@mods: Sorry if this is redundant, but I thought it would be useful to have a thread to discuss improvements to the editor in a more focused way
As you may have seen, Blizzard recently released a new 'arcade' beta for SC2. There are several very useful improvements to the map editor, including some improvements that appear to be targeted directly at improving melee mapping.
The original thread is here : http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=341648
below I've listed some changes that may impact melee mapping. I encourage you to check out the improvements yourself!
Positive Changes:
Abitity to copy and paste only combination of textures, terrain geometry, and water: this could potentially save hours of work retexturing when only minor (but hard to mirror by hand) adjustments are needed to the structure of a already textured map. It also removes the irksome situations when water squares are copied outside of the map bounds and cannot be removed.
A new distance measuring tool: replicates the action of the map analyzer and can find the walking distance between any two points on the map. Much faster than the mapanalyzer and more flexible, more distances (like maybe nat-choke to nat-choke, or nat-to-third) may now be 'standardized' and compared very easily. my only complaint about the tool is that it does not show the shortest distance path itself, which would be very useful when examining pathing patterns
copy and pasting of terrain now works correctly. No more trial and error, no more complicated system to make sure that terrain is mirrored correctly.
Multiple Lighting system Now up to 4 different lighting types may be used in a map (in the lighting editor, look under the new tab ''regions", there are also a number of new lighting brushes in the terrain editor). This might increase performance in situations where a large number of omni-light doodads may have been used previously. The options are kind of limited as of how much the light can vary, but I think it should be usable for most situations. The "add light" tool in the terrain editor seems to be broken though (it also removes the other types of light), I've just used the 'uniform lighting' tool and the 'smooth lighting' tool instead. note that you can only see this inside of the game, the effect is not shown in the editor.
New 'Add Cree'p Tool Disallowed creep zones can now be place without doodads. Creep may also be placed directly on the map. The Creep seems to never disappear like normal creep, so it may be possible to use the creep to create clearly and consistently defined "no build" zones or to give a boost to Zerg.
Possible bugs/Negative Changes:
The 'buttons' option for the unit list seems to have been removed, increasing the time it takes to scroll through the list of units.
sometimes doodads in maps opened in the new version of the editor bug out and appear as the first 'variation' of the doodad (ie all trees of the same doodad type have the same model etc). It seems to go away if I open and close the map (without closing the editor) though.
If you have anything to add to the positive and negative lists, I'll add it to the OP so that this information is easier to find.Last edit: 2012-06-03 12:16:03 | 
