[Solved] Ability issues

[Adaethus]

What exactly makes an ability play a certain animation when used?
I'm trying to make High Templar Karass' Plasma Surge Ability to play the animation "Spell B" but I can't seem to find what I should edit to get that to happen.

(I might ask more questions regarding abilites on this thread later when I get the answer to this)

 

[Dr Super Good]

Actor events declared in the appropriate actors.

Everything you see in SC2 next to the base terrain is compared of instances of actors. Actors represent local visual elements that (as far as I can tell) have no influence on the deterministic results of the session. This means what an actor does or even if an actor exists is entirely up to the client. By separating the visual side of the game from the deterministic side they were capable of creating impressive effects like missiles appearing to fly into hard points, units pushing small debris around and even tentacles moving around.

What actors do is controlled by a set of fields in the actor data known as actor events. These hook certain actor responses to certain results from the deterministic part of the engine. This can be creating the actor, destroying the actor, changing properties like tint of the actor or even playing actor animations.

In this case you want to modify the unit actor (the actor representing the unit art) so that its events include an animation play in response to casting the ability.

 

[Adaethus]

I'm sorry for not responding faster, I've been really busy with other stuff recently and I haven't had a chance to mess around the editor.
I'll be trying your suggestion sometime during the weekend, hopefully tomorrow. :3

 

[Adaethus]

It works, thanks for the help!
And here's some rep I apparently forgot existed.

I just realized that I can make a lot of custom abilities with this information I have that I had no idea how to make before.

On another note, is it possible to somehow disable an animation variation for a map?
I'd like to disable Kerrigan's Attack 01 animation for my map so I can use it for a special ability, is there any way to do that?

 

[Dr Super Good]

I am pretty sure there is but it requires more advanced actor events. Specifically with actions relating to animations and animation scarcity.

 

[Adaethus]

I wasn't able to figure it out yet, so here's another issue in the meantime.

As you can see, the campaign Leviathan's Bio Plasmid Discharge causes an error upon impact, the question obviously is - how do I fix it?
I know it's possible to just hide error messages, but I'd rather see what causes the error and maybe learn something at the same time.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Sounds like it cannot find an attachment volume on the target model. Try changing the attachment method used to be more general or adding to the target model special dummy volumes that fulfil the attachment requirements.

This is very common with shields as only Protoss units have shields so attacking any other model by default will throw an attachment error. The solution is to add a dummy shield attachment point that is just spherical.

 

[Adaethus]

That seems pretty complicated, I've never really done anything like this before.
I assume I'm supposed to be modifying the actors here, in this case "Bio Plasmid Discharge Attack"?

 

[Dr Super Good]

You could modify the attachment method used by the attack but this may make it impact funny.

 

[Adaethus]

How exactly can I do that?