I'm working on a high quality world map right now and have come to the curiosity of creating ships.
I'd like to get my banshee to stay at a constant height. I've lowerd her height to just about ground level at .01, my current delimma is when I steer her over the water, she sinks. Is it possible to force a flying unit to stay above sea-level, even with uneven terrain underneath?
The only realistic way I've found is to have the terrain below the water flat, with the water a dark enough color to not be able to see the terrain is so boring.
I've raised the height of the ships to 10.1, and lowered the ground level 10 as to keep any of the grass from showing through the water.
I'm avoiding the use of cliffs due to the fact that they are too edgy and would really diminish the look of a nicely detailed earth. I can use no-fly zones to just keep them off the 'land', but I still
Now the biggest problem I'm having is that when I move my ship... to where I want it to be in relation to the ocean surface, my banshee moves about 200 spaces to far north because she thinks I'm referring to the ground. If I raise the ground level anymore, I run into the problem of my awesome blue ocean turning into grassy green.
Try putting the height to... 2, and the ship height to 2.1. Really high/low terrain sometimes gives problems - I had a map where the pylon forcefields stopped lining up with the actual pylons but ended up about 5 squares below them.
My Water height is 0.
My Ground level is -10.5 (This prevents ground from showing through my water.)
My Banshee's height is at 10.1 (This is where she looks good mostly sunk, somewhat floating.)
10 is too deep. Take the grass out, remove some foilage, set the terrain under the water to say... 4.
Now the banshee wont move as far away, and you still should have acceptably deep water. Just change the properties of the water to a darker color if you need.
set banshee height to abs(constant height - height of terrain)
or something to that effect might work, I'm still getting used to the properties of this editor...this might require the use of leveled terrain rather than terrain deformation.
After putting it into actual gameplay test, The banshee never falls below the depth of the water, regardless of her height setting and the depth of the ground.
I've accomplished what I've needed by dropping her height to -.03 and raising the terrain level to -.5. My 'above water' ground is at .5.
Testing she plays just fine. Now... I'm just working on getting the water to look like ocean, while being very opaque so you can't see the ground underneath. Just playing with all the different bars with water to see if I can get what looks real.
Next I just hope to be able to make all above sea level land no fly zones while still being able to offload ground characters for terrain exploration.
I've reduced the size of all my units to 20% scale, but when I playtest it the camera won't go close enough to make them look normal sized. The only way I can find to make my world 'realisticly large' is to shrink everything else, but my camera takes away the effect... any ideas or solutions?
Regarding maintaining a constant flying height, you could tick "Ignore Terrain Height" in the unit flags. Then you dont need to constantly ajust it.
In my experience, restricting where flying units can go is really anoying. If you place no fly zones, the pathing algorithm will still try to fly through them when you tell the ship to move to the other side of the island. Maby it would be possible to make the ships behave as ground units, and make an unpathable area at the edges of your island. Unloading could be a targeted ability with a range of about 2-3 yards. Then you could have a trigger check if the targeted point is on an island, and if it is, unload whatever units were in the ship.
About the camera - you could use the zoom action in the triggers to bring it closer.. if the player uses the scroll wheel it returns to the normal view though
Can I lock the camera's zooming functionality only? Or maybe it would be better if I just lock the distance to not go out as far, but allow it to get much closer, and by default start closer.
I found a weird bug where when I'm testing my maps, my mouse will disappear... I have to close the game completely and restart. No alt-tab test starting. I was making no progress with my camera because of it. After a restart... come to find out I had it right the whole time. wasted effort. -.-
Anyways, I've got a really sexy Earth going on now. Perfectly to scale. My next major goals are getting the camera lock mentioned above, and also to get the world to be round. I'd like to come up with, if not get help with figuring out if it's possible so that when I tell my ship to move, it will always choose the shortest path. That means if I'm on the far left, and I want to move to the far right, on a round planet it's only actually a few spaces to the left to get there... conventionally it will try to travel the full distance across.
To lock the camera distance, you can go to the data editor, go to the "cameras" section, select "default", scroll down until you reach "zoom levels." Then select each zoom level and uncheck distance modify for each.
Agreed. You could have a large region covering all the areas with water, and then do something special for units of a certain type if they are in that region and at the water's elevation
@gregnegg I might be interested in joining a team, if for no other reason to learn and have a resource.
To everyone else, I actually gave up on this project for a really long time... but I've always had the dream of making this map a reality.
I have the map, and I have the idea of what I want to be done... but I simply don't have a goal for players to accomplish, and reason for me not to continue the work on it.
As it stands, it's a ocean based game, but adding land elements would be cool. If anyone is familiar with Uncharted Waters (NES game), that's kind of what I had in mind for this. Merchants, Pirates, Military, and other sea-faring peoples. Sea-monsters, battles, treasures, and missions. A player can buy used ships or build a new one, putting on certain attachments and gaining levels as a captain which in turn help them maneuver ships and fight better (without directly affecting power numbers.)
Some more broad ideas that would take a lot more work and research would include boarding other ships and engaging in some sort of micro with the crew, if not just bum-rush them. I'd like to keep some fantasy elements, like sea-monsters as I had mentioned.
But again, we reach my dilemma. This is all doable and exciting to me, but simply put, there's no goal to it all except 'get better'. I have nothing that would get the players engaged and keep them having fun throughout the process of exploring and building, and nothing for them to ultimately try to accomplish.
Anyways, I still have the map, and with some inspiration I might go back to it to try to accomplish my dream... but for now it'll continue sitting.
I'm working on a high quality world map right now and have come to the curiosity of creating ships.
I'd like to get my banshee to stay at a constant height. I've lowerd her height to just about ground level at .01, my current delimma is when I steer her over the water, she sinks. Is it possible to force a flying unit to stay above sea-level, even with uneven terrain underneath?
The only realistic way I've found is to have the terrain below the water flat, with the water a dark enough color to not be able to see the terrain is so boring.
I've posted my progress.
I've raised the height of the ships to 10.1, and lowered the ground level 10 as to keep any of the grass from showing through the water.
I'm avoiding the use of cliffs due to the fact that they are too edgy and would really diminish the look of a nicely detailed earth. I can use no-fly zones to just keep them off the 'land', but I still
Now the biggest problem I'm having is that when I move my ship... to where I want it to be in relation to the ocean surface, my banshee moves about 200 spaces to far north because she thinks I'm referring to the ground. If I raise the ground level anymore, I run into the problem of my awesome blue ocean turning into grassy green.
@Quartaroy: Go
Try putting the height to... 2, and the ship height to 2.1. Really high/low terrain sometimes gives problems - I had a map where the pylon forcefields stopped lining up with the actual pylons but ended up about 5 squares below them.
@Mozared
I'm not sure if I know what you're referring to.
My Water height is 0. My Ground level is -10.5 (This prevents ground from showing through my water.) My Banshee's height is at 10.1 (This is where she looks good mostly sunk, somewhat floating.)
@Quartaroy: Go
10 is too deep. Take the grass out, remove some foilage, set the terrain under the water to say... 4.
Now the banshee wont move as far away, and you still should have acceptably deep water. Just change the properties of the water to a darker color if you need.
make a trigger that looks like the following:
every .1 game seconds
set banshee height to abs(constant height - height of terrain)
or something to that effect might work, I'm still getting used to the properties of this editor...this might require the use of leveled terrain rather than terrain deformation.
After putting it into actual gameplay test, The banshee never falls below the depth of the water, regardless of her height setting and the depth of the ground.
I've accomplished what I've needed by dropping her height to -.03 and raising the terrain level to -.5. My 'above water' ground is at .5.
Testing she plays just fine. Now... I'm just working on getting the water to look like ocean, while being very opaque so you can't see the ground underneath. Just playing with all the different bars with water to see if I can get what looks real.
Next I just hope to be able to make all above sea level land no fly zones while still being able to offload ground characters for terrain exploration.
I've reduced the size of all my units to 20% scale, but when I playtest it the camera won't go close enough to make them look normal sized. The only way I can find to make my world 'realisticly large' is to shrink everything else, but my camera takes away the effect... any ideas or solutions?
Regarding maintaining a constant flying height, you could tick "Ignore Terrain Height" in the unit flags. Then you dont need to constantly ajust it.
In my experience, restricting where flying units can go is really anoying. If you place no fly zones, the pathing algorithm will still try to fly through them when you tell the ship to move to the other side of the island. Maby it would be possible to make the ships behave as ground units, and make an unpathable area at the edges of your island. Unloading could be a targeted ability with a range of about 2-3 yards. Then you could have a trigger check if the targeted point is on an island, and if it is, unload whatever units were in the ship.
About the camera - you could use the zoom action in the triggers to bring it closer.. if the player uses the scroll wheel it returns to the normal view though
Can I lock the camera's zooming functionality only? Or maybe it would be better if I just lock the distance to not go out as far, but allow it to get much closer, and by default start closer.
I found a weird bug where when I'm testing my maps, my mouse will disappear... I have to close the game completely and restart. No alt-tab test starting. I was making no progress with my camera because of it. After a restart... come to find out I had it right the whole time. wasted effort. -.-
Anyways, I've got a really sexy Earth going on now. Perfectly to scale. My next major goals are getting the camera lock mentioned above, and also to get the world to be round. I'd like to come up with, if not get help with figuring out if it's possible so that when I tell my ship to move, it will always choose the shortest path. That means if I'm on the far left, and I want to move to the far right, on a round planet it's only actually a few spaces to the left to get there... conventionally it will try to travel the full distance across.
@Quartaroy: Go
To lock the camera distance, you can go to the data editor, go to the "cameras" section, select "default", scroll down until you reach "zoom levels." Then select each zoom level and uncheck distance modify for each.
@Quartaroy: Go
You should join my team, so I can pretend I actually got anywhere.
Starcraft 2 != Ships
You'd be surprised
@sigmapl: Go
Agreed. You could have a large region covering all the areas with water, and then do something special for units of a certain type if they are in that region and at the water's elevation
Wow, surprised this thread got necroed.
@gregnegg I might be interested in joining a team, if for no other reason to learn and have a resource.
To everyone else, I actually gave up on this project for a really long time... but I've always had the dream of making this map a reality.
I have the map, and I have the idea of what I want to be done... but I simply don't have a goal for players to accomplish, and reason for me not to continue the work on it.
As it stands, it's a ocean based game, but adding land elements would be cool. If anyone is familiar with Uncharted Waters (NES game), that's kind of what I had in mind for this. Merchants, Pirates, Military, and other sea-faring peoples. Sea-monsters, battles, treasures, and missions. A player can buy used ships or build a new one, putting on certain attachments and gaining levels as a captain which in turn help them maneuver ships and fight better (without directly affecting power numbers.)
Some more broad ideas that would take a lot more work and research would include boarding other ships and engaging in some sort of micro with the crew, if not just bum-rush them. I'd like to keep some fantasy elements, like sea-monsters as I had mentioned.
But again, we reach my dilemma. This is all doable and exciting to me, but simply put, there's no goal to it all except 'get better'. I have nothing that would get the players engaged and keep them having fun throughout the process of exploring and building, and nothing for them to ultimately try to accomplish.
Anyways, I still have the map, and with some inspiration I might go back to it to try to accomplish my dream... but for now it'll continue sitting.