Bachelor's Thesis about Warcraft 3 modding

Hi folks,

I have just finished my bachelor's thesis in computer science about my project YouTD (the thread about it can be found here).
It doesn't only focus on the details of the project but rather on the general concept of using Open Innovation in game design. In addition, it gives a basic overview over Warcraft 3, the World Editor and WC3 scripting.

Since Bachelor's Theses about such a topic are quite rare, I thought that you could be interested in reading it. If so, you can download it here. Any comments welcome :).

(If I have picked the wrong forum for such an announcement, feel free to move this topic)

Yopu really got my curiosity. i'll be checking it.

I'm more concerned with the format of the thesis than anything. Surely you realize that the current format is... Just wrong. There's so much white space, empty pages, you don't follow international conventions for the organization of publishable articles, you organize it in chapters (it's not a bloody textbook...), you don't start new paragraphs properly (just hitting enter isn't proper), etc.

Furthermore, you didn't organize the chapters in a sensible way, all TD components should be after the WC3 introduction stuff, not before. You should become gradually more descriptive as you get further into the paper. You jump all over the place, such as describing the TD genre before triggers, then dwarfing the innovation chapter with 3 on World Editor that your readers don't care about.

Not to mention, you describe way too much about the WE, it's obscene. There's no direction to the article. The flow of it is as follows:

• This is a tower defense (Wrong place)
• 20 pages about WC3.
  Completely too much detail and of the wrong kind. This level of background introduction isn't necessary if you're talking about game design, the reader doesn't care about the trigger editor...
• Open Innovation pages
  These are the only really relevant pages in your whole thesis, and are written with way too much fluff. You could chop entire pages away because they're just unnecessary. You also don't exactly describe anything particularly innovative or tricky, it's very generic things. Too much coverage of the "User, Administrator, Contributor" roles, you should have looked into more than just that.)
• Some YouTD stuff.
  This stuff was ok, actually, but the math formula you hacked together for balancing towers was awful. If you want to talk about balance, you can't make up a formula just to make it sound legitimate.
  
  Anyways, example of fluff in your writing:
  
  Quote:

  No perfect tower balance can be achieved by this formula, especially for the special abilities, but the current beta version of YouTD has proven that at least no obvious balance flaws could be found, and, from a subjective point of view, the towers seem balanced.

  Did I mention epic run-on sentence? (And improper comma use, you need some semicolons in there if you really want it to be that long)
  
  I liked how you made an attempt to quantify 'difficulty' and then provide plots to show its evolution versus wave. That was good.
• Chapter the last, feedback?
  Why do you have an entire chapter of 8 pages on just feedback? That would've made a lot more sense as a sub-section of the YouTD section.
• Your bibliography included wikipedia. I can't believe you seriously did that.
  
  Quote:

  MindWorX and many more.

  That's seriously how you cited JNGP? Come on, man, these people even put their real life names on the project so that you can cite them properly.
  
  Overall, I'm heavily disappointed with the bibliography section. An attempt should have been made in all cases to obtain the proper credentials of the person being cited, as opposed to using internet handles for everything. Right now, your sources looks awful and completely unreliable. If you wanted to include internet handle as well as real name, you should have included it afterwards in parenthesis.

I would grade it, as a whole, a 78/100. It has some real good points, but sparingly few amongst entire chapters of fluff and superfluous detail. The direction of the thesis is scattered and not well-presented. There are numerous grammatical errors, most frequently being run-on sentences and comma splicing. The bibliography is very poorly put-together, and there is too much white space and too many empty pages across the paper. Finally, it didn't follow an internationally recognized thesis paper format, such as AIAA or IEEE. (Despite being engineering formats, they are recognized for their use in many, many, many more fields than just that)

Hopefully I haven't offended you in any way, but as a scholar myself, I find this sort of critique the most useful. Cheers and stuff.

May I ask why am I not in a career in which a thesis linking to jasshelper's manual would be fair game?

Though I do have dreams about one day making a language for a thesis and basing its concepts of all the more radical, crazy and non-sense vJass features maybe I'll be able to do it there.

libraries have had a much greater impact.

I like Jass syntax.

Hes german. My guess is that his german background is shining through here. Sure, its no good style. But if youre writing something in a language other than your native one, i guess its normal that certain habits shine through (such as long sentences, kept together by commas (even if those are placed incorrectly in english context, im sure most of them wouldve been correct in german context)).

Other than that, im currently reading over it as well. Will update here, if i find something.

@Vexorian:

True libraries have influence, but I didn't want to go in so deep (If I explained libraries, I would also need to explain that jass functions cannot be called from above, what the header of a map is, and that triggers are stored in a crazy order that an ordering mechanism is needed.)

@Rising_Dusk:

I already though someone would tier it into pieces ;). Don't be afraid, you didn't offend me, I agree with many of your points, but cannot change them.

Concerning the speech: Yes, I guess thats my german habitage shining through. My english is not too good, and I could have let a native english speaker correct it, but I would consider that cheating (you know, the affidavit..). So, this was the best I could give (and remember, a german speaker rates this thesis (thank god ;) )).

About the format:
Well, this was up to my advisor. He never mentioned I should follow any standard and he read and accepted it like that. I guess here in germany we are farther away from standardization than we should be (sad but true).

About the content:
I agree, that the whole WC3 part was unnecessary, but again, that was the decision of my advisor. The chair from my thesis have never used game scripting (I guess most computer science chairs haven't). So he asked me for a rather big introduction about the environment I use.

About tower defense before wc3:
Agree again, but I cought me too many times writing about a feature WC3 offers that could be interesting for TDs. So I had to explain tower defenses first. Otherwise, I couldn't explain the features WC3 offers for TDs.

About the "awful" balance formula:
Well, I said that it is not perfect, but it is better than most TDs balanced without any formula. And this was only a small part of the thesis. If i want a really good formula together with a benchmark of it, I could make a thesis just about balancing I guess. I just stated how I did it.

About including wikipedia and other websites into bibliography:
Decision from my advisor.

About "MindworX and many more":
Where are the real life names? I couldn't find them. I always tried to find all authors, even with their real names (check the other entries).

Own chapter for feedback:
The YouTD chapter is about the creational process of YouTD. I still think that the success of the game,i.e., the evaluation of the concept, needs an own chapter.

About the "fluffyness":
I agree, that normally a thesis needs more hard facts. However, we re in the field of game design. Here, feelings and subjective impressions matter. For example about the sentence you cited: If a game seems balanced subjectively, the players will like it. It is as easy as that.

Thanks for your feedback. I will try to put it into my Master's Thesis :). Can you give me a link for any standard for such theses?

Grimoire > About Grimoire.

Will read.

Ah, fair enough.
Ah yes, the sin of trying to jump ahead in an article. I always have to catch myself when I do that. :p
Yes, you did say that. It just seemed very.. Arbitrary. Arbitrary math always bothers me.
Whoa, okay... That's surprising, but as he wishes.
They are active on this site (and in IRC even) where you can ask them. I am sure they'd divulge such information in lieu of being cited in an article.
I feel like we call this the "Conclusion" or "Analysis of Results" section, not the "Feedback" section. Perhaps it was just a misnaming of the section, then.
I agree, but I was more referring to the wording and how your sentences aren't "to the point" as they should be. You could've shaved a lot of pages off that article if you'd proofread more and cut out unnecessary/repetitive sentences/words.
Of course, the MSWord (2003) AIAA international standard format is located here. If you're working in Latex, I can dig that one up too. There is another for journal articles that is double column (real slick) that can be found. (I can dig it up too if you'd like)