I'm attempting a remake of Snipers Locks based on an older map which fixes multiple blemishes of the most popular ones today. I won't bore you with the esoteric details, but essentially the current map is atrocious. I'll also be implementing a few minute changes which will hopefully balance game play or make the game less newb friendly. Poor me.

Anyway, my thoughts:

Base Vision

I want the base vision, or non-fog of war area located near one's turrets and flag, that is smaller than the current vision given by said turrets. I've thought of a couple of different ways that this can be done, but I'm not sure about the possibility of efficiency of my solutions.

- Map revealer. My only qualm with this is that it's possible that I may want to remove vision at some point (again, I won't go into details). I believe that map revealers cannot be removed singularly, but can they be removed entirely for a player or force, or given to a computer and then given back? Also, one of the two computer players controls a good deal of map revealers which act as an anti-minimap hack. Would this be an obstacle?
- Burrowed zerg unit. It's ugly, that's my only issue here, but I know it's removable, so if nothing else is available I'll be using this method.


Anti-Hack

As usual, there's a new hack out. I'm not too concerned with this, because it's gotten to the point where in highly competitive games snipers are sadly relegated to using a video recording program to record their screen. This will be mandated for any league play, but it would be nice if I could stop a good percentage of the public hackers. The newer cheats are able to automatically target ghosts.
- I've heard it relies on shared vision (because all players in Snipers Locks are allied, to create the locks effect) to select which enemy to fire upon. Any ideas on how to counter this?
- Also, for the basic crash hack for a full maphacker, I need to find a new sprite or image that will crash the game. =/

Thanks in advance for any help. I know it probably seems like I'm a completely new mapper asking for help, and I'm aware that there are frequently requests for help with sniper-specific maps, but I used to be a regular here so I'd appreciate any in-depth help. Thanks again. =)

Any enabled sprite that was preplaced should do the trick. It did it for me in all 4 versions of the good ol' Oblivion (Used for debug purposes only dammit D:<) And iNHALE.

If you really wanna get tricky, let players test if someone is hacking by walking to a beacon in the top left, in which if the player IS map hacking, they'll see the enabled sprite, if not game will continue.

Extended Terrain. Then I'd just steal your map and say i finished my map.

;D

In a Snipers map, people rarely want extended terrain, blocks work fine, just set it up so the vision is all funky

And basically anything other than the basics(units) that crashes will get past most anti-crashes on hacks. I'm not sure how you could stop that ghost targetting, I mean, if people are that obsessed with winning a Snipers game, I'd let them go . Now, for units that crash, try enabling sprites, or preplacing disabled ones, as list of disabled ones and what they do is here: http://Falkoner.CoW.GooglePages.com/Disabled_Sprite_Effects.html

Also, a great way to get them, is when no one is in an area(so basically, no vision) you move the crashing unit there, even if it's in the middle of the battle field, and as soon as someone gets close, move the unit away, and that should get most hackers.