Campaign Creations

Xelxiuz wrote: Casual question for you guys: Is it possible to access the collector's edition Thor mesh without collectors edition ie: use it in a custom map, allow others who don't have collectors to use it when playing your custom map, etc?

Possible via custom maps, yes. Same process as how certain removed or altered units were left in the MPQ for WC3 and seen in some custom maps.

Awesome, $40 saved.

My project is coming along nicely, if slowly. Since moving units with triggers doesn't work correctly with projectiles, I will probably be forced to do the projectile system with triggers (I'm kinda leaving that for last with regard to the vital systems; it won't look good until I can figure out how to use site movers anyway).

The dialog system is great, but the inventory system is still full of bugs. If you try to pass an item to a unit that can't hold it in its inventory (ability disabled, wrong item classes etc) the item is destroyed.  :P

Post has a map in attachment

After a private question from someone, here's how to "freeze a unit in time" :

Actor - Send Message - Animation Paused (AnimSetPaused)
It only pauses the animation but the unit is orderable and such. It's the same action but with "Enabled" off to turn it back to normal.

Also here's some logical follow ups actions that might be wanted for it :

Unit - Pause/Unpause Unit
Allows to prevent orders to take effect on the unit. I believe you can still order it but won't carry over until you unpause it.

Unit - Make Unit Invulnerable
Allows unit to be invulnerable, it also hides HP/Shields along with Life/Shields "Armor Icons".

Unit - Make Unit Uncommandable
Allows unit to be no longer commanded in general. However, it will still auto-execute orders that it would otherwise. For example, auto-attacking a nearby enemy unit.

So I added a map in which it contains the triggers in question in addition of being a test map where you can play it and activate/deactivate any of the following with a keyboard key on a Dark Templar and see the concrete effects in addition of any combo of the above.

Post has a map + picture in attachment

So I poked around in a hope to fetch some of the "harder" data via the catalog triggers. To be more specific, I imply data that in an array of a value field instead of a single data which if you don't know how to access it, you are kind of stuck about it.

An example would be the unit costs of a unit-type that are in a catalog data array (which is different than a training ability' resource costs but still useful). Which I need to modify for specific players to access it later.

I took some wild guesses and I found it. Here's an example for the minerals cost of a High Templar :

Catalog : Units
Entry : HighTemplar      <-- Must be raw data (and not "High Templar")
Field Path : CostResource[e_resourceTypeMinerals]  <-- Yes, it's actually like that.

Yes, for the field path, you need to add [] like if it's an array and as array reference, you put the raw reference. An attachment picture will explain just a bit better.

It's important since it would allow to modify the more interesting parts of the data editor's via triggers in mid-game for any specific player.
That would include (but not limited to) :

Unit's Attributes (Armored, Biological, etc.)
Unit's Collision Flags
Unit's Resources Costs (not training ability)

For the array indexes that seems more a logical order rather than with predefined identifiers, I am guessing it's 0, 1, 2, etc. I would have to test that.

Anyway some cases that might be like this :

Training Ability's Resource Costs of any unit (including training time)
Training Ability's Unit-Type
Training Ability's Button of Unit-Type

The editor, an illustrated guide to brain damage.

First, have a big list of random bullshit like NWN2 and the Battlefield editors.

[imgwh 640x400]http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/5246/ea1g.jpg[/imgwh]

Next, totally randomized the way it lists values!

[imgwh 640x597]http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/908/ea2r.jpg[/imgwh]

Rest case, observe as company totally fails to acknowledge the issue and release without concern like they have their previous games.

Profit!

Oh wait, no profit.

It may be that the incomplete nature of the editor (compared with the full version) may be leaving some inconsistencies and malfunctions throughout the program.  Who knows what removing half the potential content from the editor may do to it.  In any case, if these are in fact permanent errors, as with all things we've encountered in the past, we will work around it.

I actually had someone on TL claiming to be a programmer and willing to work on a XML editor sometime in the future. There are certainly more people capable and willing to make replacements.

So I found more precisely how to poke with the "Record" thingy in the Trigger Editor which might not be so obvious when you don't know to use it.

Basically, it works like the "Enum" in general programming where you determine variables that will be contained in it. However, the somewhat less obvious part is HOW to concretely use it in the SC2 Editor.

First of all, you need to create the record with the wanted variables THEN you create a variable of your newly record type (as opposed to create the record and it auto-becomes a variable somehow).

See screenshots below. I also included the map example as attachment.

The huge advantage being mostly for organization purposes. Thus, if you have 4+ variables that are logically together, it's cleaner to pack them in a record and make a variable out of the record organization.

Another advantage for power triggering makers is the ability to easily fake a 5D, 6D, etc. array if you have some really special needs.

Personally, I wish I knew how to do it before since I would have needed it much sooner especially for dialog item references since there are so many.

Or...

HKS and I were thinking of how we can fix the editor ourselves if need be. Part of the layout is in XML files so theoritically to get the values to organize better you can edit the xml files. My easy cheap way of doing it would be to abuse the naming schemes for alphabetical like I do for folders.

_BACKUP <-- a backup folder that is always displayed on top because of the underscore.

_B_Doack <-- Displayed below iirc.

That's one theory to bypassing the data editor's issues, anyway. I had a quick look at triggers and they don't look too difficult to figure out barring weird issues like those Ricky and Xenon run into, but 2042 wouldn't need huge amounts of mechanical systems like that (I hope).

Yeah, the way the game works with "ticks" appears like Supreme Commander. If you turned the speed all the way down in SupCom and zoomed way in, you could see the projectiles slow down just before they hit. This way because they were pre-calculated to hit the target at the next tick, and since the distance between the projectile and the hit point is often less than the distance it usually travels in a tick, it slows down so it hits at the tick interval.

SC2 projectiles might slow down like this before they hit, and it looks like they might, but since you can't turn the speed down very far it's hard to tell. In any case the game appears to calculate things during a tick in predetermined order by categories of things like attacking, movers etc.

I'd like to be able to get periodic/wait triggers to execute in a proper order multiple times at each tick (since I can't have them execute at intervals within the tick), but even that might not be possible. 

The terrain editor is much more annoying than I first anticipated. I decided to try starting to make some of those LoL conceptual terrain maps I was talking about a while ago and as it turns out the terrain gizmo is extremely irritating for make any kind of cliff at all, but pits especially are incredibly annoying to fine-tune. Worse yet is when I was trying to make waterfalls - ho ho, I spent a good half-hour trying to click on them and move them around and align them until I just gave up. Making good-looking waterfalls in this game is going to be very hard.

Aqueducts and stuff like that are totally impossible without custom models because of how huge the water tiles are, raised rivers are just as irritating as I suspected they would be.

There are a lot of other quirks as well, though mostly minor stuff I'd get used to over time.

The biggest, most grandest annoyance of them all however is when I wanted to make a variant of the tree doodad that only spawns a certain type of tree (I wanted to avoid putting palm trees in my forests). Well, as it turns out, there's no doodad editor at all.

If you want to do what I wanted to do you have to copy and paste doodad models around and rearrange them and then point a new model/actor in that direction.

What the hell man. What happened to intuitive editors?

Unless someone knows of a way around this because I don't see anything in these two areas that says anything about what models to load, only the single m3 (which doesn't even appear in the previewer at all) that I'm sure is just acting as an anchor to a directory full of all the variants. The only thing I see related to that is the variation count. You can't actually tell it which models to load, just how many there are. BALLS

The map I started working on is envisioned to be a part of the western provinces. A very small part because 256x256 is notably small. I just threw this shit together as fast as I could to see how fast I could do basic stuff without worrying about detailing.

[imgwh 640x426]http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/6843 ... 002301.png[/imgwh]

A small portion of what would be a small Orc encampment. Ideally, invaders would come from all sides and attack the destructible rocks the Orcs have lined up as barricades. I can probably just make them buildings outright.

[imgwh 640x426]http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/4767 ... 002851.png[/imgwh]

The Waterfall of Fail.

[imgwh 640x426]http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/3853 ... 002912.png[/imgwh]

A relatively small passage. I want to get rid of those palm trees. Also note how the rocks look like plastic. A lot of stuff looks like plastic in sc2. Maybe some lighting changes would fix that.

Since WoW textures are apparently big tiling textures like sc2 porting stuff like cobbled stone, castle rock, and other stuff like that would be really easy. BUT LOL 8 TEXTURE LIMIT AHAHAHA SO MUCH FOR DETAILED TEXTURE WORK

It seems Doodads may be entirely defined in the Actor data; I certainly haven't seen anywhere else to edit them.

Random Question: Memory Leaks.  Are they still a horrible problem like they were in WC3?  Particularly with points.  Do I have to do the whole destroy the point thing in every trigger again, or can I just use them as much I want while comfortable knowing that they are being cleaned up automatically?

Same with any other variables, I guess, but points are what I'm particularly worried about right now.