Hello Everyone.

first of all, im not completely new here. i was here some months or a year ago, but simply my email account is closed that i used on my old account, and i forgot all my login data. so i decided to create a new account, and start with a small question for an upcoming project.

i think there are many ways, and also many discussions about this, but i winna collect some ideas how i could create ingame heroes with some working abilitys.

my mapping skills are relaitve good, i worked a lot with starforge and also created some maps... noone of you knows one of them, but i think imo i was one of the first guys that tried to recreate the HGMA after it stopped working after the .. i think it was 1.12 patch, and i nearly finished it... but i was too slow so i decided to close that project...

nevermind thats not m point in this topic.

what i want to know is - how could i create heroes with working abillities?

i wanna recreate the perhaps known Hero Wars Ultimate from WC3 ROC for broodwar.
even if sc2 is coming in some months i think this wont be senseless.

what i need is the possibility to give heroes up to ~12 levels. experience would work with gas counter
thats not an problem, but the skills... anything like a stun skill, a cleaving attack, shooting multiple targets at one time
- is this anyhow possible?

i hope you guys understand what i try to ask here, even is my english sucks like hell.. im sorry for that

regards, Patch

Triggers are the only way, you can't just add spells to units, you need to have some kind of selection system and use triggers to make spells.

hm yeah sure i know but is it perhaps possible to ... make a dark swarm that makes damage in his line with triggers, for area of effect damage?
or is it possible to give a unit some more buttons , like an stimpack for hydra (w/o modding the game)

No. It's not possible, but you can create a darkswarm using advanced editors. Considering you haven't mapped in a while, I recommend downloading Scmdraft 2 because its the best editor around. Scmdraft 2
I do know what you're talking about, but the answer is really complicated(for aiming a darkswarm and doing AOE damage)

sticky, you can't create dark swarms, you can only create using triggers units that are normally placeable in Staredit. But you can detect Dark Swarms and Disruption Web using triggers, they are owned by Player 12, a player only accessible using 3rd party editors. You can use a selection system to change spells, and them detect Dark Swarm, center a location on it, and perform the currently selected spell, and remove the Dark Swarm.

Note that doing damage and especially AoE damage is very complicated. You will need to create a VHP system (Virtual Hit Points) which allows you to virtually store the hp an unit has. Then when you want to do damage with a spell you can substract VHP and translate that into real hit points.
While that is not all that difficult, the complicated part comes when you also want to do damage with normal attacks. As far as I know there are no fast and reliable systems which allows you to track every normal attack you are forced to used one of these (or another) systems:

1) Units have just 1 hp but when they die they are replaced by the same unit (or hero) version but from another computer player. Cycling this allows you to have units up to 14 hits. This won't work for player-controlled units though. This works great against comp-controlled units though and can be easily intergrated with an ammo system
2) All Heroes are invulnerable and have a 'attack target' around them (a Scourge or burrowed unit next to them (not UNDER)). The attack target will die in 1 hit if you want to register every hit or they have enough hit points for 1-5 hit points if you want to sacrafice tracking efficiency for more variarity in damage. When an attack target dies VHP will be substracted. The problem with this system is however that is that it is nearly impossible to detect WHO kills the attack target. (The only method I can think of now is to work with the 'Least/Most kills' condition. Every Hero needs an unique attack target. Every time a target dies you detect with 'most kills' who killed that unit and then somehow give everyone equal kills of that unit to the same amount so you are ready to detect the killer of the next death. Not sure if this can be done though, but you can try.)
3) Third option is to skip damage skills and only use spells like stun, teleport, armor.


EDIT:
Just thought of an fourth option:
4) With ScmDraft2 you can set the amount of suicidage damage Infested Terrans do. For AoE damage you can just create some Infested Terrans and let them explode on spot. More IT means more damage. Never thought it would be this easy -_-

I am currently working on a system with having EUD health detection where the units REAL health is in its minerals and this would allow for your own 'make-up' spells and for those melee attackers. If you don't have melee attackers then I suggest the Virtual Health Poimt System...

hahah lol.

well really i thought about many units or spells that could work if they can make some damage, but for aoe damage i didnt even though 1 second to just let spawn an infested terran nice idea

the whole VHP thingy is a lil bit too complicated atm, well have to read it a few more times

to other spells, like stun - how would a stun work? i mean, slowing is easy with the "forgot the english name but mean the green queen glibber", but stunning them ? mhhh changing the player for some seconds - would this work? any experiences?

Edit: tried some things with the scmdraft2
its a little bit weird with the triggers... nvm

all i have now is the basic of the aoe with IT´s
simply a location with switch1, if switch1 = set spawn 3 IT´s anywhere - thats my small problem atm ... how to make units spawn on the special players unit? createunit works only for locations afaik ..

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 15 2008, 6:51 pm by Patch.

To create anything near an unit you indeed need a location. You can use the 'move location' trigger to center a location ontop of an unit. When you have done that you can use that location to create pretty much anything ontop/near that unit.
Also, if you want to have a location constantly above an unit you will need hypertriggers (if you don't know them look in the tutorials) and have a trigger with the 'preserve trigger' action center the location on the unit.

You can not just use the 'Ensare' spell (from the Queen) to slow units down, there is no trigger for that. What you CAN do however is constantly (with hyper triggers) move a burrowed unit at the exact location of the unit you want to slow down. That will cause the unit to walk a lot slower.
Stun is quite easy to do if you know how to. First you need to create some 'black' terrain in the editor and create a location on top of it. Then you all you need to do is use the 'move unit' action to constantly try to teleport the stunned unit to the black terrain. Because that is impossible the unit will NOT be teleported. However because the trigger runs like 12 times per second the unit will be unable to do anything else as well.

I'm doing that same idea in my map I'm working on... You took my idea man!

okay thanks for the stun idea, think this will work nicely.

btw i hope i can use this topic for new upcoming questions about some triggers...

so i will continue now

like i said, i know how to work with triggers, made some experiences already, but now i have some next questions...

that move location works fine, never used it before! what i now need is an idea to make
a. the IT´s explode directly on spawn without
b. killing my own hero
and c. an idea how to activate this skill

i mean, in a game that needs some fast reactions i tont think that ppl like it to jump to another spot on the map, to send a slow civillian to an beacon, to activate the aoe skill...

hope you can help me again and hope you guys will help me in future with other questions.
(dont worry i really know many things with triggers already, just mostly to work special things out is a small problem )

For the IT's to not kill your own hero you just need to create IT's for the same player as your hero. As far as I know IT's only damage opponents... right? Now I'm confused
To let the IT's directly explode you could also spawn a (burrowed) zergling or so together with the IT's but for a different (enemy) player. Then use the AI 'set generic target' (or so) to force the IT's to attack the zergling. You would have to pay attention that they must explode together and if not create another zergling so the remaining IT's will explode on that one. Maybe you can also let them attack ground as you can do in-game, but I'm not sure and to lazy to figure it out myself.

Just try around with the editor yourself. Try some stuff and improve it. Repeat.

that is the problem, the IT´s kill and damage everything in their range, including my hero and the other IT´s if they dont explode together
hmhm coul make the hero invincible until the IT´s are dead.. .would fix that problem

hm ok that with the burried zergling would work, i just set his hitpoints to an astronomical heigth, so he doesnt die that fast and all IT´s can explode... same with the IT´s themselfes, that they dont kill each other