I made a rough UMS testing the use of customizable spells and ended up finishing customizable spell animations first, since it's the most interesting part ;o. The system I have up right now is optimized for reduced map lag and uses a lot more units than the optimal solution, so you may hit the map limit during testing. (Try to avoid using ground units excessively for spell animations (e,g, spamming 25 lurker spells) because you can hit the sprite limit with dead units >_>)



A unique spell animation as defined in this version is a set of points in a 5x5 grid, with each grid point defined as either "on" or "off". When a grid point is "on", you can define a death animation to be used at that location.



HOW TO USE:
-Mind control units at the bottom left to define the "on" and "off" positions. (On = Hydralisk, Off = Zergling)
-Create units at the top right and send them to the dark area to place them into the queue. (bottom-right of map)



-Spells are centered on your Dark Templar.
-Spells are cast by making any air unit at the starport near the top of the map. All five have the same effect...for now.
-When the spell is cast, the queued units are used to create the death effects. They are placed into the grid left to right and top to bottom.
-Reset your queue by making a sunken colony.

So if your grid looks like this:



And your queue contains the following units:



The spell would contain the death animations of those units arranged as follows:






You can combine different units to get much more spectacular spell effects.



For every "On" grid point in the spell configuration, a 1.5x1.5 location is centered on it and all units there are destroyed. If the unit misplaces because it is larger than the grid (e.g. battlecruiser/valkyrie/carrier), units in a 1.5x1.5 location around the explosion are killed instead. Ground units will obviously place around other units and therefore using them for spells reduces the damage potential, especially with large ones like the Ultralisk.






Well, that's it . Download and play; I copy-pasted repeated unit spawning triggers from another map so we could have things to kill, but it's going to change when I finish the AoS based on this.

Attachments:

Well well. Nice work. I played around with it for half an hour, and if that's any indication, this is gonna be one heckuvan AoS.

That is pretty damn cool. If you remember, pyro made a spell generator that allowed a player to generate a whole bunch of different kinds of spells. You could define how it looks, what it does, and how to aim it.

Not much to say here except, epic. Please finish this project.

Here's one spell I made.



Here's a pretty monstrous one I did afterward.



Overall, very cool.
Wasn't that project dropped? He said it was broken and he couldn't get it to work.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Oct 12 2010, 12:08 pm by DevliN. Reason: Mineral abuse.

Was it broken? I knew he dropped it, but I thought that was just because it was a lot of work.

I don't think it was broken, Pyro just stopped visiting SEN.

http://www.staredit.net/topic/7895/

Yes it was. It stopped working, completely fell apart, and he wasn't able to figure out why.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Oct 12 2010, 12:09 pm by DevliN. Reason: Mineral abuse.

ive been trying to figure out how maps with spells make such specific patterns, so i could start working on my map. thank you so much!!!

Awhhsome ;D. I love you.