How would that actually work in practice? I think I understand what you're saying but I'm unsure of how to translate it into an actual trigger or set of triggers. Sorry if I'm being remarkably stupid. x.x I'm fascinated by mapmaking but I've never been very good at it and I have no programming background at all. XD I do know what a Boolean variable is. I'm just not sure how to actually structure the resulting trigger.
Boy, coming up even with a title for this was a pain. XD The idea seems simple, but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to execute this. Basically I'm making a mission map in which Dehaka has become stranded on a planet where no Zerg have ever gone before. Kerrigan senses his general location and sends Zagara to that same general chunk of land to start a hive cluster so they can help destroy the Terran presence on the planet and reunite Dehaka with the Swarm. One of the mission's primary objectives, therefore, is to locate Zagara's hive cluster.
Now, here's where my problem comes in. In the campaign, when Dehaka dies, he respawns at your main base after so-and-so length of time (30 seconds or something like that.) In this mission, I want it to work like that only AFTER he finds the friendly hive cluster. In short I want it to work like this. Once you have discovered the friendly hive cluster, if Dehaka dies, he respawns after a certain length of time just like in the campaign. But before then, if Dehaka dies, the game is over and you lose.
Now, in my mind, I was picturing something like this:
Event: Unit (Dehaka) dies
Condition: AND Unit (Dehaka) has entered Region ZagaraHiveCluster
If the condition returns true, then:
Action: Run Respawn Dehaka trigger
If the condition returns false, then:
Action: End game in defeat for player 1
But of course there's no such option 'unit has entered'. Unit is IN region strikes me as a possible option, but then I'll have to phrase it differently - if you die while close to the friendly hive cluster, you respawn, but if you die far away, it's all over. This doesn't make much sense to me though given the nature of the respawning; he's basically being cloned from stored DNA samples. I can mentally justify Zagara not having any samples from him in that hive cluster until he arrives (as a Primal he probably resists sharing his essence with the Swarm as much as possible.) But once that happens, how far away he died is irrelevant, or ought to be.
So what's the best way to make this work the way I want it to - before Dehaka goes to a given region, his death ends the game, but after then, he respawns at the center of that region when he dies? Or should I just accept the unit-in-region concept and try to figure out some way to explain it so players don't go WTF, why does distance matter?
I have a suggestion with regard to the Blink. I always use Zeratul's blink ability rather than the Stalker's. In addition to not having the phantom model issue, it also gives the cool smoky effect on exit and entry.
I wasn't sure what forum this belonged in so I put it here. Sorry if this is wrong.
So I just finished playing through the HotS campaign. And while I still want to finish the WoL map I had been working on (Garmling's Revenge), while playing I got an idea for a new map that I'd really, really like to try to make. It'll be much more challenging than GR, but I think with practice and study I can do it. (And probably a lot of help from this site. XD)
Before I begin doing anything, though, I need some input on a major design choice. Basically, I can't decide whether to make the map linear or non-linear. Garmling's Revenge is more or less linear. It's possible for the player to diverge and go off and do whatever they want after they get to a certain point in the map and have earned the units/abilities to be able to move around freely, but the map is designed to channel the player through a series of challenges and events/encounters in a more or less predetermined order, rather how it is in most of the campaign maps (in both WoL and HotS). There's a certain degree of wiggle room -- for example, when I designed the map, I tended to destroy the Terran settlement on the plateau first, then wander into a Baneling trap, then find a couple of feral Zerg, then fight a Brutalisk. But it's very possible for the player to ignore the plateau settlement, head down to the feral Zerg and the Brutalisk, kill it, get the Nydus Nest, and use it to move on past the barrier cliffs to the north without ever discovering the Baneling trap or the destroyed hive cluster area. But that's the most flexible area of the map, at least so far. Otherwise it channels the player in a very specific direction so that the events happen in a certain order.
Now, the concept for the HotS map I'm about to begin is a bit similar to GR. If you haven't played HotS campaign through the Zerus missions and you care about spoilers, don't read this! [SPOILER ALERT!]
Okay, long story short, the map is set on ancient Zerus, long before Amon came to it. The concept is that the player controls one of the really old-school primal Zerg, one of the very first ones. You start out basically as a little larva-like thing, and you're supposed to hunt and kill other creatures on the map (both Zerg and critters) to absorb their essence. The more you kill, the more powerful you become generally, but the specific things you kill and absorb will determine the specific abilities you gain and how the model representing your character changes.
I am going to do a single player version first, then a competitive multiplayer version once I've mastered the mechanics and everything from making the single player version. The multi-player version will have to be non-linear to allow for meaningful competition, of course, but what about the single player version? Should I set it up so the player can basically explore and choose what to absorb, not exactly at will, but in sort of an MU*-like manner of 'if you're powerful enough to handle the enemies in the area, you can go there'? Or should I make it more linear and give it something of a small story like in GR? What would be more fun, ultimately? What would give the most replay value? I really appreciate everyone's input. :)
Dragoneles: You've never been to California it would seem... particularly the Central and South parts of it. Palm trees coexist just fine with smog in the latter and fog in the former. This scene looks like a patch of SoCal to me. :p
Consider using the Height tool. Even very small little dips and hills can make a HUUUUGE difference. The actual building area of course would have to be flat, but it could be on the flattened top of a hill for example, so that the lawns and roads leading to it slope down some, or there could be some gently rolling hills in the grassy areas (very small hillocks obviously in the actual lawn, but you know what I mean.) I mean, don't go nuts with it - subtle, like I said - but it's a way to add depth and realism without necessarily adding clutter.
Actually, odd as it looks, I've seen sand do similar things in rocky areas with a thin surface coating of sand if there's a lot of wind going in one direction for a long time. If the sand isn't disturbed, the oddest patterns form. I suspect they might be looking at aerial photos or something and trying to mimic what they see there. It doesn't really "work"... the transition between rock and sand needs to be fuzzier/softer. But the actual patterns look more or less realistic to me. Still, must be a real pain when you didn't want it to happen! XD
Agree with DrSuperEvil. I almost never set my maps on existing planets in the canon lore simply because I often have my own ideas about the place I want to create. My maps end up with any number of assorted tilesets, whatever I feel like using. For example I did a swamp map recently using tiles from Agria, Redstone, Zhakul'das, and Haven. Why not just make up your own planet/life-having moon and put whatever critters you feel like on it? (And besides, honestly, I've noticed while replaying the campaign recently that a lot of the critters are NOT limited to just one map. The Lyote appears on pretty much all the desert/wasteland ones.)
EDIT: I didn't notice the date stamp on this before replying. It seemed relatively recent from its position in the post list, but I should've checked anyway. Not sure what the gravedigging threshold is here but sorry if I crossed it. Doesn't really matter anyway, just a burst of irritable pedantic BS.
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Wow, I would've expected more perception and critical thought from a community which I know to be generally intelligent and creative. Kind of sad, but then, this sort of semi-unconscious blindness is why sexism and racism and so forth still exist...
One quote in particular in this thread I have to respond to directly, though.
"We as a society need to accept the fact that men and women ARE NOT EQUAL. We both have different needs and positions to fill."
This is a BIG pet peeve of mine. Equality != sameness. It means that things which are DIFFERENT may still be of equivalent or identical WORTH and VALUE. Having different needs and positions to fill has nothing whatsoever to do with the fundamental equality of all human beings. If you don't believe all human beings are equal, then tell me, what exactly makes one person more worthy, valuable, or deserving than another? Certainly there are plenty of philosophical constructs possible down that line of thought, don't get me wrong, but I at least am uncomfortable with the idea of some people being More Equal Than Others. But then, I've read Animal Farm.
(And by the way, to the person who said all women are hypocrites, speak for yourself -- the women where I live do the yardwork and change tires and so forth themselves. And have jobs. And raise kids. All at once. While the men expect them to have a job AND do all the traditional female duties at the same time. So let's talk about hypocrisy, shall we? Then again in my part of the world, most people don't exactly have the LUXURY of choosing whether or not to work. If you want to eat, you work. Period. Try to remember that your tiny slice of the world is not in fact the whole world.)
Feminism has nothing to do with 'proving' that women are 'the same as' men. It's about asserting that female human beings are, in fact, human beings, and as such deserve to have the same rights and opportunities as other human beings. It's really an extremely simple concept to grasp. Why people have trouble with this I will never understand, but both women and men routinely manage to make the subject a lot more complex than it really is. (And I include feminists in that, BTW. Some of them are just as guilty of it at times.)
Of course, there's also the fact that modern science has shown pretty definitively that 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are culturally defined concepts, which means they are essentially illusions. The only genuine differences between males and females are in the gross anatomy. Everything else is cultural indoctrination, end of story. Any two individual human beings, chosen at random, are more different as individuals than they are as members of whatever arbitrary groups you might want to place them in. To say that a different way, a given man and a given woman, chosen at random, will always be more different as individual people, considered independent of sex, than they are as man and woman considered independent of personal, non-gender-related traits.
And by the way, yes, the logo is sexist. Not in a really massive or terrible way, but it is, because that is a -men's- tie. Even back when there was a sort of female tie, it was very different from the male business tie. The logo implies, symbolically, that all businesspeople are male. That is what makes it sexist. But that doesn't mean the logo is a huge deal or something. It just makes it a fucking stupid logo. There are incidences of sexism which actually, you know, matter, and have a real impact on something. This is just a tiny fragment of cultural BS. Especially given that this is Florida. We're not exactly discussing a bastion of enlightened thought, here...
How exactly are you doing the KotH concept? Depending on the precise way you want this to work it might not be all that hard. My very first map had a KotH type concept - there was an island expo in the center of the map which one side had to seize and hold for 20 consecutive minutes to win the game. If I wanted to have multiple hills in that scenario, that could be done a few ways. For example let's say I wanted the player to have to have a base on -all- the hills to win, not just one. I would add a condition to the trigger specifying that the countdown wouldn't start until all the hills were held by one player. But to try to offer much help though I'd have to know what exactly you want the map to do/be like.
I see -- interesting. Is there a way to make two AIs ignore each other? I keep having an issue where player 2 (the Dominion) and player 3 (wild Zerg) units keep wandering into each other and killing each other during playtests before I even manage to play through to that part of the map. I fixed it just by moving the units around a bit so they weren't likely to ever be in each other's sight range, but that'll be much more difficult if I'm sending units walking around. The map is being designed such that it sort of channels the player around through a series of scenarios or challenges -- that is, there's X enemy units in Y positioning ahead and you have Z available to deal with it, what do you do, that kind of thing. So while it isn't obvious when you're playing it, a lot of the encounter zones are very close together on the map with the potential for units I didn't intend to interact catching sight of each other.
Wow, his work is excellent. Somehow nothing there quite fits what I'm looking for though for this particular unit (although I might end up using some of them as other units on the map anyway... also it seems to me that some of his models were included in my Map Editor by default? O.o Am I imagining things?)
I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I should just modify the lyote model uberlisk-style to make it more Zergy and go with that instead of trying to use a brand new model... hmm.
There's only three. Making copies of the action and changing the unit was actually my original solution but I felt like a sloppy amateur using it. XD I've gotten the unit group concept to work now thanks to Tehwildcard's help in PMs. Now I just need to work out how attack waves work so I can have the Dominion be aggressive rather than just defending against the player's attacks all the time. (Then again, given that the map is already kind of hard and strongly resource limited perhaps it's best to leave them on the defensive?)
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Aha! I see now. Thanks very much!
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How would that actually work in practice? I think I understand what you're saying but I'm unsure of how to translate it into an actual trigger or set of triggers. Sorry if I'm being remarkably stupid. x.x I'm fascinated by mapmaking but I've never been very good at it and I have no programming background at all. XD I do know what a Boolean variable is. I'm just not sure how to actually structure the resulting trigger.
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Boy, coming up even with a title for this was a pain. XD The idea seems simple, but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to execute this. Basically I'm making a mission map in which Dehaka has become stranded on a planet where no Zerg have ever gone before. Kerrigan senses his general location and sends Zagara to that same general chunk of land to start a hive cluster so they can help destroy the Terran presence on the planet and reunite Dehaka with the Swarm. One of the mission's primary objectives, therefore, is to locate Zagara's hive cluster.
Now, here's where my problem comes in. In the campaign, when Dehaka dies, he respawns at your main base after so-and-so length of time (30 seconds or something like that.) In this mission, I want it to work like that only AFTER he finds the friendly hive cluster. In short I want it to work like this. Once you have discovered the friendly hive cluster, if Dehaka dies, he respawns after a certain length of time just like in the campaign. But before then, if Dehaka dies, the game is over and you lose.
Now, in my mind, I was picturing something like this:
Event: Unit (Dehaka) dies
Condition: AND Unit (Dehaka) has entered Region ZagaraHiveCluster
If the condition returns true, then:
Action: Run Respawn Dehaka trigger
If the condition returns false, then:
Action: End game in defeat for player 1
But of course there's no such option 'unit has entered'. Unit is IN region strikes me as a possible option, but then I'll have to phrase it differently - if you die while close to the friendly hive cluster, you respawn, but if you die far away, it's all over. This doesn't make much sense to me though given the nature of the respawning; he's basically being cloned from stored DNA samples. I can mentally justify Zagara not having any samples from him in that hive cluster until he arrives (as a Primal he probably resists sharing his essence with the Swarm as much as possible.) But once that happens, how far away he died is irrelevant, or ought to be.
So what's the best way to make this work the way I want it to - before Dehaka goes to a given region, his death ends the game, but after then, he respawns at the center of that region when he dies? Or should I just accept the unit-in-region concept and try to figure out some way to explain it so players don't go WTF, why does distance matter?
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I have a suggestion with regard to the Blink. I always use Zeratul's blink ability rather than the Stalker's. In addition to not having the phantom model issue, it also gives the cool smoky effect on exit and entry.
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I wasn't sure what forum this belonged in so I put it here. Sorry if this is wrong.
So I just finished playing through the HotS campaign. And while I still want to finish the WoL map I had been working on (Garmling's Revenge), while playing I got an idea for a new map that I'd really, really like to try to make. It'll be much more challenging than GR, but I think with practice and study I can do it. (And probably a lot of help from this site. XD)
Before I begin doing anything, though, I need some input on a major design choice. Basically, I can't decide whether to make the map linear or non-linear. Garmling's Revenge is more or less linear. It's possible for the player to diverge and go off and do whatever they want after they get to a certain point in the map and have earned the units/abilities to be able to move around freely, but the map is designed to channel the player through a series of challenges and events/encounters in a more or less predetermined order, rather how it is in most of the campaign maps (in both WoL and HotS). There's a certain degree of wiggle room -- for example, when I designed the map, I tended to destroy the Terran settlement on the plateau first, then wander into a Baneling trap, then find a couple of feral Zerg, then fight a Brutalisk. But it's very possible for the player to ignore the plateau settlement, head down to the feral Zerg and the Brutalisk, kill it, get the Nydus Nest, and use it to move on past the barrier cliffs to the north without ever discovering the Baneling trap or the destroyed hive cluster area. But that's the most flexible area of the map, at least so far. Otherwise it channels the player in a very specific direction so that the events happen in a certain order.
Now, the concept for the HotS map I'm about to begin is a bit similar to GR. If you haven't played HotS campaign through the Zerus missions and you care about spoilers, don't read this! [SPOILER ALERT!]
Okay, long story short, the map is set on ancient Zerus, long before Amon came to it. The concept is that the player controls one of the really old-school primal Zerg, one of the very first ones. You start out basically as a little larva-like thing, and you're supposed to hunt and kill other creatures on the map (both Zerg and critters) to absorb their essence. The more you kill, the more powerful you become generally, but the specific things you kill and absorb will determine the specific abilities you gain and how the model representing your character changes.
I am going to do a single player version first, then a competitive multiplayer version once I've mastered the mechanics and everything from making the single player version. The multi-player version will have to be non-linear to allow for meaningful competition, of course, but what about the single player version? Should I set it up so the player can basically explore and choose what to absorb, not exactly at will, but in sort of an MU*-like manner of 'if you're powerful enough to handle the enemies in the area, you can go there'? Or should I make it more linear and give it something of a small story like in GR? What would be more fun, ultimately? What would give the most replay value? I really appreciate everyone's input. :)
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Dragoneles: You've never been to California it would seem... particularly the Central and South parts of it. Palm trees coexist just fine with smog in the latter and fog in the former. This scene looks like a patch of SoCal to me. :p
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Consider using the Height tool. Even very small little dips and hills can make a HUUUUGE difference. The actual building area of course would have to be flat, but it could be on the flattened top of a hill for example, so that the lawns and roads leading to it slope down some, or there could be some gently rolling hills in the grassy areas (very small hillocks obviously in the actual lawn, but you know what I mean.) I mean, don't go nuts with it - subtle, like I said - but it's a way to add depth and realism without necessarily adding clutter.
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Actually, odd as it looks, I've seen sand do similar things in rocky areas with a thin surface coating of sand if there's a lot of wind going in one direction for a long time. If the sand isn't disturbed, the oddest patterns form. I suspect they might be looking at aerial photos or something and trying to mimic what they see there. It doesn't really "work"... the transition between rock and sand needs to be fuzzier/softer. But the actual patterns look more or less realistic to me. Still, must be a real pain when you didn't want it to happen! XD
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Agree with DrSuperEvil. I almost never set my maps on existing planets in the canon lore simply because I often have my own ideas about the place I want to create. My maps end up with any number of assorted tilesets, whatever I feel like using. For example I did a swamp map recently using tiles from Agria, Redstone, Zhakul'das, and Haven. Why not just make up your own planet/life-having moon and put whatever critters you feel like on it? (And besides, honestly, I've noticed while replaying the campaign recently that a lot of the critters are NOT limited to just one map. The Lyote appears on pretty much all the desert/wasteland ones.)
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EDIT: I didn't notice the date stamp on this before replying. It seemed relatively recent from its position in the post list, but I should've checked anyway. Not sure what the gravedigging threshold is here but sorry if I crossed it. Doesn't really matter anyway, just a burst of irritable pedantic BS.
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Wow, I would've expected more perception and critical thought from a community which I know to be generally intelligent and creative. Kind of sad, but then, this sort of semi-unconscious blindness is why sexism and racism and so forth still exist...
One quote in particular in this thread I have to respond to directly, though.
"We as a society need to accept the fact that men and women ARE NOT EQUAL. We both have different needs and positions to fill."
This is a BIG pet peeve of mine. Equality != sameness. It means that things which are DIFFERENT may still be of equivalent or identical WORTH and VALUE. Having different needs and positions to fill has nothing whatsoever to do with the fundamental equality of all human beings. If you don't believe all human beings are equal, then tell me, what exactly makes one person more worthy, valuable, or deserving than another? Certainly there are plenty of philosophical constructs possible down that line of thought, don't get me wrong, but I at least am uncomfortable with the idea of some people being More Equal Than Others. But then, I've read Animal Farm.
(And by the way, to the person who said all women are hypocrites, speak for yourself -- the women where I live do the yardwork and change tires and so forth themselves. And have jobs. And raise kids. All at once. While the men expect them to have a job AND do all the traditional female duties at the same time. So let's talk about hypocrisy, shall we? Then again in my part of the world, most people don't exactly have the LUXURY of choosing whether or not to work. If you want to eat, you work. Period. Try to remember that your tiny slice of the world is not in fact the whole world.)
Feminism has nothing to do with 'proving' that women are 'the same as' men. It's about asserting that female human beings are, in fact, human beings, and as such deserve to have the same rights and opportunities as other human beings. It's really an extremely simple concept to grasp. Why people have trouble with this I will never understand, but both women and men routinely manage to make the subject a lot more complex than it really is. (And I include feminists in that, BTW. Some of them are just as guilty of it at times.)
Of course, there's also the fact that modern science has shown pretty definitively that 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are culturally defined concepts, which means they are essentially illusions. The only genuine differences between males and females are in the gross anatomy. Everything else is cultural indoctrination, end of story. Any two individual human beings, chosen at random, are more different as individuals than they are as members of whatever arbitrary groups you might want to place them in. To say that a different way, a given man and a given woman, chosen at random, will always be more different as individual people, considered independent of sex, than they are as man and woman considered independent of personal, non-gender-related traits.
And by the way, yes, the logo is sexist. Not in a really massive or terrible way, but it is, because that is a -men's- tie. Even back when there was a sort of female tie, it was very different from the male business tie. The logo implies, symbolically, that all businesspeople are male. That is what makes it sexist. But that doesn't mean the logo is a huge deal or something. It just makes it a fucking stupid logo. There are incidences of sexism which actually, you know, matter, and have a real impact on something. This is just a tiny fragment of cultural BS. Especially given that this is Florida. We're not exactly discussing a bastion of enlightened thought, here...
My .02. Take it or leave it as you will.
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