How big will these maps be?

It seems that the maps didn't get much larger between Starcraft and Warcraft III--both ended up I think at around 256x256 maximum size. If that's what they're going to do in SC3, I suppose it's all right (they do have to keep a playable game going), but after reading the doodad maximums I'm kind-of hoping that they'll permit much larger maps to be made.

One reason not to do this, of course, is pathing calculations, which take up a lot of CPU time whenever the map becomes large and cluttered. But, it seems that pathing ought to be an algorithm whose complexity lies in local (or at least near-local) factors, so the pathing cost should scale as O(N log N) with some sort of cell decomposition.

But, the reason I'm really excited about the possibilities of huge maps is that, even if they do limit us to perhaps 8192 doodads and 8192 destructibles (which would be more than enough even in WC3) it seems that these doodads are so much more detailed that you wouldn't need too pack 'em tightly to get the effects that you want (even in WC3, I eventuall learned to place doodads more sparsely to conserve CPU cycles while still painting nice landscapes).

We should ask Blizzard next time around--how big will these maps get?

 

I think the map sizes will be about the same as in SC 1. They were great for both few and many players per map, and I don't see the bases getting bigger than in the first game. So the maps most likely will stay in the same sizes they had in SC 1.