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Modifying/copying the broodlord

  • 4 posts
    #1 Nov 20, 2012 at 09:51 UTC - 0 likes

    Hiya, I've been playing around in the editor with some success for a while, but broodlords have me stumped!

    What I'm trying to do is create a copy of the broodlord that fires a different unit type (for now I'm fine if it actually uses the model for the broodling, it's very similar). Simply changing which unit is spawned seems to be a simple case of changing BroodlingEscortImpactA (Unnamed)'s Spawn Unit type to whatever I want, that works fine. However I want to preserve the original broodlord in the map as well, so I need to create a copy and that's where things go wrong. Can anyone point me at exactly what effects I need to modify for this to work?

    I'd try to list the approaches I've taken so far, but tbh I can't even remember them all - I jsut get lost in all the dozens of layered effects/actors and end up getting nowhere. I suspect there's some crucial link that I'm missing/don't understand, which is what I'm looking for help to try and find! Or if anyone's sucessfullly done this before can can point me in the right direction :).

    Help would be very much appreciated! - Thanks.

    #2 Nov 20, 2012 at 19:55 UTC - 0 likes

    True broodlords are one of the trickier pieces of ingame data to get your head round.

    The broodlords use an Arm Magazine ability to spawn the brooling escorts that follow it at an angle. They are unselecatable units that do not attack on their own.

    The arm magazine ability when combined with the Attack ability and a Weapon order the ammo units to attack the targets of the host unit's attack ability. The weapon of the broodlord is a dummy that is just used for guiding the ammo units to attack.

    The broodling escorts have a needlessly complex effect tree with some redundancy like the obsolete release magazine effect. In short they have a weapon that uses a Launch Missile effect that lacks an ammo unit so it uses the launching unit as the ammo. This can be used for a zerg viper like jump/pull of a unit but it can also suicide the unit on impact depending on the death type set for the launch missile effect.

    On impact the escorts do the rest that you know and love.

    Last edited Nov 20, 2012 by DrSuperEvil
    #3 Nov 23, 2012 at 12:59 UTC - 0 likes

    @DrSuperEvil: Go

    Thanks for the input - I got this functionally to work, the key link that I was missing was the link between broodlord and broodling in "Brood Lord - Brood Lord Hangar" arm magazine's ability "Info - Ammo 01". Tbh I just never realised I could expand that array and see the contents!

    When I did a quick test today I got a lot of warning messages relating to "Can only create one Actor <name> for effect <name>" or similar (I didn't copy the error stupidly), I suspect this is due to me mucking up a duplicate/reference somewhere and will dig into it another time. Not sure if there's a good reference anywhere of what causes/resolves these in-game errors?

    Thanks

    #4 Nov 23, 2012 at 21:44 UTC - 0 likes

    Ok that says the Actor data type is not happy. If you duped odds are it is the Action type actor used. The Art: Missile and the Events+ fields having multiple clones of the event that creates the actor when the effect triggers resulting in it not being created at all. Those are usually to blame if it is what I think it is.

    Last edited Nov 23, 2012 by DrSuperEvil
  • 4 posts

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