Looks awesome. I hope you actually make a finished map out of that, it has huge potential.
The drawings are based on triggers I suppose?
Are you also using some triggers for the abilities?
If you are not I would love to know how you can vary the size of the explosion area or the length of the beams with data. No need to get into specifics, just the basic idea :)
And does this recoloring work for every model or did you have to specifically prepare the models somehow to be able to do that?
Just wanted to bump this and say that this project is NOT dead :)
edit: For the YT video look into my message on the bottom or the start of the thread.
Haven't worked on it for almost 5 month now for different reasons, mainly lack of time, but also motivational problems. To get my motivations up again I worked a lot more on the core gameplay and how I want the Line of Sight dynamics and fights to happen.
Almost everything is unfinished, I mainly uploaded it to show that I'm still (again) working on it for some days now. The Youtube quality for some reason is really bad, I probably have to record it in a higher quality with Fraps to get better results for the next video. I'm mainly working on it right now to have a playable map to get some kind of "proof of concept" before HotS comes out, so I got a working core gameplay and can already gather feedback from players even if the map is far from getting into Alpha/Beta status (if it ever gets, I got so much stuff in my mind that it probably will never get close to finished).
Right now I also feel that I'm getting good enough with the data editor that I can actually begin to create some abilities which I will use later on. Right now I only intend to use the basic weapons (the machine gun kind of thing and the rockets with trails which get launched from alternating sides) for the map in the release, and I got some cool ideas for abilities that will probably be really really fun for gameplay, and I want to experiment with that. Also I have to work on more different units, but I'm still not sure if I definitely want to stick with Zerg as the main antagonist race for my first map. Terran and Protoss also have a lot of advantages and really cool units :)
Tell me what race you would like to play against for a map like this.
I hope I can finish a little scenario of some kind and the marine AI and maybe another unit and ability this week. Stay tuned! No big update so far, but I'm working on it.
edit:
Man, this Youtube video is dark! Original map isn't as dark and has less contrast in general.
For your first problem just go into the data editor, open the turret tab and find the "Missile Turret" turret.
Now change the data entry "Idle" to something else than Spin and/or change the Yaw Idle Rate.
Does it loop animations automatically like the Fire Medium does? Else you probably have to tweak the animation actor events too or not use ModelAddition as a base. But I haven't tried that model yet, so I don't know exactly what you have to change @fischy.
About your first question:
The flame is purely visual so what you want to look at are actor attachments.
Go to the data editor.
1. Create new actor of type "ModelAddition".
2. Art: Model -> Fire Medium.
3. Hosting: Host -> Subject -> Actor -> Thor.
4. Event: Events -> make new Event of type UnitBirth.Thor with action "Create".
5. Now the last thing you have to adjust are the Site Operations. Site Operations basically define where and how actors appear, so you can use them to change the positioning on the Thor. Go to Hosting: Host Site Operations and add a new one of type SOpAttachOverhead or SOpAttachHead or something. With this you will have a flame over/on the head of your Thor, if you want to adjust it further create new Site Operations of type Local Offset and add them to the list (I don't think rotations will work on the fire model because the fire is just particles and you can't edit particles at all in the editor apart from the position). Local Offset just lets you adjust the actor in a xyz-axis kind of way with 3 vectors where z is the height.
Now just create as many fires and flames as you like, you can of course change the scale of each actor and stuff like that as you like. If you want other cool looking models I can't help you much, maybe the "Smoke Medium" will also look cool if you play around with tinting it or something, I don't know. There are probably a lot of cool things you can try out, maybe even some Firebat attack animations bursting out somewhere periodically or stuff like that.
Im just a little bit concerned about the fact that its a periodic check, i would like to avoid performance eaters. (I guess it will be fine if i reduce the check intervall to smth like 0.5, however id like to make sure that there isnt a better solution).
Do you think there would be any, more efficient approach for this problem?
How many of these beams do you intend to use?
I'm working a lot with actor event timers (even with really small intervall times in the 0.1-0.0625 margin) in addition to a lot of changing scale, tint etc. with blend timers and using periodic effects on projectiles with periodic search area effects for collision checks. I did some stress testing with easily 40+ timer-units and 70+ projectiles around at once and haven't seen big performance problems at all.
I highly doubt that you will see problems with 0.5s intervall timers in actor events, and as long as it works I'd personally use it without any concerns.
But usually the beam actors shouldn't behave any differently to behavior.start/end events as far as I know, would be interesting for me too whats up with that :)
Who are you to demand a legitimate reason for forgiveness? What gives you the right to judge them? I am not blowing this out of proportion at all. The argument is that judgement is relative. There are no absolute truths in the world. Therefore, (false) judgement is always inevitable. It is neither good or evil. It is just an opinion.
The point of the argument is that I am no more wrong in judging farmers as pathetic than you are in judging pedophiles as needing forgiveness.
PS: There is no such thing as good or evil.
I've heard this kind of reasoning a few times from different persons now and it is just wrong.
If you want to throw everything the human society has accomplished over a few thousand years out of window have fun and go live in your cave. If you want to live in society there are actually certain standards and ethics which make it pretty easy to judge actions on a basic level. You can do whatever you want to yourself and to your body, no one cares. But as soon as other people are involved you should realize that it is a whole different story, so your pedophilia comparison is just a craving for attention as far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with the former topic so it is not worth discussing about (in this thread). I mean we can talk about an alternative world in which it is considered "right" by society to abuse children and "wrong" to not do it, but to me that would be a really pointless discussion, because here in our society it is very easy to judge the "level of wrong" from accepting pedophilia compared to condemning someone because he plays a game.
Sigh. I suppose you would argue that cleaning toilets as a janitor is no less pathetic than doing it for fun.
Cleaning toilets is not pathetic at all, it is a work that has to be done and is probably annoying for the one who has to do it so I wouldn't do it if I have another chance to earn my money. But I would never call honest work pathetic :)
I find these types of games and the players who play them pathetic. Why not watch paint dry on the wall? Please note that I am not lumping you into this category because you are trying to make money. That is a different line of thinking altogether.
So a pathetic activity gets reasonable for you as long as you do it to make money (probably in the 3-4$/hour margin at best)?
Illegal money even. Yeah, thats a nice point of view.
When I change the effect flag and uncheck channelled, I can move around and it works as I want but the unit is still on the ground and attackable and it looks really wierd because it stretches the legs a lot, so he floats up and the legs stay on ground stretched. It's the only thing I've found that allows me to move around though.
EDIT: And looking at the graviton beam behaviour all the movement speed multipliers are set at 1, so I'm still puzzled what is making the guy stay still.
Because I think unchecking channeled under flags for anti gravity (persistant) effect stops a sequence of events including the movement paralysis, and whatever makes the unit float correctly. So I just need to find the movemnt stopper and fix it up, but can't see it anywhere.
The Height Behavior which is applied to the target is linked to the Channeling aspect of the ability/persistent. If you uncheck every channeled/channeling flag it should work.
edit:
Oh, but of course it doesn't remove the behavior automatically anymore, so you have to manually remove it when the duration ends or the phoenix dies or something.
Set the "Attachment: Launch Attachment Query" from the Action Actor to "AMFilterWeapon01".
Make sure all the Effects are linked properly, then it should work.
I think I overrate visuals, but doing visuals is kind of relaxing for me so its fine. No one is paying me or has any expectations for my work, so I won't let anyone down by making nice visuals of any kind even if its not really necessary and there are more important things to do. I'm pretty disappointed each time I play Custom Maps, because over half of the even really successful ones has no proper design for their interface, their terrain and their overall art choices. On the other hand, most people don't really care so its fine I guess.
Oh, I just played the map yesterday for the first time. "EEE HAN TIMING" I guess ;)
Very fun map though, I'm usually not a big fan of tower defense maps but you really got that Plants vs. Zombies feeling right, I like it. I'll probably test your update of the map soon!
0
Looks awesome. I hope you actually make a finished map out of that, it has huge potential.
The drawings are based on triggers I suppose?
Are you also using some triggers for the abilities?
If you are not I would love to know how you can vary the size of the explosion area or the length of the beams with data. No need to get into specifics, just the basic idea :)
And does this recoloring work for every model or did you have to specifically prepare the models somehow to be able to do that?
0
Just wanted to bump this and say that this project is NOT dead :)
edit: For the YT video look into my message on the bottom or the start of the thread.
Haven't worked on it for almost 5 month now for different reasons, mainly lack of time, but also motivational problems. To get my motivations up again I worked a lot more on the core gameplay and how I want the Line of Sight dynamics and fights to happen.
Almost everything is unfinished, I mainly uploaded it to show that I'm still (again) working on it for some days now. The Youtube quality for some reason is really bad, I probably have to record it in a higher quality with Fraps to get better results for the next video. I'm mainly working on it right now to have a playable map to get some kind of "proof of concept" before HotS comes out, so I got a working core gameplay and can already gather feedback from players even if the map is far from getting into Alpha/Beta status (if it ever gets, I got so much stuff in my mind that it probably will never get close to finished).
Right now I also feel that I'm getting good enough with the data editor that I can actually begin to create some abilities which I will use later on. Right now I only intend to use the basic weapons (the machine gun kind of thing and the rockets with trails which get launched from alternating sides) for the map in the release, and I got some cool ideas for abilities that will probably be really really fun for gameplay, and I want to experiment with that. Also I have to work on more different units, but I'm still not sure if I definitely want to stick with Zerg as the main antagonist race for my first map. Terran and Protoss also have a lot of advantages and really cool units :)
Tell me what race you would like to play against for a map like this.
I hope I can finish a little scenario of some kind and the marine AI and maybe another unit and ability this week. Stay tuned! No big update so far, but I'm working on it.
edit:
Man, this Youtube video is dark! Original map isn't as dark and has less contrast in general.
0
For your first problem just go into the data editor, open the turret tab and find the "Missile Turret" turret. Now change the data entry "Idle" to something else than Spin and/or change the Yaw Idle Rate.
0
Ah nice, I'll check it out :)
Does it loop animations automatically like the Fire Medium does? Else you probably have to tweak the animation actor events too or not use ModelAddition as a base. But I haven't tried that model yet, so I don't know exactly what you have to change @fischy.
0
You used... Squibs? What? :)
About your first question:
The flame is purely visual so what you want to look at are actor attachments.
Go to the data editor.
1. Create new actor of type "ModelAddition".
2. Art: Model -> Fire Medium.
3. Hosting: Host -> Subject -> Actor -> Thor.
4. Event: Events -> make new Event of type UnitBirth.Thor with action "Create".
5. Now the last thing you have to adjust are the Site Operations. Site Operations basically define where and how actors appear, so you can use them to change the positioning on the Thor. Go to Hosting: Host Site Operations and add a new one of type SOpAttachOverhead or SOpAttachHead or something. With this you will have a flame over/on the head of your Thor, if you want to adjust it further create new Site Operations of type Local Offset and add them to the list (I don't think rotations will work on the fire model because the fire is just particles and you can't edit particles at all in the editor apart from the position). Local Offset just lets you adjust the actor in a xyz-axis kind of way with 3 vectors where z is the height.
Now just create as many fires and flames as you like, you can of course change the scale of each actor and stuff like that as you like. If you want other cool looking models I can't help you much, maybe the "Smoke Medium" will also look cool if you play around with tinting it or something, I don't know. There are probably a lot of cool things you can try out, maybe even some Firebat attack animations bursting out somewhere periodically or stuff like that.
0
How many of these beams do you intend to use?
I'm working a lot with actor event timers (even with really small intervall times in the 0.1-0.0625 margin) in addition to a lot of changing scale, tint etc. with blend timers and using periodic effects on projectiles with periodic search area effects for collision checks. I did some stress testing with easily 40+ timer-units and 70+ projectiles around at once and haven't seen big performance problems at all.
I highly doubt that you will see problems with 0.5s intervall timers in actor events, and as long as it works I'd personally use it without any concerns.
But usually the beam actors shouldn't behave any differently to behavior.start/end events as far as I know, would be interesting for me too whats up with that :)
0
I've heard this kind of reasoning a few times from different persons now and it is just wrong.
If you want to throw everything the human society has accomplished over a few thousand years out of window have fun and go live in your cave. If you want to live in society there are actually certain standards and ethics which make it pretty easy to judge actions on a basic level. You can do whatever you want to yourself and to your body, no one cares. But as soon as other people are involved you should realize that it is a whole different story, so your pedophilia comparison is just a craving for attention as far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with the former topic so it is not worth discussing about (in this thread). I mean we can talk about an alternative world in which it is considered "right" by society to abuse children and "wrong" to not do it, but to me that would be a really pointless discussion, because here in our society it is very easy to judge the "level of wrong" from accepting pedophilia compared to condemning someone because he plays a game.
Summarization of this thread:
0
Cleaning toilets is not pathetic at all, it is a work that has to be done and is probably annoying for the one who has to do it so I wouldn't do it if I have another chance to earn my money. But I would never call honest work pathetic :)
0
So a pathetic activity gets reasonable for you as long as you do it to make money (probably in the 3-4$/hour margin at best)?
Illegal money even. Yeah, thats a nice point of view.
0
The Height Behavior which is applied to the target is linked to the Channeling aspect of the ability/persistent. If you uncheck every channeled/channeling flag it should work.
edit: Oh, but of course it doesn't remove the behavior automatically anymore, so you have to manually remove it when the duration ends or the phoenix dies or something.
0
Set the "Attachment: Launch Attachment Query" from the Action Actor to "AMFilterWeapon01". Make sure all the Effects are linked properly, then it should work.
0
I think I overrate visuals, but doing visuals is kind of relaxing for me so its fine. No one is paying me or has any expectations for my work, so I won't let anyone down by making nice visuals of any kind even if its not really necessary and there are more important things to do. I'm pretty disappointed each time I play Custom Maps, because over half of the even really successful ones has no proper design for their interface, their terrain and their overall art choices. On the other hand, most people don't really care so its fine I guess.
0
Go into the Units Tab, search for Roach, find the "Combat: Weapons +" Value, double click it and remove the non-melee weapon from the list.
0
Oh, I just played the map yesterday for the first time. "EEE HAN TIMING" I guess ;)
Very fun map though, I'm usually not a big fan of tower defense maps but you really got that Plants vs. Zombies feeling right, I like it. I'll probably test your update of the map soon!
0
Do these missile have specific movers that use throw drivers? In this case you maybe have to change the "Throw Rotation Type" to "Look at Target".