Satyr Saturday Replays Week 71 and up

[IskatuMesk]

Yeah, I figured as much. It was mostly that Devour felt kind of lackluster as the ultimate. The real star of the show was always just ramming people. It was kind of silly trying to hit moving targets in the latency but really rewarding when you finally managed to.

[Mucky]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F7hhZ8ttZI

[IskatuMesk]

I see ricky is keeping the torch warm while I my sleep order is cucked

[Mucky]

It looks like I've finally fixed the flickering. Running WC3 in windowed mode with CursorLock did the trick.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Just to note that I am VERY likely to miss most to all of tonight's SS.

[Vetraeus]

I will...kill you. With a baguette.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

A worthy death!

[Mucky]

"I'll just take a nap"

[IskatuMesk]

"I'll just HORRRYYY SHIEEEEET"

[IskatuMesk]

hi

so um

we have LoL running right now

I had Mucky take a look at the map a while back to figure out why it wouldn't load. return bug etc. Bill offered to have a look at it recently, and determined the bug is largely tied to the AddDmg event or whatever. It's used for some damage display and a bunch of abilities. Disabling that lets the map load. He says he'll be able to take a look at maybe trying to fix it in some days as he's busy.

Ever since we started playing wc3 again I've given a lot of thought about this map and what I would do to try to fix it. The big issue is I don't know JASS. That's why it died to begin with. I couldn't self-sustain the project.

I'm a bit wiser today but I still don't know shit. JASS is more confusing than Galaxy and I am not exactly capable of writing Galaxy, only reading small portions of it.



So I'm looking at this map and I see a whole fuckton of low hanging fruit I could fix and I have a lot of ideas I could probably do myself given some time to experiment and make the play experience a lot better than it was.

Preliminary

- Remove that fog
- Make NPC players hide the heroes and shit after startup so there's less units in their control and their stuttering isn't as fucky
- Remove all unnecessary turrets, towers, etc. from the lower level (which will become hostile hell for game mechanic reasons)
- Redesign neutral bosses to remove hard CC from most of them and lower their damage/invul strength while increasing their utility (debuff/buffs). I can tell immediately just from some short fighting that this shit is impossible for heroes to fight early on and yet that's EXACTLY what I want you doing (see further).
- A lot of defense structures will be removed and the defense units upgraded.

Short-term
- Make an assessment of all the heroes and what they do and build that into a game concept so I know what exactly is in the map (I have no clue besides 2-3 heroes atm)
- Make an assessment of all the divisions and what they currently do and then document this INGAME so you actually know (is there a way to do this cleanly?)
- Once assessments are complete I may remove entire heroes, particularly after gathering some feedback from their design, because they either contribute nothing interesting, are feature incomplete, their designs are toxic (cough), or they'll be problematic because of super high utility (I don't remember anything being like that but we'll see).
- Homogenize hotkeys (CFA/TGS)

Production
- Redo all the graphics ports or import them into 3ds max and fix shit like the busted cubemaps that make stuff brighter, remove unnecessary animations (though they don't fuck a lot of the models up they're still unnecessary), FINISH all existing content. To do this I'll need to check Blinkboy's neodex tool which also supports sc2 and will be nice to have for Apex, so it's on my to-do list anyways. He makes reference to the wc3 art tools which I really hope aren't needed for this because they don't work on any max versions supported by windows 7.
- If the above works, I'll look into adding sound events to models because no new model has any sound events. I don't know how Mucky does sound events (probably via trigger) but that probably isn't as clean as what I need for like 200 new meshes.
- Consider feature completion.

So anyways, other than really minor stuff I am gonna keep listing here for personal reference, there's a lot of questions I need to ask not only myself but also you, the players, because this is a community map and will always be private, so your input will directly influence how or if this project is worked on.

I have a lot of ideas for items now. First of all, I don't want to make an item combination system akin to dota or battleships or whatever. It's a fucking chore to keep track of. I'd prefer to keep it really simple, and I have a few ideas how I can do it.

Items

- I like the idea Dragon's Dogma has with dragonforging items to upgrade them, and it immediately stood out as something I could do in this map - allow neutral npcs to give players items to upgrade their gear.



The entire lower levels of the map are unused other than two control points that I had originally intended to allow players to capture for the purpose of having strong global spells. That seems stupid and not very interesting, so I think turning those into forges would be a lot cooler.



I considered allowing players to kill respawning bosses for certain materials they use to upgrade their gear to more powerful versions of what they already are. This allows the item system to remain rather simple to understand but have great depth in actual deployment. If the structures must be protected for your gear to be upgraded over time, you can make a team investment to stop your enemy team from becoming stronger and to protect your investment. The laneplay in LoL is super stale because the lanes have very little openness between them and there's no reason to actually leave them. I want to open up more map play and therefore add more ramps and change the terrain a bit (this will not be as easy as it sounds).

I originally planned to add more waygates but in hindsight I DON'T want to do that. I may use town portals instead (or some iteration of them, I'll have to think about it).

In that sense I want to reduce the amount of creeps that spawn but make them individually stronger. I think I may have already done that before but I'm going to do it again. Looking at a flood of tiny units is boring. I want each fight to mean something.

I want each part of the map to mean something. I was initially doing Isador's area back when this map was still a thing and I think it's a pretty good balance of detail and openness.



Comparatively, the Loladin area needs doodads and attention. I may decide to reverse the platform to the boss or remove it entirely as well, since it seems a bit awkward to me. Nothing wrong with the way CFA does this.



Those fortresses are clutter hell. They're ok in lane but not in the boss area. The boss arenas should be tailored to the bosses. Sir Lol has a bouncing shockwave iirc and it never bounces because his area is big. I could add some unpathable pillars for bouncing. I remember Lord Dread having some insane stun that, in hindsight, was incredibly dumb. Big damage is ok but I want to dramatically cut down the CC that units have vs heroes (vs creeps is ok).

Upgrade structures are in a dumb fucking spot. I will move them to the spawn region and drop their size. I actually don't know if the current implementation of the upgrade system is cheese proof. I can't remember. Maybe Mucky knows of a better implementation of a shared resource system like the one we were using. I remember buying items being buggy which is why I switched to this?

I think the Division system is really strong and a really nice concept, but it could use a bit more dynamic. I believe I wanted the resource generation count to be based on how many garrisons you controlled. This allowed pushing and AoE heroes to remain viable even if they couldn't personally penetrate a base filled with strong duelists or heroes. It also would allow you to focus on either laneplay or "jungling". Plus your allies could give you upgrade items from them killing bosses while you push. For all I know this is already how it works but I don't know. The triggers in this map are an unbelievable fucking mess and I can't read JASS, so I'm kind of starting over from scratch in understanding what they actually do.



Map Tong Hop may be a super imbalanced mess but I like a lot of the ideas it has, like everything being super ridiculous. I definitely think I can do a better job on balancing but I have to (and this is why I didn't want to do items back then) get every hero on the same sort of level statistically. I think it's foolish to think the map will ever be perfectly balanced, but if I can make everything fun to play, even at the cost of removing a lot of content at the start, the map as a whole will be still be enjoyable for the few people who play.



Some of my long-term goals I can accommodate short-term. I would want to make the graphical fidelity for this map the best of any wc3 project I've yet to experience. I can make the assets for it, but only if neodex works like I hope it does. As a mid-way, though, I'm going to be outright deleting a fuckton of visual clutter from the map. These huge, ugly ass particles and any vanilla doodad meshes that look out of place or are too blurry. A ton of small units have huge fucking shadows are look ugly as shit. There's lots of open spaces totally unused I can detail or change and will use for NPC spawns. There'll be roaming npcs like those in CFA, the inane spawns that currently exist, and timed boss spawns. I want killing those bosses to be a team thing, so while they'll drop materials, their gold bonus will be team-wide. I have also considered removing bounty from minions and making it based on either neutral mobs, tower control, or a combination of the above (ofc hero kills are still a big bulk). Any input on here would be nice.

As a short-term bandaid for items I could just add a bunch of dumb expensive shit but it'll imbalance some stuff, which brings me to the meat of the big double-edged sword for this project.

My original design, and the design mucky is using for CFA, is still the biggest thing. All hero stuff should scale off stats. And I will be completely removing attribute bonus, and dropping numbers a lot. I would like to basically copy mucky's idea of having a second "ult". This is also why I want to just remove any heroes that rub me the wrong way or seem lazy.

Yes, this will still require an exe. The difference is it will be on an FTP and not be sent over aim. I don't actually know how or what I split from the map for the exe at this point in time. I will have a PM list on CC for the exe to be sent, preferably before events start by a few days. Keep in mind even if the Emu "fixes" everything this weekend I highly doubt the map will be hosted for a few weeks AFTER that point. I'm basically hoping to copy paste stuff from CFA if mucky allows me to and just try to circumsize it to my own needs while figuring out bits and pieces in my spare time. So, to that end...

Do you want to see LoL worked on again?

What do you value most?
- Short term playability (do you want to play this next event or wait until I fix it up? Do you want it to be more complete before I look to have it played at all?)
- Items
- Heroes
- Polish (Sounds/graphics)
- Features (Neutral spawns, divisions, etc.)


extra notes
-

Just for me...

- So many units have critical strike. WHY
- Loladin top lane in front of the Sergeant is just a huge goddamn trainwreck. They keep trying to path back to home. WHY
- Gut sergeants/captains or their forts
- inane spawns are not INANE ENOUGH
- make units spawn more often (once their number is reduced a bit), the scaler is probably a bit too aggressive on slowing the spawns down
- every fucking npc has soul grip or whatever it is and divine shield, delete and ban
- there are THREE blocks of text when someone dies. Condense this shit already
- make cannon garrisons teleportable, add some to other areas, making them all capturable?
- gut all these extra turrets everywhere
- any unit not assigned to a division gets removed until added to one?
- why do divisions not tell what they DO
- steal text loadout for color definitions from SOMETHING and use for ALL items and DIVISION UPGRADE TOOLTIPS and ABILITY DESCRIPTIONS, build an external document to list EVERYTHING
- kill NPC stat bloat so I know EXACTLY what stats they have
- WHY does stuff in loladin base just gain +40 damage/stats, where on earth is this coming from?
- WHY is there a waygate to evil hero select in loladin fountain!?

- Heroes to get rid of and why

- Blood Warden (nerubian) - Just has some generic filler bullshit. delete
- Sweaty Lenny (Janitor) - See above.
- (Loladin) Minotaur Battlemaster - See above.
- (Loladin) Soljitsu Druid - Ophelia had a huge place in ET lore but all she has in this is a 5 second stun power shot and some generic bullshit. We can do more with her. Backburn this filler.
- Immortal King - His passives are boring as shit. Reincarnation makes sense for him, but surely his other abilities can be more interesting. Backburn.
- Gnomecrusher - what is this shit
- (Loladin) Lord Robert - why does such a critical LoL hero have two idiotic abilities one of which is a "click button to kill yourself" steroid. delete
- Gorogath - two passives with shockwave and avatar. for a hero with a decent graphic he has nothing of interest besides deflect. backburn
- Leeroy Jenkins - His first two abilities are dumb. The fear sounds OP and chain lightning doesn't fit his kit at all. Backburn
- (Loladin) Lolriorr - obviously I just copy pasted the paladin and gave it stun. I did this a LOT. delete
- Astral Wanderer - I remember her ult being cool if not OP. She only has two other skills. backburn
- Spider Dude - what is this shit
- Furion - has nothing of any value besides pinestorm if it actually does anything. backburn
- Anegma - commanding shout is a cool ability idea because it adds a bit of utility to your attack waves, but in practice I remember it being very fucky. save graphic for something else and remove.
- Void Stalker - seems the tamer of tipereth's heroes. Void Mastery doesn't tell what it does. Find out.
- Void Walker - ah yes, the "I stack shit and just instantly kill entire waves and enemy heroes and 3 of my abilities are geared to doing only this". toxic. remove
- (Loladin) Atomic Goat - while the suicide ability seems silly I am not sure how useful it actually is in this map. I am conflicted on this. He has bash, immolate, and presumably some kind of steroid that makes him take more damage but move faster.
- (Loladin) Soljitsu Gatekeeper - a support hero with ensnare, an aoe heal, slow poison, and presumably an aura ult. The ensare/healing seems neat but the others are odd. What can be done with him that is simple?
- Boatmaster - hey look, another hero with bash. Fuck this.
- Emperor of Blood - hey look, more filler. I probably left this crap here as a placeholder but I should have made them unpickable.
- (Loladin) Rakusu - deathwish shouldn't make you take that much damage (verify if it even does), and the second ult will be a charge/gapcloser. the other abilities seem ok
- Isadorian Bloodtalker - he has an ok kit (meteor, ability steroid, rejuvinate, faerie fire). consider his second ult carefully
- Void Talker - tipereth got lazy with this one. bash and some physical stuff coupled with a... channeled aoe thing? seems misplaced. probably not worth keeping.
- (Loladin) Lead Zeppelin - all of the abilities are centralized around ram, which isn't necessarily bad, but they're boring. figure out other abilities for this unit that don't increase his utility much. backburn otherwise
- Chaos Warden - very basic, boring stuff, especially the health/damage passive. can do better than this for him surely
- Lord Jordan - his shoulder armor particles are FUCKED but his abilities seem ok.
- (Loladin) Stabbyman - well I mean it has backstab, eviscerate and a bunch of very confused or boring substitutes for other abilities. backburn
- Skeram - I don't remember what this guy does. He isn't a standard hero...
- Bloodthunder Tyrant - ah yes I remember the puntasaurus. His Q seems better suited for a boss than him, but he's probably all right as he is for now.
- (Loladin) Olympic Sprinter - is this guy SUPPOSED to have such insane damage range at level 1? he does as much as many level 25 evil heroes... his abilities are kind of meh as well. Maybe a more suitable ult combo would set him up.
- Dark Howler - ok concept boring execution. some of his abilities can be changed and he might just work.


alright the heroes in this map are in a much worse state than I anticipated...

[Mucky]

aw snap

Learning JASS is a matter of:
1) Getting comfortable with standard programming concepts that carry over into multiple languages.
2) Transitioning from GUI, which centers around triggers, to an environment that centers around functions.

There's dozens of tutorials around, though a lot of them are horribly outdated. Avoid anything that talks about Kattana's Handle Variables or Vexorian's CSCache, since those things exploit the return bug (why these tutorials have never been taken down is beyond me). Here's one I'd recommend. I'm also around to answer any questions that tutorials might not clear up.

These days, you can't get away without learning vJass, so a tutorial that delves into it early on is ideal. vJass is nice to learn on its own since it comes with object-oriented syntax, which is easier to understand than procedural syntax, and other quality-of-life features. But more importantly, CFA uses vJass, so you'll need to get Jass NewGen Pack if you want to port stuff into LoL.

You might be interested in the item update I have in mind for CFA, which uses a more modular design for combinations.

I vaguely remember the lumber system in place for divisions. Arcan and I were sometimes able to get double upgrades, which would then cause the next lumber bonus to be skipped, so it's only somewhat vulnerable to cheesing. Gold/lumber is local to each player, and latency makes it difficult to enforce across multiple players. I think the only way to truly improve on that is to move away from gold/lumber and have some sort of point system that can be displayed via multiboard and be globally enforced.

Anyway, I think heroes and divisions would be the main things to fix up if you're looking to have a playable version ready for next SS.

[IskatuMesk]

ok. I can't promise a super timely dive into this but we'll see how things shape up. I'll skim the documents and look into reading them as I have a look at the project overall (once the emu takes a swing at actually fixing that's in there). What exactly is vjass? A library?

I'll have a look at what you do with the items. I've got a few things in my head but I need to see about how I'm going to change the neutral areas of the map to get an idea how realistic or interesting my idea is (or if those regions could potentially benefit some other mechanic, e.g. off-lane control points).

I do distinctly recall something about eating the lumber bonus. It's probably because a variable goes into the negative or something. Although not super dramatic and probably not something I am going to think about tackling early in, it is something that should eventually be addressed.

If I flat out strip all the heroes that are either imbalanced to fuck or placeholder I doubt the hero roster will be any bigger than CFA but that's a good place to start when it comes to adding the secondary ults and killing the attribute bonus. I have a few other hero ideas but I'll have to composite a bunch of the stuff into a document and there's no way that is getting done before the next SS. Short term I think I can probably cobble some placeholder abilities that sort of complement their existing skillsets or build a new basic skillset. Anyways, I'll see what I can conjure in the week post-emuification.

long-term I need to figure out what exactly kind of direction I want heroes to take. I want silly map tong hop kind of stuff but not as hard to balance. Items with stat scaling will have to be considered early and what other kind of non-stat bonuses (e.g. orb effect kind of shit) they will add. I know I want a bunch of things like double strike, multiattack, and some proc-based item crap to benefit those, but I need more than that to build an ideal framework. For now I can substitute double shot with 2x critical strike and call it a bandaid for the one archer, but yeah. I think 80% of the skills I want to make will require basic jass at the least. At least I now have so much league/blizzdota experience I can figure out what will be blatantly problematic/toxic abilities from the ground up. I also have to account for the high input delay on b.ent so anything particularly twitchy is probably not a good idea.

I can't remember, does wc3 have debuff stuff? like aids removal abilities? I know it has flat out purge...

[Mucky]

vJass is a user-made compiler that converts all the object-oriented syntax (structs, interfaces, etc) into regular Jass syntax. Technically, everything in CFA could be done in regular Jass, but it would take hundreds of more lines of code and it would be significantly harder to read and maintain. I'm probably going to need to write up an example of a spell done in both syntaxes to show the difference.

WC3 does have dispel/disenchant/purge, but if you ever wanted to consider triggering buffs (which can be something as simple as a DoT scaling off stats), you'd need to trigger debuffing as well.

[IskatuMesk]

Yeah, it sounds like I shouldn't bother trying to hybridize too much.

So, vjass is like of like a higher level interpretation of jass. Maybe it will be easier for me to read. I skimmed LoL's triggers and jass and even the basic stuff reads in really confusing way.

[IskatuMesk]

Emu has handed off a working version to me.

He replaced the event with a similar one in CFA as we had nothing else to go off of, though I believe he said Cleave and Hell's Judgement are disabled (Cleave being a neutral boss ability and Hell's Judgement being I think Lord Dread's CC). He did say he wasn't sure if there would be a memory leak from the event not removing units or something, which is what I am going to try to test.

As it is monday, I am not sure if I will have a tangibly different version by Saturday. I will, however, be starting work on basic stuff for this.