Factions Selection System

[Lurker99]

I'm am looking for a trigger that will allow the selection of a sub-faction of a race ie if human is selected you get to pick different factions when the game starts but only human factions same thing for orc, night, undead, ect. My intention is to also have computer AI work for a melee game im working on.

 

[Spellbound]

Well you have to say what method you'd want to employ. Personally, I'd say avoid Dialogs (since those technically pause the game) and have something like a special unit that appears on map start over your Town Hall building that contains the different factions you can pick. They're all abilities and you can describe the factions to your liking. Once you pick one, the unit disappears and corresponding faction units are unlocked. Alternatively, you can just add a Spellbook spell to your townhall that contains all the factions within. The Spellbook gets removed once a faction is selected.

Unless of course you're looking for something fancier like those Hero Selection systems, in which case you could actually repurpose the system to select factions instead.

 

[Lurker99]

Well to be honest im not too familiar with multiplayer systems and was thinking of something using the game interface ie difficulty selection or the colour of the race picked to determine the factions, which would eliminate the need to select once in game and also allow for the use of AI once I've got it programmed.

 

[Spellbound]

Wc3's UI cannot be modified beyond changing the 'skin', so unless you have abilities that will do the selection of the factions, you're stuck with something that doesn't have any descriptions (like dialogs). You can still try repurpose the Hero Selection Window system for that, but this seems like excessive work for something like that. Having said that, personally, I wouldn't want to pick my faction before I know anything about them. Imo it would be better to have the ability to choose your faction as the game is on-going (early game, before your first hero pops out) so that you have time to read up descriptions of each faction and things like that. Faction-related buildings and units will be disabled until the player picks one.

There is still a solution to make this happen before game start, but that would require you use your own custom initialisation triggers. Consider something like DotA where each player selects their hero from taverns before the game starts. After a timer has expired, the game starts so slowpokes don't hold back the rest of the players. You could potentially do something like that, and I wouldn't be that hard to do. When the game starts, instead of a town hall you have a tavern (or soemthing like that) with the abilities in it, and it's only after every player has finished picking that the game starts. If someone doesn't pick a faction after X seconds, a random one is picked for them. If the player is AI the randomisation happens instantly.

How do either solution sound?

PS: why would you want to pick difficulty, though? That's feasible pre-game already.

 

[Lurker99]

The second one is more along the line of what i was thinking and what i meant by the difficulty is using that to set the AI faction before the game starts. I just dont like taverns for non hero-centered mods as this will be an altered melee.

 

[Spellbound]

You could always use handicap to select factions. If you're human and your handicap is at 100, you get Kirin Tor subfaction. If you're at 90 handicap, you get Khaz-Modan subfaction. There's a system already in place for that, so it's only a matter of importing it in your map. You'll need JNGP, though, since it's coded in vJASS: Custom Race System.