SC2Mapster

@Redlight51: Go For the dialog stuff take a look at the dialog related triggers in the editor - you can choose which playergroup to show something to. Making a playergroup from a single player shows it to just one person.

Anything you can do with the GUI trigger editor can be done with Galaxy (plus it can do a little bit more). If you like programming just think of it as a big API you can use to control your maps.

I'm working on a fairly elaborate project to create a turn based tactical strategy game. The game is flexible and designed to be played on an individual turn by turn basis or all players can act out their turn at the same time, giving it a faster pace. It is designed to be a drop in for any set of terrain designed under a few limitations, meaning that the framework can support multiple "maps."

It is written entirely in Andromeda (an object oriented extension to Galaxy which is heavily inspired by Java) so I am looking for people who know how to program in an object oriented language and want to work on challenging game design problems. There are a lot of cool things to work on within the limited environment Galaxy provides while creating a complex game system that is totally different from the standard gameplay. It's not a problem if you don't know Andromeda - it is easy to learn and I'm willing to help.

I am also looking for people who have patience and are good at unit balance to help design the units the game uses. When I say design, I don't mean doing data editor work - this is just filling out spreadsheets of information on the units to give them the various attributes the framework uses. This will be a lot of figuring out how much damage one unit will do against others, any abilities it should have, etc.

I don't want to reveal too much about it publicly yet since it is still in the early stages. If you think you would be interested in this, PM me and I'll provide as much detail as you would like. So far a lot of work has been done mostly by myself on the map and a lot of the initial core code is done, but there is still a ton of stuff to work on.

Quote from VeridianEntropy: Go

The popularity system is what really kills any though of me trying to make a new map or heaven forbid even change the damn name of my map, for fear that no one will see it / play it.

It was so much better for w3.

And why the hell cant a multi-billion dollar company like blizzard make a search function...

There is a search function that works rather well; unfortunately it is only for creating a game, not joining one.

I'm working with some pretty complicated triggers that exceed the maximum runtime for a trigger (which according to my testing is about 175ms).

I've discovered that the Wait() command sleeps a trigger and that the trigger duration is not saved over context switches. So by inserting Wait( 0.0, c_gameTime ) into a trigger, it can essentially be broken up to fit into intervals that do not exceed the trigger limit.

This raises an interesting question though - when playing a game online, is the trigger execution time determined by the slowest person's computer? The machine I test on is quite fast and if my map is played by someone with a much slower computer, the way I am splitting my trigger may not work.

In case you are wondering, I am working on a map with a hexagonal game grid where the movement costs for units can vary depending on the grid cell, so a shortest path problem needs to be solved every time a unit is selected for movement. I haven't implemented a priority queue yet so the current implementation I'm working off of is O(n^2) (yuck). To make matters worse, for the maximum range of a unit in my game (7) this turns into n = 169 hexagonal grid cells. Right now the slowest part of the procedure is building the n by n array of weights between the nodes.

Edit: So far I've tested on two computers, a 3.4ghz quad core phenom and a 2.4ghz dual core turion and the runtimes were exactly the same - need to find someone with a really slow computer to see if this trick won't work in all cases.

I'm pretty sure (though not 100%) that it is not currently possible to change map textures dynamically right now.

@OverPoweredZeratul: Go What does your trigger do? Unless you are hitting the trigger runtime limit, you probably don't need to break it up (unless it make sense to factor out common functionality into functions).

@llou: Go Quick question unrelated to the question you just posed - how are you creating your game grid and highlighting the cells in it? I'm working on a project that is similar in nature (though not a tactics style game).

I'll get around to making a part 3 for that tutorial I started sometime. I got pretty distracted from working on it. After I finish the map I'm currently working on I might write a few more example driven tutorials.

Quote from Skittles17: Go

@progammer: Go

Hey, I was just thinking about my top down shooter and remember seeing this yesterday... and well, why don't you just make 8 boxes per player? Mouse enters one of the boxes and the other boxes move around where that box was. So the boxes constantly move around the mouse. Get what I'm saying? That would greatly reduce any lag issues this may have.

A solution like that would fail as soon as there was a discontinuity in mouse movement (e.g. the field of view changes abruptly or even slowly with the mouse over a UI element that prevents highlighting). If your map is constrained such that these events can't happen, then certainly it seems like it would be better to employ a strategy like that.

Quote from gorang: Go

Not sure what SD means. After I used virtualdub with the Xvid codec it came out as 79mb. Then I uploaded it and there we have it.

I went online and looked up what all the settings mean for xvid configuration and did what i thought best. It's not the nicest looking vid, but I uploaded a 300mb vid before at it stopped at 95% and failed. it took hours too. So rather go for low quality unless i can be sure lol

SD means standard definition, generally a resolution of around 720x468 or lower. XviD can make some nice videos if you allow it enough room.

The reason this can't be done is that the name of a region isn't stored anywhere except in the map editor - thus it is not available at runtime.

I'd just like to mention some differences between TriggerDestroy and TriggerEnable.

using TriggerEnable( some_trigger, false ) will cause all of the events for your trigger to fire, but the runActions (second argument) parameter will be false, allowing your trigger to check this condition and do nothing (assuming you have coded for this).

TriggerDestroy, on the other hand, will completely get rid of your trigger - any events related to it will be unregistered.

Quote from Vermore: Go

@AzothHyjal: Go

Thanks AzothHyjal!

By the way, I tried searching online and researching, but what exactly are enrichments and what are they used for? Is it something like allocating some attributes/properties to a class?

Take a look at this thread: http://sc2mod.com/board/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=13

sc2mod is the home of Andromeda, it's a good place to ask questions specific to it.

Enrichments are basically a way to add functionality to a type. For example, if I had an enrichment on the type unit called "getHP," I could then use any unit variable name along with that enrichment to get its hp. For example:

unit myUnit;
int hp; // might be fixed, I can't remember
hp = myUnit.getHP();

Even though unit is not a class, the enrichment allows me to define some class like functionality for it, instead of a traditional C approach which would be the following:

unit myUnit;
int hp; // might be fixed, I can't remember
hp = getUnitHP( myUnit );

Quote from Vermore: Go

s3rius, thanks! You answered my questions exactly as well as some extra nifty stuff.

@s3rius: Go

How would I include the initializer function if I'm coding outside of SC2? Currently my setup is coding in Notepadplusplus with Andromeda syntax and then compiling with Andromeda which also injects my code into a specific map as an import.

In Andromeda you can put code in a static block to have it run on initialization.

static{
    // code goes here
}

You don't need to worry about the InitMap() function with Andromeda - the only important thing is that the init map function calls the initialization for Andromeda, which will handle all of your code.

Quote:

Thats pretty neat, I'll be using this quite a lot. Concerning gt_SomeDeathTrigger, is the parameter limited to global triggers? If not, does everything else gets automatically included when I use function TriggerAddEventXYZ for any function I write? (In other words do I need to write anything else after adding the event within a function, other than the actual function that is ran when the event is triggered?)

Trigger variables do not need to be global - once an event has been passed a trigger you can get rid of the trigger variable if you want - the only reason to keep the variable is if you will need it later on, for instance adding it to another event or something. In fact if you wanted to you could place the call to TriggerCreate() directly in an event binding.

Quote from s3rius: Go

Know your code - learn galaxy :D

@ZarafFaraz: Go

For-loops are always messy. For a non-nested loop is much less problematic. A while loop would still be more efficient, but the different is far smaller.

Seems like a compelling response to that "Should I learn the Scripting Language?" thread.