- Joined
- May 15, 2008
- Messages
- 492
After a long time of trying to see new ideas that could be used in starcraft 2 games, I came by the idea of a ability manager.
What is the ability manager?
Its pretty simple. Its a custom UI box that allows you to set the amount of mana used on a ability. This allows you to weaken or strengthen your ability based on the level you set( my idea for levels was percentages). A great example would be a Naruto map with like 3 different rasengan abilites. It becomes very annoying having all your ability slots filled with the same ability in different versions. With something like a ability manager, you could simply set the abilities percentage to lets say 100% to get the strongest rasengan ability, 60% to get a medium and 20% to get the weakest.
What use would this really give? Can't we just change the ability once it levels?
Well that is a work around but it becomes much more strategic when you can choose how strong your ability is. If your hero has little mana, you can either wait for him to get the mana or run back to base to heal. With this kind of system, you could set the percentage of your ability to a low enough amount to make your hero be able to use it, even if its weaker.
How would a ability manager look like?
The way I pictured it, it would be a box in a corner of a screen not taking up too much space with a bar in it setting the percentage, a list of your hero's abilities(maybe buttons shown by icons or something along those lines), and a text showing how much damage your ability would do, the mana, and maybe if your hero can cast it with his current mana. If a ability manager is made well enough, it can take up very little space and come into great effect in AoS's, Arena's, RPG's, and any other hero based games.
Making such a system won't be very simple since you have to make math calculations that divide the damage done by percents, the mana used by percents, the actual damage your ability will do, and if you want to you can also add or take away amounts of effects used based on mana. There are a few draw backs with such a system, as it would take up code for every ability casted and with the posts I have read, you can only have a certain amount of code in your map. A work around for literally making a trigger for every ability possible would to make a Initialization trigger that sets a formula for damage based on the level into a integer that holds the actual ability raw code. You do this all in one trigger and make another trigger that is fired when a ability is casted. Then you match the strings of the raw code's you made with your abilities and get the formula's to deal damage. This may not be the way to do this, I am not familiar with the sc2 editor or its triggering limits so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Please give feedback about my idea of a ability manager in sc2 maps. Hope its helpful!
What is the ability manager?
Its pretty simple. Its a custom UI box that allows you to set the amount of mana used on a ability. This allows you to weaken or strengthen your ability based on the level you set( my idea for levels was percentages). A great example would be a Naruto map with like 3 different rasengan abilites. It becomes very annoying having all your ability slots filled with the same ability in different versions. With something like a ability manager, you could simply set the abilities percentage to lets say 100% to get the strongest rasengan ability, 60% to get a medium and 20% to get the weakest.
What use would this really give? Can't we just change the ability once it levels?
Well that is a work around but it becomes much more strategic when you can choose how strong your ability is. If your hero has little mana, you can either wait for him to get the mana or run back to base to heal. With this kind of system, you could set the percentage of your ability to a low enough amount to make your hero be able to use it, even if its weaker.
How would a ability manager look like?
The way I pictured it, it would be a box in a corner of a screen not taking up too much space with a bar in it setting the percentage, a list of your hero's abilities(maybe buttons shown by icons or something along those lines), and a text showing how much damage your ability would do, the mana, and maybe if your hero can cast it with his current mana. If a ability manager is made well enough, it can take up very little space and come into great effect in AoS's, Arena's, RPG's, and any other hero based games.
Making such a system won't be very simple since you have to make math calculations that divide the damage done by percents, the mana used by percents, the actual damage your ability will do, and if you want to you can also add or take away amounts of effects used based on mana. There are a few draw backs with such a system, as it would take up code for every ability casted and with the posts I have read, you can only have a certain amount of code in your map. A work around for literally making a trigger for every ability possible would to make a Initialization trigger that sets a formula for damage based on the level into a integer that holds the actual ability raw code. You do this all in one trigger and make another trigger that is fired when a ability is casted. Then you match the strings of the raw code's you made with your abilities and get the formula's to deal damage. This may not be the way to do this, I am not familiar with the sc2 editor or its triggering limits so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Please give feedback about my idea of a ability manager in sc2 maps. Hope its helpful!
