Right I understand, there's no object oriented way to approach the problem. You can't merely state "make the shields regenerate at half the normal rate." I was merely suggesting that you could create multiple effects and use actions to determine which effect gets applied. At some point, when working with a proprietary editor you're going to have to hard code a lot of stuff if you want to get an effect to work properly in a way that the tool builders didn't original intend.
You could use validators to check for your equipment, upgrades, etc and then apply a different behavior in each circumstance. The more variations you have the more difficult it could get, but it would be a lag free solution. The other suggestion I was making was that you could approach the battle regen as a new mechanic, and have it function independently of out-of-combat regen, perhaps consolidating previous upgrades and adding new ones, depending on whether or not it would cause symmetry or balance issues.
I think you're confused about what I suggested. Are you using triggers to accomplish this? (I'm assuming yes, as I can't imagine any data editor driven solution creating lag.) I'm not talking about triggers talking about creating an effect in the data editor that uses actions to apply itself whenever the unit takes damage. So you'd make an effect like...
Shield Combat Regen (Carrier)
And that status effect would be applied to the carrier automatically (no triggers) by itself, to itself, whenever it took damage. It wouldn't affect any other units of the same type. The reason I mentioned "type" of unit, is because you said you needed to use fractions, which means (I assume) you had many different rates of shield regen for different vessels. If you didn't, fractions are wholly unnecessary and hard coding that value wouldn't be an issue.
Anyway, as far as the effect goes, if it's set to non-stacking and has a duration that matches how long it takes shields to start regen-ing again after combat finishes, the result should be exactly what the above poster suggested (and you may be trying to achieve) a regen for shields that occurs during battle and has a different value than the regen outside of battle.
Achieving this for multiple ships with different regen rates is as simple as duplicating the effect and linking it to the other ships. It would just become somewhat unwieldy if you have dozens upon dozens of ships with different regen rates. But I doubt that is the case?
And to answer your first issue, which I assume is that these upgrades would not affect the combat shield regen, you can either have that be a part of your mechanic, or you could link those items and upgrades to the effect, I'm pretty sure you can tell it to change values based on research and upgrades.
Well, how many ships with shields that regenerate at different rates are we talking about in your map? After a certain number it would be rather impractical to create a new status effect for each ship... But if the number is only a few dozen it shouldn't be too difficult to create multiple status effects. Prefix/Suffix usage to keep them organized.
Another route to take again I have no idea what sort of mechanics you have in place in this map, but if there are upgrades, you could allow tiers of "battle regen" upgrades that span across all ships with shields.
I haven't had a chance to play this map, I don't really regularly play custom maps with multiple other players. But in response to your suggestion, there is a way to make shield regeneration function like that through the data editor.
I'm not entirely sure if there's a setting to determine whether shields can regenerate in combat but regardless of that you'd either create a status effect that reduces shield regen in combat (if you could enable it) or if it wasn't possible to enable this directly, create a status effect that activates when the unit is struck, begins regenerating shields at a decreased rate (to that of your standard regen) and then deactivates 10 seconds later (which I think is when normal shields kick in?) Just make sure you don't allow it to stack and it should work perfectly.
Whether that is a wise decision for the map I can't comment on, as I haven't played it, sorry!
Recently discovered I can host games I have published as private and am attempting to use this to observe testing on a single player campaign levels in black box.
Anyway. I added an observer player slot so the players look like this in my example:
Player 1 (Player)
Player 2 (Neutral)
Player 3 (Computer)
Player 4 (Computer)
Player 5 (Player)
Tried creating custom game variants, the computer slots show as locked. Even tried making sure they were in locked teams, but on battlenet I get this:
Team 1
1 Player Slot
Team 2
2 Player Slots
That's it, the first player (me, always the host) is Player 1, and the second player is always Player 3 (which should be a computer player.) I've looked around, and would like to avoid using triggers to get the setup right, I can't imagine there is no way to do this through map settings, but it looks like it may be something Blizzard neglected. Anyone have a solution?
Hey lolzguy, I gave your map a try, all the feedback is based on the "hard" difficulty setting. I normally play brutal difficulty in the campaign with no issues for reference.
The left refinery in the starting base has a small gap behind it with no way out, this results in the first SCV being spit out into that spot and being stuck there until the nearby mineral patch is mined out. Place a doodad back there or a no pathing area to prevent this.
There are a lot of problems with the dialog and introductory text, tense issues (the word has is used where the word have should be quite a few times.) If you're not a native English speaker and you want to release the map in English consider having someone edit the script for you.
That's it as far as verification testing, but I have a lot of validation feedback on the actual gameplay, it's all sort of stream of consciousness but I'll try to bullet it out for you and include some suggestions.
Problem: The player is largely unaware of most of the challenges in the level until they're right on top of them. This includes things like the attack waves, drops in your base, siege tanks positioned all over the cliffs near the road and even the APC (more on that in a moment.) This forces the player to take the trial and error approach to gameplay. They have to fail in order to succeed.
Solution: Make your challenges visible. The player should have some idea that the first attack wave is coming, and what sort of units to expect so that they can prepare for it. There are a lot of ways you can do this, through a short vignette or even just by temporarily revealing the attack and pinging the mini-map. You want to reveal that there are going to be cloaked units in this attack too, or remove the cloak at that point in the level. The player is just trying to establish their base and are likely going to have to build a missile turret during battle in order to counter it, which stacked with the fact that the player starts with no medics and not enough time to produce very many, is going to result in their force being largely wiped out immediately before the APC shows up. Giving the player a few medics to start and making the cloak upgrade for the enemy player occur later in the level could go a long way in balancing out the early game.
Problem: The APC starts its path very far away from the player, down a road that is largely in the range of enemy siege tank fire. The player also has no idea how far along the APC is once it starts, and is also busy defending against enemy attacks.
Solution: Raise visibility again here, reveal the road or use pings to track the location of the APC (as in mission THanson01.) You also have to do a crapload of damage to the APC in a very small window of time that you can actually attack it after it comes out of siege tank range. Either move the tanks, or allow concussive shells to slow the APC, or give the player more opportunities to attack early on. The difficulty of destroying the APC should ramp up, but shouldn't start quite as difficult.
Ashes of Freedom is not a remake or port but in fact, a complete adaptation of the original StarCraft 1 Terran campaign "Rebel Yell" into a StarCraft 2 experience. The Legacy project is intended to capture the soul and feeling of the original game, while using Wings of Liberty's campaign as a benchmark for quality level design. As such, many levels will play out in a completely different way than their predecessors. There will also be the addition of new levels, as well as modifications to tech, units and the addition of new units.
StarCraft 1's Terran campaign re-imagined
Entirely new level designs
Addition of new levels
Bonus objectives with special upgrades
New and modified units
Adjusted Tech Trees
Same beloved story, new exposition
Work in Progress
Ashes of Freedom is a new project, and as such is currently under development. At this moment the campaign includes the first mission "Wastelands." Please check back periodically for updates.
Download & Install
1. Place both .SC2Map files in the folder "Maps" in your StarCraft II folder, under Program Files.
If you do not have a maps folder, create one inside of the StarCraft II folder, case sensitive: "Maps"
2. Place "Legacy.SC2Mod" into your "Mods" folder found in your root StarCraft II directory.
3. Create a shortcut for StarCraft II, go to the shortcut properties and in the Target field add: -run "Wastelands.SC2Map" -difficulty # or (depending on which level you wish to play) -run "Backwater Station.SC2Map" -difficulty # after the path to the .exe and the closing quotation. # should be 1-4 depending on the desired difficulty.
Casual (New to RTS games)
Normal (Somewhat familiar with RTS games)
Hard (Confident StarCraft 2 player)
Brutal (Very good StarCraft 2 player, looking for a challenge.)
4. Run StarCraft II via the new shortcut. Enjoy.
Note: Either map can be opened in the editor, however, playing the level through the editor lacks
certain optimizations that may cause parts of the level to experience slowdown depending on your machine. Additionally,
the map can be run by telling your computer to open the map with SC2.exe, however, it will default to normal difficulty,
and cannot be altered. Blizzard support for custom campaigns is currently non-existant, so please bear with these simple
instructions.
This is not a strict port in the way that Jones313's StarCraft 1 campaign's are. I have a lot of respect for his project, and if you're interested in a strict port of the original experience to SC2 I suggest you check it out.
Bump, I messed with using a turret actor to replicate this, but the constant rotation of a turret actor seems to be handled on the unit itself under idle. I didn't see any actor messages on the turret actor itself that appeared to make it rotate. Anyone have any ideas for making a portrait actor constantly rotate?
This was extremely helpful, Validate Unit is exactly what I needed, I must not have looked through terms very carefully, super helpful!
(And to clarify, I was simply expanding a shield actor created by a spell and raising the height on certain units where their were clipping issues.)
Edit:
ActorCreation
Validate Unity Type IsGroundUnit
Set Height 1.0_
Works but as soon as the unit moves the actor drops to its normal height, which is curious because there's no other actor event changing height, but this is unrelated to my inability to check the unit the actor was placed on. This is just me not understanding actor events well enough yet, and I should be able to go from here, I'll post back if I figure out what silly mistake I'm making in case anyone else ever runs into this.
Straightforward question I can't seem to figure out. Is there an event that can check the actor or unit the actor was created on?
Context: I have an actor created by an ability for a buff, the scaling/offset are fine for 95% of all units but certain units like the Goliath clip through the shield because of their wonky center points. I'm attempting to check via events to see if the actor (for the shield) was attached to those specific units. After that it's straightforward, but I'm not really familiar with the actor events yet, and after looking through didn't see one that appeared to do this, but there's quite a few and some are unclear.
Yeah I mean I looked through the functions, and I found some related to rotation, but I have no idea how to apply that value over time. I stopped messing around with it so it may be obvious after a few minutes, and I'm going to take a crack at it now, once that's out of the way looping it would be no issue at all.
After a few minutes of digging no obvious direct solution that I found. It seems like "Set rotation from" may be a workaround, if I spawn a turret actor in somewhere else, then set the rotation of the actor in the portrait to the rotation of the turret. But I have yet to test it, and don't feel like implementing a workaround if there's a better solution. I'm also fairly certain that "set rotation from" would need to be called constantly in order to achieve that affect, something that has obvious drawbacks.
Excellent, the scale message worked perfectly. Now to figure out how set rotation works and how it receives parameters, I imagine it takes some kind of vector but it has just one large field to enter text into, and no matter what I put there nothing seems to happen. I had no idea you could access the portrait actor in this way though, so this was immensely useful.
I'm curious if anyone has found a way to do this. I'm attempting to create something similar to the "Available technology" item in the mission selection UI in the liberty campaign, basically a portrait that is a rotating unit model. I've been able to create a portrait using a unit, but the camera on the portrait is zoomed really close into the origin. I can't seem to figure out how to zoom the camera out or cause the camera or model to rotate.
This is a sort of qualitative question regarding AI and time investments... How big of a time sink is it to adjust let's say, the Campaign AI to appropriately handle custom units? I suppose this is a difficult question to answer, I'm sure it varies depending on how far that unit is removed from any sort of existing unit. So I suppose I can break it down into something like...
If I essentially were to duplicate a unit, would some sort of AI marker go with it? For instance, if I decided to simply duplicate all terran campaign units, and use these duplicated units (with whatever small stat modifications, or none at all) would the AI behave properly?
What if I changed the tech tree, such as changing a structure required to build a unit?
Added an existing ability to a unit that previously did not have access to that ability?
Created a new ability with a unique effect?
From what I can gather the Campaign AI more or less is a bare-bones framework, and just handles rebuilding lost units and structures, and is told via scripts to attack and expand etc, so I imagine it would be easier to tackle than a melee AI. I'm basically trying to make a judgment call on how much unique data I want to create for the project I'm working on, and have yet to dip my hands into AI at all. It's a front loaded cost, so it may be worth it in the long run, and I just wanted to get feedback from people who may have already worked with AI and custom units in depth. I don't expect exact numbers, more like estimates, educated guesses and suggestions.
If anyone has any tutorials they found tremendously useful for this topic, I'd gladly take suggestions. This is one place where messing around with existing maps is probably not going to cut it, and I'd rather not learn wholly by trial and error.
PS. I understand most AI editing would be done in Galaxy which is why I posted this here, though it's not a specific technical question, so if any mod sees this and feels it would best be placed elsewhere, please do so!
I finally managed to get it to work, and I'm not entirely sure how. Yeah I was aware, like I was saying though, the strange part was all the other models were loading fine, just not the Kaboomer. Wish I had an answer incase anyone else runs into this issue, but it's rather obscure, either way case closed.
0
@Kildare88: Go
Right I understand, there's no object oriented way to approach the problem. You can't merely state "make the shields regenerate at half the normal rate." I was merely suggesting that you could create multiple effects and use actions to determine which effect gets applied. At some point, when working with a proprietary editor you're going to have to hard code a lot of stuff if you want to get an effect to work properly in a way that the tool builders didn't original intend.
You could use validators to check for your equipment, upgrades, etc and then apply a different behavior in each circumstance. The more variations you have the more difficult it could get, but it would be a lag free solution. The other suggestion I was making was that you could approach the battle regen as a new mechanic, and have it function independently of out-of-combat regen, perhaps consolidating previous upgrades and adding new ones, depending on whether or not it would cause symmetry or balance issues.
Edit:
@Kildare88: Go
Hope your idea works out for you!
0
@Kildare88: Go
I think you're confused about what I suggested. Are you using triggers to accomplish this? (I'm assuming yes, as I can't imagine any data editor driven solution creating lag.) I'm not talking about triggers talking about creating an effect in the data editor that uses actions to apply itself whenever the unit takes damage. So you'd make an effect like...
Shield Combat Regen (Carrier)
And that status effect would be applied to the carrier automatically (no triggers) by itself, to itself, whenever it took damage. It wouldn't affect any other units of the same type. The reason I mentioned "type" of unit, is because you said you needed to use fractions, which means (I assume) you had many different rates of shield regen for different vessels. If you didn't, fractions are wholly unnecessary and hard coding that value wouldn't be an issue.
Anyway, as far as the effect goes, if it's set to non-stacking and has a duration that matches how long it takes shields to start regen-ing again after combat finishes, the result should be exactly what the above poster suggested (and you may be trying to achieve) a regen for shields that occurs during battle and has a different value than the regen outside of battle.
Achieving this for multiple ships with different regen rates is as simple as duplicating the effect and linking it to the other ships. It would just become somewhat unwieldy if you have dozens upon dozens of ships with different regen rates. But I doubt that is the case?
And to answer your first issue, which I assume is that these upgrades would not affect the combat shield regen, you can either have that be a part of your mechanic, or you could link those items and upgrades to the effect, I'm pretty sure you can tell it to change values based on research and upgrades.
0
@Kildare88: Go
Well, how many ships with shields that regenerate at different rates are we talking about in your map? After a certain number it would be rather impractical to create a new status effect for each ship... But if the number is only a few dozen it shouldn't be too difficult to create multiple status effects. Prefix/Suffix usage to keep them organized.
Another route to take again I have no idea what sort of mechanics you have in place in this map, but if there are upgrades, you could allow tiers of "battle regen" upgrades that span across all ships with shields.
0
@Ranakastrasz: Go
I haven't had a chance to play this map, I don't really regularly play custom maps with multiple other players. But in response to your suggestion, there is a way to make shield regeneration function like that through the data editor.
I'm not entirely sure if there's a setting to determine whether shields can regenerate in combat but regardless of that you'd either create a status effect that reduces shield regen in combat (if you could enable it) or if it wasn't possible to enable this directly, create a status effect that activates when the unit is struck, begins regenerating shields at a decreased rate (to that of your standard regen) and then deactivates 10 seconds later (which I think is when normal shields kick in?) Just make sure you don't allow it to stack and it should work perfectly.
Whether that is a wise decision for the map I can't comment on, as I haven't played it, sorry!
0
Recently discovered I can host games I have published as private and am attempting to use this to observe testing on a single player campaign levels in black box.
Anyway. I added an observer player slot so the players look like this in my example:
Tried creating custom game variants, the computer slots show as locked. Even tried making sure they were in locked teams, but on battlenet I get this:
That's it, the first player (me, always the host) is Player 1, and the second player is always Player 3 (which should be a computer player.) I've looked around, and would like to avoid using triggers to get the setup right, I can't imagine there is no way to do this through map settings, but it looks like it may be something Blizzard neglected. Anyone have a solution?
0
@lolzguy: Go
Hey lolzguy, I gave your map a try, all the feedback is based on the "hard" difficulty setting. I normally play brutal difficulty in the campaign with no issues for reference.
That's it as far as verification testing, but I have a lot of validation feedback on the actual gameplay, it's all sort of stream of consciousness but I'll try to bullet it out for you and include some suggestions.
0
Overview
Ashes of Freedom is not a remake or port but in fact, a complete adaptation of the original StarCraft 1 Terran campaign "Rebel Yell" into a StarCraft 2 experience. The Legacy project is intended to capture the soul and feeling of the original game, while using Wings of Liberty's campaign as a benchmark for quality level design. As such, many levels will play out in a completely different way than their predecessors. There will also be the addition of new levels, as well as modifications to tech, units and the addition of new units.
Work in Progress
Ashes of Freedom is a new project, and as such is currently under development. At this moment the campaign includes the first mission "Wastelands." Please check back periodically for updates.
Download & Install
1. Place both .SC2Map files in the folder "Maps" in your StarCraft II folder, under Program Files.
2. Place "Legacy.SC2Mod" into your "Mods" folder found in your root StarCraft II directory.
3. Create a shortcut for StarCraft II, go to the shortcut properties and in the Target field add: -run "Wastelands.SC2Map" -difficulty # or (depending on which level you wish to play) -run "Backwater Station.SC2Map" -difficulty # after the path to the .exe and the closing quotation. # should be 1-4 depending on the desired difficulty.
4. Run StarCraft II via the new shortcut. Enjoy.
Note: Either map can be opened in the editor, however, playing the level through the editor lacks certain optimizations that may cause parts of the level to experience slowdown depending on your machine. Additionally, the map can be run by telling your computer to open the map with SC2.exe, however, it will default to normal difficulty, and cannot be altered. Blizzard support for custom campaigns is currently non-existant, so please bear with these simple instructions.
Media
Feedback
Notes
0
Bump, I messed with using a turret actor to replicate this, but the constant rotation of a turret actor seems to be handled on the unit itself under idle. I didn't see any actor messages on the turret actor itself that appeared to make it rotate. Anyone have any ideas for making a portrait actor constantly rotate?
0
@TheAlmaity: Go
This was extremely helpful, Validate Unit is exactly what I needed, I must not have looked through terms very carefully, super helpful!
(And to clarify, I was simply expanding a shield actor created by a spell and raising the height on certain units where their were clipping issues.)
Edit:
ActorCreation
Works but as soon as the unit moves the actor drops to its normal height, which is curious because there's no other actor event changing height, but this is unrelated to my inability to check the unit the actor was placed on. This is just me not understanding actor events well enough yet, and I should be able to go from here, I'll post back if I figure out what silly mistake I'm making in case anyone else ever runs into this.
0
Straightforward question I can't seem to figure out. Is there an event that can check the actor or unit the actor was created on?
Context: I have an actor created by an ability for a buff, the scaling/offset are fine for 95% of all units but certain units like the Goliath clip through the shield because of their wonky center points. I'm attempting to check via events to see if the actor (for the shield) was attached to those specific units. After that it's straightforward, but I'm not really familiar with the actor events yet, and after looking through didn't see one that appeared to do this, but there's quite a few and some are unclear.
0
@Tolkfan: Go
Yeah I mean I looked through the functions, and I found some related to rotation, but I have no idea how to apply that value over time. I stopped messing around with it so it may be obvious after a few minutes, and I'm going to take a crack at it now, once that's out of the way looping it would be no issue at all.
After a few minutes of digging no obvious direct solution that I found. It seems like "Set rotation from" may be a workaround, if I spawn a turret actor in somewhere else, then set the rotation of the actor in the portrait to the rotation of the turret. But I have yet to test it, and don't feel like implementing a workaround if there's a better solution. I'm also fairly certain that "set rotation from" would need to be called constantly in order to achieve that affect, something that has obvious drawbacks.
0
@Tolkfan: Go
Excellent, the scale message worked perfectly. Now to figure out how set rotation works and how it receives parameters, I imagine it takes some kind of vector but it has just one large field to enter text into, and no matter what I put there nothing seems to happen. I had no idea you could access the portrait actor in this way though, so this was immensely useful.
0
I'm curious if anyone has found a way to do this. I'm attempting to create something similar to the "Available technology" item in the mission selection UI in the liberty campaign, basically a portrait that is a rotating unit model. I've been able to create a portrait using a unit, but the camera on the portrait is zoomed really close into the origin. I can't seem to figure out how to zoom the camera out or cause the camera or model to rotate.
Any ideas?
0
This is a sort of qualitative question regarding AI and time investments... How big of a time sink is it to adjust let's say, the Campaign AI to appropriately handle custom units? I suppose this is a difficult question to answer, I'm sure it varies depending on how far that unit is removed from any sort of existing unit. So I suppose I can break it down into something like...
From what I can gather the Campaign AI more or less is a bare-bones framework, and just handles rebuilding lost units and structures, and is told via scripts to attack and expand etc, so I imagine it would be easier to tackle than a melee AI. I'm basically trying to make a judgment call on how much unique data I want to create for the project I'm working on, and have yet to dip my hands into AI at all. It's a front loaded cost, so it may be worth it in the long run, and I just wanted to get feedback from people who may have already worked with AI and custom units in depth. I don't expect exact numbers, more like estimates, educated guesses and suggestions.
If anyone has any tutorials they found tremendously useful for this topic, I'd gladly take suggestions. This is one place where messing around with existing maps is probably not going to cut it, and I'd rather not learn wholly by trial and error.
PS. I understand most AI editing would be done in Galaxy which is why I posted this here, though it's not a specific technical question, so if any mod sees this and feels it would best be placed elsewhere, please do so!
0
@DrSuperEvil: Go
I finally managed to get it to work, and I'm not entirely sure how. Yeah I was aware, like I was saying though, the strange part was all the other models were loading fine, just not the Kaboomer. Wish I had an answer incase anyone else runs into this issue, but it's rather obscure, either way case closed.