Sorry about forgetting this part of my project for a while. The EffectInstant worked great for a dummy with a cooldown, thanks.
@SouLCarveRR: Yep, the intent was to create a command card button with a cooldown, that I could catch with the "Player presses button" event and handle appropriately.
I have a number of menu buttons that do nothing (except getting caught by triggers). I normally just make them issue the Stop:Cheer command, but this one does not allow for adding a cooldown.
Can anyone recommend an ability base that allows cooldowns, has minimal effect and always shows up in the command card? I tried basing it on AbilBehavior, but have been having issues that it kept disappearing once the behavior was turned on.
I think favorites should be a separate list entirely - that is, they should be hidden from other sortings, or I should at least be able to toggle it to be so.
When I want to browse through hundreds of not-yet-popular niche maps, I'm going to list them by rating alone. The only way I can keep on browsing and finding new games quickly, is if I can remove the games I like (by sending them to favorites) and those I don't like (by personally giving them a low rating or sending them on some ignore list). That way, I can keep discovering new maps all day long, without having to skip past many pages of high-ranked favorites at the start, every time I want to join a game.
Thanks for making me realize that the popularity system could go from awful to convenient with just a few key changes. These are essentially everything I would need to be happy with the system:
Don't show maps without active game lobbies.
Enable user rating and allow sorting by average user rating.
Either allow my own rating to take priority in my listing and/or allow me to keep an ignore list of maps.
Allow me to keep a list of favorites. These maps should not show up on the standard map list.
With this system, I can discover new cool maps all day long. If I want to play it frequently, I just move it to favorites. If I don't want it clogging up my list, I move it to ignore. Ignore is essentially just a copy/paste of favorite functionality, so I can still join maps from that list when I feel like playing them for whatever reason. The favorite list also means that I never have to search around, or cause load on the game list server when I want to join the game I play 30 times a day.
Popularity * rating would be a more common listing method, but it's essential that plain rating is possible. This means that new maps can enter the lists without the current catch-22. Being able to choose the relative weighting of rating vs. popularity would be even better.
Additional suggestions and cool ideas from others:
The popularity formula could also be improved a lot, which would help both popularity and (popularity * rating) listings, as well as make boosting way less viable. Here's a simple alternative:
Quote:
Instead of each hosted 5+ min game giving a "popularity point", each unique player contributes with popularity points equal to log10(minutes played) for the day.
That automatically scales popularity with number of players in the game, and to some extent the game length. It also requires the map to be popular with many unique accounts: A user playing 15 minutes in a day, would contribute 70% more than one playing 5 min/day, and one playing 60 min/day would contribute 50% more than that. Yet a map maker logged into his own map 24/7 (botting or hosting repeated games no longer serves a purpose) adds less than 5 times as much as one additional user playing for 5 minutes.
It's slightly more technically advanced, but should be feasible with just a few kb of extra storage per player account. You only need to store a player's playtime stats for maps he has played within the last week, and you only need to update a player's contribution to the popularity score when the player finishes a game on that map. The map itself doesn't even need to have the player data stored - it just needs to subtract score for player's previous playtime and add score for player's new playtime. The computation effort involved as each game ends should be less than a second's worth of hosting the average SC2 map.
Forbiddian's request players suggestion is awesome for discovering new maps, as well as letting new maps earn the initial few ratings to start entering the lists. Alternately, seeing the number of active games and being able to specifically search for maps with only 1 hosted game, would serve the same purpose.
RSS map feeds is an awesome idea. Going to any map site and simply clicking a link that adds the map to your favorites list, allowing you to host/join it would have an immense cool factor and would be extremely practical, all the while helping the distribution of new exciting maps, overcoming the safety issue of having people download the open map file (assuming map locking becomes more solid), and sparing Blizzard's hardware the thousands of republishings people make in order to host a map.
Passing feedback in a sort of comments thread for each map would also be a cool feature, but be careful with making it way too low effort - we all know the quality of average Youtube comments. If added, make sure the map maker has tools and filters to identify and the truly constructive comments. Some options would be to allow users to rate each other's comments and/or allow players to sign their feedback with their real-ID instead of their character name. Also make sure the map maker has a way to establish further contact with whoever left a useful comment.
Also great work on your own interface, and on initiating constructive debate. I hope you'll have a lot of strong suggestions to bring over to the official forums.
A completely blank map, or a map containing an advertisement, would be in violation of policy. I like the other thread's idea of making the deliberately subpar map, Popularity Wars. A 2 player map lasting exactly 5 minutes.
Could make it 2 minutes of unskippable text explanations about having to earn popularity to get your map playable on battle.net 2.0, followed by 3 minutes of mediocre gameplay.
Make a popularity leaderboard, where you earn 1 popularity point for every 5 minute game you sit through.
Make the few minutes of core gameplay be something that seems like it could be fun, with actual meaningful strategic choices, except that "2 players" and "5 minutes" are clearly the best choices for your map project, and that the 13/15 map genres that are not income wars or TD are all blatantly underpowered in every way.
Now, you've got a 5 minute joke map with a pretty clear sarcastic comment, that I think quite a few people from around here would enjoy hosting legitimately. Request a front page review, with instructions on how to find and host the map, and watch magic ensue. =)
I'm in the process of manually triggering exp gain in my map. To that end, I'd like to be able to read the KillXP (AKA "Combat - Kill Experience") value of a unit.
Can anyone give me example of how to do this? I would expect it's to do with the functions for catalog values, when reading any value outside the most common unit properties, but I don't know how those functions are to be used.
0
Sorry about forgetting this part of my project for a while. The EffectInstant worked great for a dummy with a cooldown, thanks.
@SouLCarveRR: Yep, the intent was to create a command card button with a cooldown, that I could catch with the "Player presses button" event and handle appropriately.
0
I have a number of menu buttons that do nothing (except getting caught by triggers). I normally just make them issue the Stop:Cheer command, but this one does not allow for adding a cooldown.
Can anyone recommend an ability base that allows cooldowns, has minimal effect and always shows up in the command card? I tried basing it on AbilBehavior, but have been having issues that it kept disappearing once the behavior was turned on.
0
I think favorites should be a separate list entirely - that is, they should be hidden from other sortings, or I should at least be able to toggle it to be so.
When I want to browse through hundreds of not-yet-popular niche maps, I'm going to list them by rating alone. The only way I can keep on browsing and finding new games quickly, is if I can remove the games I like (by sending them to favorites) and those I don't like (by personally giving them a low rating or sending them on some ignore list). That way, I can keep discovering new maps all day long, without having to skip past many pages of high-ranked favorites at the start, every time I want to join a game.
0
Thanks for making me realize that the popularity system could go from awful to convenient with just a few key changes. These are essentially everything I would need to be happy with the system:
With this system, I can discover new cool maps all day long. If I want to play it frequently, I just move it to favorites. If I don't want it clogging up my list, I move it to ignore. Ignore is essentially just a copy/paste of favorite functionality, so I can still join maps from that list when I feel like playing them for whatever reason. The favorite list also means that I never have to search around, or cause load on the game list server when I want to join the game I play 30 times a day.
Popularity * rating would be a more common listing method, but it's essential that plain rating is possible. This means that new maps can enter the lists without the current catch-22. Being able to choose the relative weighting of rating vs. popularity would be even better.
Additional suggestions and cool ideas from others:
The popularity formula could also be improved a lot, which would help both popularity and (popularity * rating) listings, as well as make boosting way less viable. Here's a simple alternative:
Forbiddian's request players suggestion is awesome for discovering new maps, as well as letting new maps earn the initial few ratings to start entering the lists. Alternately, seeing the number of active games and being able to specifically search for maps with only 1 hosted game, would serve the same purpose.
RSS map feeds is an awesome idea. Going to any map site and simply clicking a link that adds the map to your favorites list, allowing you to host/join it would have an immense cool factor and would be extremely practical, all the while helping the distribution of new exciting maps, overcoming the safety issue of having people download the open map file (assuming map locking becomes more solid), and sparing Blizzard's hardware the thousands of republishings people make in order to host a map.
Passing feedback in a sort of comments thread for each map would also be a cool feature, but be careful with making it way too low effort - we all know the quality of average Youtube comments. If added, make sure the map maker has tools and filters to identify and the truly constructive comments. Some options would be to allow users to rate each other's comments and/or allow players to sign their feedback with their real-ID instead of their character name. Also make sure the map maker has a way to establish further contact with whoever left a useful comment.
Also great work on your own interface, and on initiating constructive debate. I hope you'll have a lot of strong suggestions to bring over to the official forums.
0
A completely blank map, or a map containing an advertisement, would be in violation of policy. I like the other thread's idea of making the deliberately subpar map, Popularity Wars. A 2 player map lasting exactly 5 minutes.
Could make it 2 minutes of unskippable text explanations about having to earn popularity to get your map playable on battle.net 2.0, followed by 3 minutes of mediocre gameplay.
Make a popularity leaderboard, where you earn 1 popularity point for every 5 minute game you sit through.
Make the few minutes of core gameplay be something that seems like it could be fun, with actual meaningful strategic choices, except that "2 players" and "5 minutes" are clearly the best choices for your map project, and that the 13/15 map genres that are not income wars or TD are all blatantly underpowered in every way.
Now, you've got a 5 minute joke map with a pretty clear sarcastic comment, that I think quite a few people from around here would enjoy hosting legitimately. Request a front page review, with instructions on how to find and host the map, and watch magic ensue. =)
0
@Helral: Go
Thanks, that was exactly the info I needed, to learn how to operate catalogs.
Final and tested action looks like this (in response to a unit dying event):
0
Appreciate the attempt, but I've just tested and confirmed that that action returns the experience level of a hero unit, not the KillXP value.
0
I'm in the process of manually triggering exp gain in my map. To that end, I'd like to be able to read the KillXP (AKA "Combat - Kill Experience") value of a unit.
Can anyone give me example of how to do this? I would expect it's to do with the functions for catalog values, when reading any value outside the most common unit properties, but I don't know how those functions are to be used.