- Joined
- Mar 8, 2006
- Messages
- 604
Over this past summer I have been working on improving my skills with spells and the like in object data. I have discovered a few things which have proven to be useful to me and I hope will be useful to someone else.
1.Negative Values and the Value of Zero
2.Locust
3.Sphere
Negative values can be enabled in the editor in Prefrences and checking the box that applies.
What are negative values?
Negative values change spells as we know it. It can make damaging spells healing spells and healing spells damage spells. Buffs become de-buffs etc. . .
Yet, there is a price. . .there are two things I've noticed and been unable to fix when using negative values on spells.
1)When you make a damage spell a healing spell, it accounts for the units spell resistance. For instance you heal a hero for 300, but the hero has a 25% spell resistance because of his hero armor. That means you heal him for only 225. =P
2)When you make a healing spell a damage spell, and say you use it to kill a creep perhaps. It will not give you experience or gold. (Grrr.) I have noticed though that the Alchemist's healing Spray does give experience but it will do seemingly random damage no matter what you set it's damage meter at.
What Is "The Value of Zero"
Awhile back Blizzard (In one of the patches I believe) set it some things when given the value of 0 last for infinite amount of time.
For example
uration. You can make permanent buffs, stuns etc. . .when setting their duration to 0. This doesn't happen with all spells though, some spells like Tranquility won't allow you to put 0 as a duration. So to be safe I usually put 0.01 as my duration. (I have not tried putting negative values into a duration.)
For in cases like Tranquility where if you put the duration at 0 and the caster does nothing, you will either have to settle for a time duration like 9999999 or set up some triggers to make it last/keep repeating.
What is Locust Ability? And What Is It's "Secret."
The Locust ability is a passive ability used by those little floating buggers which fly from the Crypt Lord when he uses his ultimate ability: Locust Swarm.
What it does is quite interesting. It makes whoever has the ability completely and utterly invulnerable, not to mention, unselectable. And when I mean "completely and utterly invulnerable," I mean it. Not even a trigger such as: Unit - Kill trigger can kill it!!
However, It is possible to move them if they are stored as a unit variable, although this is tricky and I'm very bad at it, it's possible-just a pain.
Now you're probably thinking: That's seems completely pointless and serves no point. Why would I want to make a unit which I can't select or kill?
The answer is also it's secret: a dummy unit. In other words a summoned unit that appear for a short duration then dissapear, and all the while no one can do anything about it!
The easiest example for the usefulness of this spell comes when we look at the Inferno spell. There have been some tutorials on how to do this which is why it is the most prevalent and easy spell in my mind.
1)Copy the Locust unit (Units>Undead>Special) make sure it can't move, attack etc. . .and set it's model to a non existant model.
2)Now make a new spell based off of the inferno spell. Adjust the stats and whatnot however you want (Damage, speed, etc. . .) Then set the summoned unit to the new Locust unit you made and set the duration to 0.01 and Presto! You have a meteor spell which doesn't appear to summon anything!
You can use this on all sorts of spells like Parasite - instead of having a unit spawn from the corpse it's just a normal de-buff.
What is the Sphere ABility?
The Sphere ability is the ability that gives those floating little spheres to the Blood Mage. Unfortunately You can't do this to any 'ol unit because the Blood Mage has three extra attachment points for them. But it's still handy.
You can use sphere for many things but the main thing I want to touch on is this:
1)Adding permanent effects/attachments to heroes.
Adding permanent effects/attachments to heroes:
(We are using the Art field: Art - Target)
This little trick is helpfulallowing multiple models to be attached with the same ability. We'll use the Bloodmage as an example. Say you want to add the Death Coil Missle art and to the BloodMage's right hand and the DragonHawk Missile art to the left hand.
1)Make A copy of the Sphere ability. In the Art - Target area, delete the Blood Mage missile art and add Death Coil Missle Art and the Dragon Hawk Missile Art. Not both of these two should be in the Art - Target area.
2)For the Attachment Point 1 field enter the strings (seperately and withought the ' ) 'hand' 'right'. Then for Attachment Point 2 enter 'hand' left'. And there you have it! Run your map and you will see he has two cool model effects on his hands.
Here's how it works (I friend explained this to me) lets say you have 2 models for Art - Target which we'll call "A" and "B" (In order). Attachment Point one determines where "A" will go and Attachment Point 2 determines where "B" will go. You can have up to five or six (I forget - I think six) different models on your hero.
Does this work on items?
Yep. . .now you can make a fire ring and give a flame effect to your hero's hands. =D
Oh and since when a unit with Sphere attacks - his attachment dissapears and reapears we can fix this. The reason it does this is linked with the cooldown of Sphere, so set the cooldown to 0.01(Just to be safe =D)
That is all for now, I hope I have helpedSOMEONE out at least.
Any further questions or comments are greatly appreciated - feel free to comment here or pm me!
-Deck
1.Negative Values and the Value of Zero
2.Locust
3.Sphere
Negative values can be enabled in the editor in Prefrences and checking the box that applies.
What are negative values?
Negative values change spells as we know it. It can make damaging spells healing spells and healing spells damage spells. Buffs become de-buffs etc. . .
Yet, there is a price. . .there are two things I've noticed and been unable to fix when using negative values on spells.
1)When you make a damage spell a healing spell, it accounts for the units spell resistance. For instance you heal a hero for 300, but the hero has a 25% spell resistance because of his hero armor. That means you heal him for only 225. =P
2)When you make a healing spell a damage spell, and say you use it to kill a creep perhaps. It will not give you experience or gold. (Grrr.) I have noticed though that the Alchemist's healing Spray does give experience but it will do seemingly random damage no matter what you set it's damage meter at.
What Is "The Value of Zero"
Awhile back Blizzard (In one of the patches I believe) set it some things when given the value of 0 last for infinite amount of time.
For example
uration. You can make permanent buffs, stuns etc. . .when setting their duration to 0. This doesn't happen with all spells though, some spells like Tranquility won't allow you to put 0 as a duration. So to be safe I usually put 0.01 as my duration. (I have not tried putting negative values into a duration.)For in cases like Tranquility where if you put the duration at 0 and the caster does nothing, you will either have to settle for a time duration like 9999999 or set up some triggers to make it last/keep repeating.
What is Locust Ability? And What Is It's "Secret."
The Locust ability is a passive ability used by those little floating buggers which fly from the Crypt Lord when he uses his ultimate ability: Locust Swarm.
What it does is quite interesting. It makes whoever has the ability completely and utterly invulnerable, not to mention, unselectable. And when I mean "completely and utterly invulnerable," I mean it. Not even a trigger such as: Unit - Kill trigger can kill it!!
However, It is possible to move them if they are stored as a unit variable, although this is tricky and I'm very bad at it, it's possible-just a pain.
Now you're probably thinking: That's seems completely pointless and serves no point. Why would I want to make a unit which I can't select or kill?
The answer is also it's secret: a dummy unit. In other words a summoned unit that appear for a short duration then dissapear, and all the while no one can do anything about it!
The easiest example for the usefulness of this spell comes when we look at the Inferno spell. There have been some tutorials on how to do this which is why it is the most prevalent and easy spell in my mind.
1)Copy the Locust unit (Units>Undead>Special) make sure it can't move, attack etc. . .and set it's model to a non existant model.
2)Now make a new spell based off of the inferno spell. Adjust the stats and whatnot however you want (Damage, speed, etc. . .) Then set the summoned unit to the new Locust unit you made and set the duration to 0.01 and Presto! You have a meteor spell which doesn't appear to summon anything!
You can use this on all sorts of spells like Parasite - instead of having a unit spawn from the corpse it's just a normal de-buff.
What is the Sphere ABility?
The Sphere ability is the ability that gives those floating little spheres to the Blood Mage. Unfortunately You can't do this to any 'ol unit because the Blood Mage has three extra attachment points for them. But it's still handy.
You can use sphere for many things but the main thing I want to touch on is this:
1)Adding permanent effects/attachments to heroes.
Adding permanent effects/attachments to heroes:
(We are using the Art field: Art - Target)
This little trick is helpfulallowing multiple models to be attached with the same ability. We'll use the Bloodmage as an example. Say you want to add the Death Coil Missle art and to the BloodMage's right hand and the DragonHawk Missile art to the left hand.
1)Make A copy of the Sphere ability. In the Art - Target area, delete the Blood Mage missile art and add Death Coil Missle Art and the Dragon Hawk Missile Art. Not both of these two should be in the Art - Target area.
2)For the Attachment Point 1 field enter the strings (seperately and withought the ' ) 'hand' 'right'. Then for Attachment Point 2 enter 'hand' left'. And there you have it! Run your map and you will see he has two cool model effects on his hands.
Here's how it works (I friend explained this to me) lets say you have 2 models for Art - Target which we'll call "A" and "B" (In order). Attachment Point one determines where "A" will go and Attachment Point 2 determines where "B" will go. You can have up to five or six (I forget - I think six) different models on your hero.
Does this work on items?
Yep. . .now you can make a fire ring and give a flame effect to your hero's hands. =D
Oh and since when a unit with Sphere attacks - his attachment dissapears and reapears we can fix this. The reason it does this is linked with the cooldown of Sphere, so set the cooldown to 0.01(Just to be safe =D)
That is all for now, I hope I have helpedSOMEONE out at least.
Any further questions or comments are greatly appreciated - feel free to comment here or pm me!
-Deck
