers, enables the abilities and such, and does the force and player settings. You'd only have to place the starting locations and tell the program how many "players" there are (should be from Player 1 to x).
I will keep this in mind for my editor, but there's a long way ahead.
If there is someone who is experienced in MPQ/CHK stuff, you could take my idea an create a small tool. I will ask some of my friends at BF, too, because those will only need like an hour for this ;) -if they do it^^
The only thing you nneed to do is:
1)start the map with StarEdit because it auto. sets the upgrades to 3.
2)go into players and turn everything off except random startpos.
3)Add observer triggers.(Give vision for player 1-4 to player 5-8)
I found someone who is interested and will probably give it a try. He certainly is capable of this (made some .chk editor already), and if he can do it as quick as I guess, he will probably finish it, too ;)
This tool will be able to fix buggy obs maps (and make non-obs maps to obs maps, of course), as well as make non-obs maps playable in UMS mode (if he carries out my suggestions). The only thing you have to do yourself is the placement of the starting locations. modified by spinesheath
Might still take a while because he will finish another project at first (he says about a week or 2).
I might also modify a tool from a friend of mine to make it do this job ;)
Update: I have a beta on my comp now. My fellow from BF will fix some small mistakes, and update it a little. I think you could soon have it.
Backdraw: He is a VS 2005 .net programmer and uses a .dll made in VS 2005 .net, so it will require .net 2.0 (I don't like that either...) But hey, nobody forces you to use this tool :p
Right now the maps are not loadable in SE, but in SF/SCMD2. Probably because he doesn't write some .chk sections. He will look over this and hopefully be able to fix it.
Probably does not work on protected maps, or at least not on all.
But it certainly is a nice tool. Especially handy if your map has a corrupt units/upgrades/abilities section, fixes it with just a fwe clicks instead of hundreds...