Game knowledge

How StarCraft: Brood War works, and how to make maps for it. The two parts are kept together because mapmakers and bot authors rely on the same game data.

Game mechanics

How the game works under the hood. For ways to run the game faster see the BWAPI tutorials.

External references

Exactly how do the custom AI scripts work? (FAQ)
How does default pathfinding work? (blog post)
Attack Animation Frame Data and the IceCC tool's decompilation of the iscript.bin file 'data\scripts\iscript.bin' from the MPQs: iscript_all2.txt.zip (explanation (spreadsheet))
Attack Order Timings (spreadsheet)
nturley's Unusual Unit Morphs and jaj22's Unusual BW unit transitions (Google Doc)
StarCraft UnitType Data (spreadsheet)
StarCraft WeaponType Data (spreadsheet)
StarCraft TechType Data (spreadsheet)
Latency and latency compensation (blog post)
BW order timings data (Google Doc)

Map making

Guides and tools for making and editing StarCraft: Brood War maps.

Guides

File formats and archives

CHK Format
An overview of working with MPQ archives. Use MPQDraft to patch MPQ files. For reading and editing the contents, use MPQ Editor.

Scmdraft and Extended Unit Death (EUD) triggers

Scmdraft map editor. Under downloads, you will obtain version 0.8.0, but this is not the latest version. Instead, look at the news page and get ScmDraft 2 (0.8.1), located in the temp folder. The author did not update the version number in the build, so it incorrectly says 0.8.0. You need this version to create EUD triggers (the Memory condition is enabled when creating a trigger).
The memory offsets used by EUDs change with every version of StarCraft. Many of the good EUDs have been patched.
To find the hex values in the first place, use ArtMoney to monitor the process. Then see this exported wiki article. This post clears up exactly what is being read (4 bytes at a time). Many of the tutorials simply assume that all other bytes are 0, which is often incorrect.
How to make 4 players share minerals + gas. A modest resource, but hard to find anything else on this.

Reference

How damage works, such as for burning buildings. See also how much damage an attack does to a unit.
StarCraft unit sizes. You can use DatEdit (StarEdit tab) to get the Placement box in pixels. The pixels for a Terran Dropship, for example, are height 37 and width 49. Since scmdraft is zero indexed, enter your locations for bottom and right as one less than the actual value. In this example, bottom would be 36 and right would be 48.