I thought we were supposed to follow one of the two standardized rules of marketing for video games:
Option 1: Have a cover picture of a gruff manly guy who looks like he just left prison in heavy armor holding his weapon and in the backdrop smoldering remains of a city or castle.
Option 2: Have cover pictures of 3d scantily clad females with impossibly large breasts wielding a weapon.
I mean who cares about gameplay or uniqueness when you have marketing like that =P.
StormKeep Alpha has gone live as of right now. It's now available on the US server. Check it out and give us some feedback, everyone on our team would appreciate it.
After many months of delays and setbacks we are getting ready to release a public alpha version of StormKeep. We will be updating soon with an exact date, but in the meantime the forums are now up and running so if your interested in playing the Alpha version of StormKeep or just want to keep up with our progress check out our forums in the link below
Ive already solved the my issue with this but I figured I'd give people a heads up cause I didn't see any posts on the matter. Now whether this problem is rooted in the math itself or just the specific purpose we were using it for I'm not sure. It did cause us a slight head ache so I figured Id post to spare others the pain. Here is a quick summary of what occurred:
Hero used ability which would kill the target unit and then add the remaining amount of life the target unit had on it before it was killed and add that total to the hero.
Game would crash right after.
The ability was designed mostly in triggers mainly the amount of life given to the hero unit. Now at first we thought the problem was the trigger doing the math for the life gain, however. As repeated testing and the debugger reveled with actually something different but related. Below follows what was actually causing the crash.
Previous to 1.5 in the trigger editor when you could select the precision of the decimal and the default was "Any Precision" which for all intents and purposes didn't appear to work. Now in 1.5 it is working and it was causing us a huge problem with our Custom UI. We had developed a custom stat bar for tracking life, shields, and energy. which had to do some simple math to calculate the change in the colored bar and the actual displayed number of life. My assumption is, now that Any Precision is actually working, a number would try and get added or subtracted to our stats bar number (IE not the bar itself but the numerical value displayed of amount of life) similar to 10/3 or any other infinite series and for some reason trying to display that number would cause the game to crash. I'm pretty sure it was the colored bar equation because we converted to integers.
The lesson I suppose I will take away from this is don't use the default values but there might be cases were people want to use the Any Precision so be forewarned.
EDIT: if anyone has trouble understanding what the hell I'm talking about I'll see if I can add some screenshots.
I'm actually working on a minimalist tutorial on the basics of it. Though I'm not sure if it's going to be detailed enough to answer your question. Hopefully be able to post it up tonight, else I'll only be able to next week.
In a nutshell, you just need to add fields, the same way you would add them in a struct (record). Once you've declared the fields, just add instances, and set their values.
Each field allows you to determine it's:
ID
Variable Type
Size (Default 1), Increasing it to more than one just makes it a larger array.
Editor Column: This needs to be a unique (non-zero) number, it determines where exactly the field appears in the instances table.
Modifiable: If you plan to modify your instances with script, then tick this, else it basically locks the data field such that it can't be modded.
Others properties are kinda useless IMO.
Make sure your user_type has "define default values" unchecked though, or it won't let you modify your instances. For ease of use, I recommend defining your default values after adding all your fields. This way, whenever you add a new instance, it will assume all the default values. If many of your instances have identical data in their fields, this will save you a lot of trouble.
Edit: But then again.. Its kinda redundant to have the field in the first place if all the data is the same.
Once you've keyed all the data in, you can read them with the new User Type trigger functions provided in the trigger editor. They're very straightforward to use.
Thanks much, you gave me enough info to figure them out and make it work. While for my studio's current project we probably won't be switching from variable arrays when we start our next one this new data type will be fantastic.
EDIT: One thing to note and honestly I have no clue why, while variable arrays can use 0 as a valid index entry the User Types seem to start at 1 and you can't use 0. For me since I'm so used to using arrays it's a little annoying, but that's probably because our entire system is setup to count 0 as part of the numerous loops to cycle through the array. At the onset of a new project it won't be as annoying.
User types are extremely useful in liason with triggers. They allow you to create records of variables via data instead of triggers, which is significantly easier than having to painstakingly key them in one by one within the trigger GUI.
I'm in the process of trying to understand how the User Types work exactly. It seems to me they could be used to avoid using a huge variable array of for example: upgrades, behaviors, or units (and many more). I'm having some issues figuring out exactly how to implement it though. Any chance you could post some images of how you are using them?
From what I understand the higher difficulty AI's aren't really all that much "smarter" really with Very Hard and Insane its the fact that the AI has a higher APM cap and it has bonus resource advantages IE basically it cheats.
Okay I'm going to attempt to answer this and granted I'm on my phone and can't pull up the editor. Our team has had issues all over the place with unit variables in events. In the advent of a problem like this we do a generic event and get the trigger to run properly via conditions. An example is using any unit uses said your ability and then in conditions use triggering unit= builder[0]. As for the cause I haven't a clue only that I have had similar issues with this kind of event before.
This may not mean much to you, but I'll be praying for you and your family. My deepest condolences because I can't even imagine what life would be like without my father.
Okay this is a really exciting post for me. However before the really exiting news first things first I did post a small update on the front post with some new pictures and filled in the last bit of missing core game-play information. We finally finished the last major UI addition and it looks really awesome.
The exciting news is starting this next Monday. Meaning January 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM MST we will officially be starting CLOSED BETA which means anyone wanting to help us with that and get a sneak peek at what this project is going to be like can. Their are only 3 requirements.
1. US Bnet account, sorry for the rest of u guys outside the US but for closed beta we will doing exclusive testing on just US. (Don't fear though when we hit Open Beta we will be going for a Worldwide release)
2. you must send me a PM giving me your Bnet name and character code and/or email link to your bnet account either is fine but I do need those things.
3. Ventrilo, we discussed this long and hard and decided that for best testing results we really need some kind of dialogue back and forth between us and the testers because at it's heart this is a Team vs Team map so quick communication is key.
Thats all you need to participate in the closed beta! The main reason I'm super pumped about announcing this because unlike my usual posts of "we should be done about some generic time" everything is already ready to go but we wanted to let people know ahead of time.
Yeah I can say I've had random issues like that. Its a pain to deal with so eventually I just started making most things I needed from scratch. Once you get familiar with what fields need to be entered it doesn't take all that long and does away with those annoying problems. I never did find any kind of solution (other than just building everything from scratch) though for the random issues that cropped up from duplicating, but it didn't happen all that often.
Updates the rules and mechanics of StormKeep on the main page. These are changes we made a while ago but hadn't posted about. Hopefully it fills in some more details for people. However if you don't want to read here is a summarized version.
Updates to the the commander role: He now only focuses on the enemy board. Too busy trying keep track what was happening on the whole map. so we limited his job to just the enemy arena, however we added new things for him to do so he is still a very intensive role but not overly so. Commander levels have been reduced to just gaining a Skill point every several minutes he can use to learn more abilities. This was done to give a more specific balance to the game so that it didn't become overly lopsided.
Updates to Armageddon: refined the idea of Armageddon into the newly titled Storm Bar and Storm Tower. the goal is a race to who can fill the bar first thus helping them end the game and win.
General Mechanics: Rounds have been done away with, it feels unnecessary to have the game divided into rounds so we changed the game so everything updates after several minutes without interruption. Teams can now revive dead heroes instantly but the cost is brutal, so its better to wait for the natural revive time period.
That's about it for now more to come soon(tm).
If we don't make updates for a long time don't be worried I assure you that we get up every day and work on this map. We have invested massive amount of time and effort into this project and we won't be stopping unless the entire team gets killed in a freak accident.
0
I thought we were supposed to follow one of the two standardized rules of marketing for video games:
Option 1: Have a cover picture of a gruff manly guy who looks like he just left prison in heavy armor holding his weapon and in the backdrop smoldering remains of a city or castle.
Option 2: Have cover pictures of 3d scantily clad females with impossibly large breasts wielding a weapon.
I mean who cares about gameplay or uniqueness when you have marketing like that =P.
0
StormKeep Alpha has gone live as of right now. It's now available on the US server. Check it out and give us some feedback, everyone on our team would appreciate it.
0
After many months of delays and setbacks we are getting ready to release a public alpha version of StormKeep. We will be updating soon with an exact date, but in the meantime the forums are now up and running so if your interested in playing the Alpha version of StormKeep or just want to keep up with our progress check out our forums in the link below
http:www.ninjacore.net/forum
0
Ive already solved the my issue with this but I figured I'd give people a heads up cause I didn't see any posts on the matter. Now whether this problem is rooted in the math itself or just the specific purpose we were using it for I'm not sure. It did cause us a slight head ache so I figured Id post to spare others the pain. Here is a quick summary of what occurred:
Hero used ability which would kill the target unit and then add the remaining amount of life the target unit had on it before it was killed and add that total to the hero.
Game would crash right after.
The ability was designed mostly in triggers mainly the amount of life given to the hero unit. Now at first we thought the problem was the trigger doing the math for the life gain, however. As repeated testing and the debugger reveled with actually something different but related. Below follows what was actually causing the crash.
Previous to 1.5 in the trigger editor when you could select the precision of the decimal and the default was "Any Precision" which for all intents and purposes didn't appear to work. Now in 1.5 it is working and it was causing us a huge problem with our Custom UI. We had developed a custom stat bar for tracking life, shields, and energy. which had to do some simple math to calculate the change in the colored bar and the actual displayed number of life. My assumption is, now that Any Precision is actually working, a number would try and get added or subtracted to our stats bar number (IE not the bar itself but the numerical value displayed of amount of life) similar to 10/3 or any other infinite series and for some reason trying to display that number would cause the game to crash. I'm pretty sure it was the colored bar equation because we converted to integers.
The lesson I suppose I will take away from this is don't use the default values but there might be cases were people want to use the Any Precision so be forewarned.
EDIT: if anyone has trouble understanding what the hell I'm talking about I'll see if I can add some screenshots.
0
Thanks much, you gave me enough info to figure them out and make it work. While for my studio's current project we probably won't be switching from variable arrays when we start our next one this new data type will be fantastic.
EDIT: One thing to note and honestly I have no clue why, while variable arrays can use 0 as a valid index entry the User Types seem to start at 1 and you can't use 0. For me since I'm so used to using arrays it's a little annoying, but that's probably because our entire system is setup to count 0 as part of the numerous loops to cycle through the array. At the onset of a new project it won't be as annoying.
0
I'm in the process of trying to understand how the User Types work exactly. It seems to me they could be used to avoid using a huge variable array of for example: upgrades, behaviors, or units (and many more). I'm having some issues figuring out exactly how to implement it though. Any chance you could post some images of how you are using them?
0
From what I understand the higher difficulty AI's aren't really all that much "smarter" really with Very Hard and Insane its the fact that the AI has a higher APM cap and it has bonus resource advantages IE basically it cheats.
0
Okay I'm going to attempt to answer this and granted I'm on my phone and can't pull up the editor. Our team has had issues all over the place with unit variables in events. In the advent of a problem like this we do a generic event and get the trigger to run properly via conditions. An example is using any unit uses said your ability and then in conditions use triggering unit= builder[0]. As for the cause I haven't a clue only that I have had similar issues with this kind of event before.
0
Don't feel bad the data editor is a complex being, and actors events especially awesome/angry when you start using them
0
This may not mean much to you, but I'll be praying for you and your family. My deepest condolences because I can't even imagine what life would be like without my father.
0
Update
01/25/2012
Okay this is a really exciting post for me. However before the really exiting news first things first I did post a small update on the front post with some new pictures and filled in the last bit of missing core game-play information. We finally finished the last major UI addition and it looks really awesome.
The exciting news is starting this next Monday. Meaning January 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM MST we will officially be starting CLOSED BETA which means anyone wanting to help us with that and get a sneak peek at what this project is going to be like can. Their are only 3 requirements.
1. US Bnet account, sorry for the rest of u guys outside the US but for closed beta we will doing exclusive testing on just US. (Don't fear though when we hit Open Beta we will be going for a Worldwide release)
2. you must send me a PM giving me your Bnet name and character code and/or email link to your bnet account either is fine but I do need those things.
3. Ventrilo, we discussed this long and hard and decided that for best testing results we really need some kind of dialogue back and forth between us and the testers because at it's heart this is a Team vs Team map so quick communication is key.
Thats all you need to participate in the closed beta! The main reason I'm super pumped about announcing this because unlike my usual posts of "we should be done about some generic time" everything is already ready to go but we wanted to let people know ahead of time.
0
Yeah I can say I've had random issues like that. Its a pain to deal with so eventually I just started making most things I needed from scratch. Once you get familiar with what fields need to be entered it doesn't take all that long and does away with those annoying problems. I never did find any kind of solution (other than just building everything from scratch) though for the random issues that cropped up from duplicating, but it didn't happen all that often.
0
Update
01/12/2012
Updates the rules and mechanics of StormKeep on the main page. These are changes we made a while ago but hadn't posted about. Hopefully it fills in some more details for people. However if you don't want to read here is a summarized version.
Updates to the the commander role: He now only focuses on the enemy board. Too busy trying keep track what was happening on the whole map. so we limited his job to just the enemy arena, however we added new things for him to do so he is still a very intensive role but not overly so. Commander levels have been reduced to just gaining a Skill point every several minutes he can use to learn more abilities. This was done to give a more specific balance to the game so that it didn't become overly lopsided.
Updates to Armageddon: refined the idea of Armageddon into the newly titled Storm Bar and Storm Tower. the goal is a race to who can fill the bar first thus helping them end the game and win.
General Mechanics: Rounds have been done away with, it feels unnecessary to have the game divided into rounds so we changed the game so everything updates after several minutes without interruption. Teams can now revive dead heroes instantly but the cost is brutal, so its better to wait for the natural revive time period.
That's about it for now more to come soon(tm).
If we don't make updates for a long time don't be worried I assure you that we get up every day and work on this map. We have invested massive amount of time and effort into this project and we won't be stopping unless the entire team gets killed in a freak accident.
0
Looks like a lot of fun guys can't wait to try it out.
0
@LongLivetheTalDarim: Go
I did Latin in High school and you are right it's proved invaluable for that reason alone.