I feel very noob about asking this, but many times I wanted to modify something from an ability and I always ended up randomly checking through the Events, Behaviours and Effects of it, never knowing which one I should look at.
So ya... can anyone gives a definition or differentiations of those 3 things?

EDIT: As Pears mentioned, it'd very appreciated to understand when to check all the boxes and when not to check them when we copy some unit/model/actor/etc. It's very confusing.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 13 2010, 1:35 am by payne.

this would help me out a lot too. In the help vidoes people are always saying lets copy this or change this and i watch them without a solid knowledge of exactly what kinds of things are in each category. As i understand it effects fall into behaviors and the behavior is attached to the unit to get the desired effect?

I'll try my best to explain what I know.

Effect cause things to be effected. They either modify things in the world (e.g. damage, apply behaviour) or cause other effects (e.g. set, search).
Abilities are actions, they are things that are activated by players/triggers. Most of the time these will cause effects.
Behaviours are a lot like abilities but they require no action by players/triggers. The most common behaviour is buff all other behaviours are very specific (e.g. wander, click response).

Any visual/audio things you see are caused by actors that are attached to effects/abilities (and other things). These can be attached in a couple different ways. One is through events, for instance sound actors can be attached to effects through the events on the actor (effect.effectname.initial or something similar) so that when the effect happens a sound is played. The other way of being attached to another object is through a setting, like with units (unit name setting at the top of the actor's setting list).

In terms of duplicating never duplicate something you don't want to change. When you do duplicate something pay careful attention to actor events, it won't always duplicate things like sound actors and so you will need to manually attach them. For instance duplicating the permanently cloaked behaviour without duplicating the sound actors will cause no sound actors to be attached to it. Really, although inconvenient, I think this would be desired as you should modify the sound actor to also be attached to your cloak object (since the object would be no different).

I'd like to add "Flags" to the list too.

Flags are boolean attributes. Flags in the data editor have many different types of options, but in general they are used for preset things that can only be turned off and on.

Yeah, many abilities need flags set for the unit/target. Say for instance, a Phoenix's attack is only allowed to attack units that are flagged as "Air Units". If you take a ground unit and change it's air unit flag to on, theoretically, a Phoenix would be able to target it without using it's void prison ability.