SC2Mapster

Quote from Zolden: Go

I tried to create a model, that could visually fake creep or blight.

It's a combination of a mesh textured with terrain material, and a decal projected on it.

But as Renee noted, all methods will not be performance friendly. If we spam units, that have this model as main, we recieve units based performance lowerirng. If we do everything with triggers and simply spam models, we will need to have a periodic triggers, that check every unit's position to give/remove creep based bonuses. And this will be laggy too.

Also, I found some issues with the way graphical engine interprets this kind of model. First, there's small visible darker lines on intersections of the models. It can be hidden with a mask on terrain texture. And second, decals projected on mesh textured with terrain material hides its shading, so if we expand the decal to cover the borders, they won't look brighter/darker baseds on orientation to light, so it won't look raised.

A periodic trigger spamming models is far more efficient then spamming units.

Also, the model would need to be square to prevent that exact-problem of, "First, there's small visible darker lines on intersections of the models."

Then there'd have to be a separate model that's an "edge" so it doesn't look blocky.

When place correctly they won't overlap at all and thus they won't look bad.

Quote from Renee2islga: Go

Well it's technically possible to mimic fake creeps and blights, but any methods seems very bad for the performance :(

I noticed this as well. It seems SC2 actually has a harder time keeping track of 100s of units at a time then WC3 does. This is particularly prevalent on the WC3 map you made, where it seems the ridiculous-amount of trees really slows down the game on my PC.

Okay, so I made a thread asking how this would be possible a while ago.

Now I think I know just exactly how to do it:

1. Remove the bonuses from the units in the data editor. Instead, an aura will provide these bonuses from Creep or Blight sources. This way, "Creep" doesn't give Undead a health-regen bonus and "Blight" doesn't give Zerg a speed bonus. You'll have to provide validators to check for certain unit-types that get bigger or smaller bonuses from Creep, or even Blight. (They will not stack of course)

2. Creep's base texture will be a blank texture. Instead, the decal method will replace both's texture using an algorithm to determine where "space" decals should be placed and where "edge" decals should be placed. This way it shouldn't look ugly when you have multiple Creep/Blight types or sources overlapping. Another thing would also be needed to show off the creep growing slowly like it normally does.

If Decals can be animated then this shouldn't be a problem at all. It's very easy to find Creep via "Creep is present at Point" condition. Then with that, we just play our creep growing animation there, create the fake creep texture, and there we go. If Decals can be animated, this would also help show the Creep's undulation like it normally does.

Now of course a similar thing can be done with Blight, but we don't have to show it growing and we don't have to have any special algorithm's for it growing.

Also, glad to see SC2Mapster has a WC3-related Forum now. ;D

EDIT: This is of course no small task. I would be glad to do it on my own but I still need to learn SC2 Triggers. I would be more then happy to work with someone to do this, though. As I am still quite skilled in WC3 triggers, so some of that knowledge can transfer over.