Takes alot more work then the tutorial gives you, the tutorial shows you have to build such an effect, to then use it with a unit would require knowing how to make abilities and hook them into units and in your case then assign that ability to fire from a mouse click. I'd say lurk moar around the tutorials section concerning direct control of units or just really spend more timing experimenting with the editor. I intend to eventually release a module that has all of that stuff integrated but its pretty important that the developers using it know how it all works at least on the surface otherwise its not very useful to them. The key points thoug is learn about how abilities call effects, how to put those abilities on units and also how you can then use triggers to call upon abilities.
@drummerboy1151: Go
Yah when that happened I knew that moment had to be preserved with video for sure :P Man I can't wait to get that map done, the AI is loads smarter (not necessarily a good thing) now just trying to debug some evil little script slayers resulting from the AI being threaded functions. Stupid threads, so nice of a concept but utterly bonkers to debug.
@Raeymunn: Go
Or directly call the effect with an effect at 'X' trigger, either way works for sure.
This concept was just bugging me so I went looking and found a thread a while back where someone pulled it off, they got around the usual problems by removing the real weapon effect from the tank then constantly placing an invisible unit in front of the tank at an angle opposite the camera (so in front and center of both) and telling the tank to attack it. They were using click-based attacking methods so I'm guessing the real tank's weapon was some ability triggered off of the click and ignored the weapon system entirely. This essentially gave the illusion that the tank was twisting its turret with the mouse and made use of how turrets functioned already to do it. It worked, sorta.
Quick jist: Make a new button, make a new ability and then in that ability set its effect to the search effect the tutorial had you build...I think that should do it.
Yah I think the trick is how to find the right message that will burrow from the main unit's actor to its turret sub actor, I haven't spent much time looking but its gotta be possible.
Fraid I already tore down the map I made to try out your method but yah that new stuff looks a little more likely to work to make missiles fired with your method look more like they should. Btw about turrets and triggers I'm pretty sure that's possible using an actor message, it'd only be useful for me if you could then have it actively following the mouse but yah pretty sure you can pull it off with those.
Yah its a WASD map with mouse firing and those are stalkers. It was a real toss up between the stalker and the immortal on which unit to use, don't know why I picked stalker in the end but they look pretty neat when passing under shadows. Once someone figures out how to make the immortal's upper body follow the mouse cursor though I'll probably be compelled to switch up the models. :)
I'm looking forward :) Any research towards direct-fire weapons is something I'm very interested in, trying to acquire as much knowledge as possible around this topic since well its such a foreign concept to how starcraft 2 traditionally treats weaponry as 'never misses'. My purposes is working on a particular map which is a throw back to a fantastic top-down little team based shooter/flag capping game I used to play a long long time ago. Just started testing some AI for computer opponents last night actually and made a video of the results. Here's what I've got in terms of direct fire weaponry any ways:
The missiles all use little rapid periodic searchers to emulate collision spheres that travel with them, the bouncers though are a whole other ball of highly annoying wax, as was the method to get them all detecting cliffs.
Aye when I first read the reference to the impact effect I crossed my fingers that it could actually be that simple...but through testing it is unfortunately not the case, as I said I think the impact effect is called when the missile reports back that its reached its destination and is used to represent the payload between the caster and the target, that's how I see it used with targeted missiles any ways.
Fraid its not so simple to make that searcher represent the impact condition and calling it a day. Far as I know the impact effect is triggered upon the missile's mover declaring its reached its target and the problem with that is these missiles are specifically designed to not have any sort of official target.
You'd need to go through the pain of creating the small radius searcher, then making a behavior and set its periodic effect to that searcher and give it a very fast period like .1 to ensure it happens enough to catch anything its passing through especially on a fast missile, then attach that behavior to your missile's unit. Then that searcher needs to be calling a set effect which is composed of the actual payload (your damage effect) and then if its a one-shot missile a suicide/remove effect so the missile strikes and goes away (or leave that one off if you want one that just continuously mauls everything in its path). Then when it comes to the mover you gotta set that thing up pretty precisely too since unlike most movers it won't just 'rubber band' fix any calculations you didn't set since its got no target to correct its flight path towards, such as giving it a huge accelerating or forgetting to make it ignore gravity and/or terrain. I still don't really understand how these movers work otherwise I'd have probably tried to create such a tutorial myself, that and sometimes I still have these missiles launch with unpredictable slopes in their movement especially around deep holes (-1 cliff).
Oh and then as the triggering mechanism for the whole thing your own uses a search effect so that's auto-firing essentially and you could also use with these dumb-fires but otherwise you'd also have to create an ability or weapon which calls the original persistent effect that launches the missile too. Yer original method is indeed much simpler then all this, but yah its not quite the same.
Its definitely a different approach to simulating a dumb-fire missile for sure, that offset creation sure looks painful for long trajectories though, I think I prefer the rapid periodic searcher strapped to a genuine targetless missile method.
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@Raeymunn: Go
Takes alot more work then the tutorial gives you, the tutorial shows you have to build such an effect, to then use it with a unit would require knowing how to make abilities and hook them into units and in your case then assign that ability to fire from a mouse click. I'd say lurk moar around the tutorials section concerning direct control of units or just really spend more timing experimenting with the editor. I intend to eventually release a module that has all of that stuff integrated but its pretty important that the developers using it know how it all works at least on the surface otherwise its not very useful to them. The key points thoug is learn about how abilities call effects, how to put those abilities on units and also how you can then use triggers to call upon abilities.
@drummerboy1151: Go Yah when that happened I knew that moment had to be preserved with video for sure :P Man I can't wait to get that map done, the AI is loads smarter (not necessarily a good thing) now just trying to debug some evil little script slayers resulting from the AI being threaded functions. Stupid threads, so nice of a concept but utterly bonkers to debug.
@Raeymunn: Go Or directly call the effect with an effect at 'X' trigger, either way works for sure.
@wingednosering: Go
This concept was just bugging me so I went looking and found a thread a while back where someone pulled it off, they got around the usual problems by removing the real weapon effect from the tank then constantly placing an invisible unit in front of the tank at an angle opposite the camera (so in front and center of both) and telling the tank to attack it. They were using click-based attacking methods so I'm guessing the real tank's weapon was some ability triggered off of the click and ignored the weapon system entirely. This essentially gave the illusion that the tank was twisting its turret with the mouse and made use of how turrets functioned already to do it. It worked, sorta.
@KingRaul: Go
Quick jist: Make a new button, make a new ability and then in that ability set its effect to the search effect the tutorial had you build...I think that should do it.
Yah I think the trick is how to find the right message that will burrow from the main unit's actor to its turret sub actor, I haven't spent much time looking but its gotta be possible.
Fraid I already tore down the map I made to try out your method but yah that new stuff looks a little more likely to work to make missiles fired with your method look more like they should. Btw about turrets and triggers I'm pretty sure that's possible using an actor message, it'd only be useful for me if you could then have it actively following the mouse but yah pretty sure you can pull it off with those.
@wingednosering: Go
Yah its a WASD map with mouse firing and those are stalkers. It was a real toss up between the stalker and the immortal on which unit to use, don't know why I picked stalker in the end but they look pretty neat when passing under shadows. Once someone figures out how to make the immortal's upper body follow the mouse cursor though I'll probably be compelled to switch up the models. :)
@wingednosering: Go
I'm looking forward :) Any research towards direct-fire weapons is something I'm very interested in, trying to acquire as much knowledge as possible around this topic since well its such a foreign concept to how starcraft 2 traditionally treats weaponry as 'never misses'. My purposes is working on a particular map which is a throw back to a fantastic top-down little team based shooter/flag capping game I used to play a long long time ago. Just started testing some AI for computer opponents last night actually and made a video of the results. Here's what I've got in terms of direct fire weaponry any ways:
The missiles all use little rapid periodic searchers to emulate collision spheres that travel with them, the bouncers though are a whole other ball of highly annoying wax, as was the method to get them all detecting cliffs.
@wingednosering: Go
Aye when I first read the reference to the impact effect I crossed my fingers that it could actually be that simple...but through testing it is unfortunately not the case, as I said I think the impact effect is called when the missile reports back that its reached its destination and is used to represent the payload between the caster and the target, that's how I see it used with targeted missiles any ways.
@wingednosering: Go
Fraid its not so simple to make that searcher represent the impact condition and calling it a day. Far as I know the impact effect is triggered upon the missile's mover declaring its reached its target and the problem with that is these missiles are specifically designed to not have any sort of official target.
You'd need to go through the pain of creating the small radius searcher, then making a behavior and set its periodic effect to that searcher and give it a very fast period like .1 to ensure it happens enough to catch anything its passing through especially on a fast missile, then attach that behavior to your missile's unit. Then that searcher needs to be calling a set effect which is composed of the actual payload (your damage effect) and then if its a one-shot missile a suicide/remove effect so the missile strikes and goes away (or leave that one off if you want one that just continuously mauls everything in its path). Then when it comes to the mover you gotta set that thing up pretty precisely too since unlike most movers it won't just 'rubber band' fix any calculations you didn't set since its got no target to correct its flight path towards, such as giving it a huge accelerating or forgetting to make it ignore gravity and/or terrain. I still don't really understand how these movers work otherwise I'd have probably tried to create such a tutorial myself, that and sometimes I still have these missiles launch with unpredictable slopes in their movement especially around deep holes (-1 cliff).
Oh and then as the triggering mechanism for the whole thing your own uses a search effect so that's auto-firing essentially and you could also use with these dumb-fires but otherwise you'd also have to create an ability or weapon which calls the original persistent effect that launches the missile too. Yer original method is indeed much simpler then all this, but yah its not quite the same.
Its definitely a different approach to simulating a dumb-fire missile for sure, that offset creation sure looks painful for long trajectories though, I think I prefer the rapid periodic searcher strapped to a genuine targetless missile method.