Ability/Weapon Editing Help: How do I...?

[DeathSamurai187]

I've been trying to make a few abilities, but I'm having a few problems getting them to work the way I want. I want to see what everyone would do to get the effects/conditions I'm trying to achieve and see if it would work more easily.

Ability 1: I wanted to make an ability/weapon where the Colossus' thermal lance scans the ground in front of it in a single line, and a second after it passes by, the ground explodes along the line it scanned.

Progress: So far I was able to make it so that when the line scans and does its damage, it leaves an explosion in its wake (through some actor editing and whatnot). However, these explosions only appear at the point that the target enemy/neutral unit was at the time the beam scanned over them rather than a number of explosions along the entire path of the beam consistently. The delay part is easy because of the line damage delay effect, but I cant seem to get the explosions to just spawn on the ground.

Or rather, I -think- I was able to do that, but it only centers on an actual target instead of going along the entire line. In other words, if I was hitting a building, it'd have all 4-5 explosions hitting the center of the building at the same time instead of a single scan line. Perhaps I'm using the wrong kind of effect?


Ability 2: I wanted to make an ability based on the Yamato Gun that charges for a moment and then fires, shooting a massive laser beam that does line damage kind of like Shockwave from War 3.

Progress: I was able to do that for the most part, exchanging the Yamato Gun Missile effect with the Infernal Flame Thrower effects and editing said effects so that the flame beam is a protoss mothership or colossus beam, with edited width and color. I was able to get it to that it can be cast on a location rather than needing to select a unit as well.

The problem? It only fires the special effect if there are targetable units in front of the caster. If I aim it at an empty space, it starts to charge, but when it finishes the preparation nothing happens. I want to get it so that the beam still fires independently of whatever target is in front of it, doing damage to whatever's in its way like a shockwave.

Thanks in advance for whatever help you can give me.

 

[Darkness-4ever]

It will be easier to help if you post the map of how you're doing this, so we know just which areas exactly you are struggling with, with what you've given it would take a lot of guesswork to give you an answer for how to make the abilities and weapons you want functional.

 

[mrzwach]

The first problem is because I'm guessing you added the explosion effect onto each "Search" effect.

That will make it create explosions on the units getting targetted by the Search effect. Instead, make a "Set" effect that includes both the search and the explosion effect and put that into the persistent effect.

Sorry if this made absolutely no sense to you, lol.

 

[DeathSamurai187]

@Darkness-4ever: You're right. I probably should provide those. >< I'll do that once I test this next thing.

@mrzwach: That is something I could do.

The explosion effect is simply a copy of the nuke explosion actor with a different model (a small Terran building explosion), with the event changed so that it activates when the thermal lance line damage effect initiates. For all intents and purposes, the "explosion" effect is pretty much the damage effect.

I have a feeling this will work. I'll post my success/failure soon.

 

[DeathSamurai187]

Hmmm...no dice.

I first tried setting it so that instead of the Search effect, the Persistent periodic effect was just the damage delay effect. I figured doing that would cause the damage delay effect at each period, which would then expire and trigger the actual damage effect and the explosion actor. (I set it to 5 periods so that there wouldnt be a huge mess of explosions. It was interesting when it was left at 11, but it caused a small bit of game lag, so it wouldnt be good for lower video ram cards).

Unfortunately, this didn't work. Not only was there no damage effect whatsoever on the units I used it on, but there was no beam effect as well. That's when I learned that the beam and beam impact actors are associated with the Search effect of the ability. I changed it so that the actor was associated with the damage delay effect, which -sortof- got the beam to work, except that when the colossus attacks again, the beam starts at the end of the last scan and then zips over to the beginning for another scan. I bet it has something to do with the delay.

I then tried what mrzwach said and put the Search and damage delay effect in a set, and associated that with the persistent effect. All it seems to do is the same thing the spell was already doing. It wasn't causing the splash damage in a complete consistent line, but instead appearing where an affected unit was and dealing the damage there. In fact, I think adding the damage effect side by side caused it so that the units that triggered the damage effect would die even if they outranged the blast.

Then I saw that I didnt need to put it in a set because you can add multiple effects to the persistent effect. Still, it yeilded the same results.



I'm attatching the version of the map that has the spell working as close to my original goal as possible. Basically, what it does is scan the beam over enemy/neutral units, and if there are units caught in the search, the damage effect appears at the location the beam scanned over them. Any unit in range of said explosion takes damage, but the targeted unit can still run away and avoid the blast.

The way I want it to look is the way it looks when you test it on the group of marines near the top of the map. It scans over the units, some time elapses, and then the ground explodes along the pattern scanned. It looks just like I wanted it to look when its used on a big group of units like those marines, but if you use it on spread out units in the map, like zerglings, it only triggers one or two explosions depending on how many are selected in the scan.

I also edited a reverse version of the beam that scans perpendicular to the forward, but I disconnected it from the Set for purposes of testing. It's just there for fun.

I'll post the other spell map next.

 

[DeathSamurai187]

Here's the map for the second spell.

Basically I have most of everything working right except for the fact that if I aim the spell somewhere that doesn't have any targets, it doesn't fire. It starts the preparation, finishes, and then fires nothing. I want it to work more like shockwave.

There are also some other smaller things I'd like to figure out.

1. When I fire the ability from the Battlecruiser, it shoots the beam straight out in front of it rather than towards the ground. It's actually fine enough, since a shockwave/frontal cone ability from an air unit would be something that'd affect other air units rather than the ground. If it was air to ground, it'd be more of an area explosion attack or single target blast. Still, I'd like to figure out what controls that.

2. I was also wondering how to get the beam to fire from the front of the battlecruiser rather than the center, though I think that's simply a matter of fiddling around with attatchment points.

3. I'm trying to figure out how to make it so that the Ghost stays in firing animation for the whole duration of the beam's effect. Whenever he uses it, he goes back to standing position and the beam's launch site is still firing from the point of his gun while it's pointed upward. I figure there's a way to just shorten the beam effect, but I'd also like to find out how to lengthen the animation used.

The other units and stuff were just from me messing around with how to change tints and such. You'd think that setting the model tint directly from the model file would do it, but apparently that doesn't work. You have to do it through the actor of the model.

OH! In fact, I'm wondering how I can do that with the regular Yamato Gun's missile impact. I can change the color of the charge model and the blast by going through their actors, but I cant find the actor that affects the Impact explosion. I also can't seem to find out how to change the color of the lighting effect that emits from the projectile...but I think that's just a part into the model itself. Probably wont be able to change that until someone makes a 3rd party model editor like for WC3, or if the Viewer allows you to change some minor things like ribbons, emitters, etc. (hint hint, Blizzard :3)

 

[ezbeats]

on the 2nd spell its just the animation thats the problem. i dont know the solution. when i mess with it i can get it to do all sorts of strange things, but not function as youre intending simply. it still does dmg but only if a unit is there will the effect be visible. i guess it needs a target to animate itself to. thats a pretty rough actor animation in my experience. you need to cut out the battlecanon hellion thing, its fuckin out of my grasp atm. maybe use the yamato missile effect, but with no dmg, make that unit model what you want it to look like. then just make your own persistent, search, dmg effects and add them for the dmg. ORRRR you could just use the yamato base effect, with no dmg, but the unit missile has a behavior that 'immolates' of sorts, just a -1 duration, .5 periodic or something that workds and a search effect with a dmg effect in the search field. does that make sense? those hellion animations are strange. they could be pretty interesting the way it acts if you ever figured it out though i bet. GL- post what you come up with

 

[DeathSamurai187]

The "immolate" idea is interesting for another spell idea, but that isn't what I want to do.

Changing the Yamato missile into the beam effect doesn't work right. It'd just shoots a regular beam model instead of stretching the beam from point A to point B. I've yet to figure out what determines the behavior of a beam weapon in making it fire properly.

I could take an existing beam weapon like the Mothership, fashion it into a spell where it can fire at a target point instead of a unit, make sure it works when there isn't even any targets, and then try change the persistent effect to work like a line attack. Only problem is, I think I attempted that, only to get the persistent effect to start FROM the point of impact instead of the source unit. Though I'm sure I can find the field that controls that...

It does make me think, though. Maybe the effect not firing has nothing to do with the effect, but the ability itself. Maybe it's the one that needs the targets. But I don't know...I think if I'm to narrow that down I'll have to use the EMP spell as a test.

As for the Hellion attack, right now it's pretty much the closest possible thing to what I'm trying to make. It's a line-based attack, which is exactly what I'm looking for. In fact, now that I think about it, having it fire out directly straight from the unit that fires it isn't a bad thing at all. I prefer it for it's ground unit use. It'd look weird trying to get a line/cone attack that's being fired from the air to deal that kind of damage to ground units, since it'd be fired from an angle. It'd make more sense to act like an explosion attack in that case.