Is there any way to play a stand animation for a buff / special effect instead of birth?

[E5una]

I would like to flash the Magic Sentry (Human Towers) <Caster> "eye" above a unit when it misses due to my triggered evasion ability. The problem I'm having is that the birth animation plays which is very blurry and doesn't lend itself well to flashing on the screen quickly. I would instead like to play the stand animation for the buff which is very static and would "flash" a lot cleaner. Is there any way to accomplish this without editing the model to remove the birth animation?

So far, the only thing I can think of that I haven't tried is something around creating a dummy unit at that location that is hovering and has Magic Sentry as its model so that I can leverage playing the units animation, which would also let me freeze it on a specific frame, which would also be nice.

Any other ways to accomplish this? I'd prefer not to try to fuss with creating units overhead to accomplish this. Sounds awkward.

 

[Pyrogasm]

So far, the only thing I can think of that I haven't tried is something around creating a dummy unit at that location that is hovering and has Magic Sentry as its model so that I can leverage playing the units animation, which would also let me freeze it on a specific frame, which would also be nice.

This line of inquiry is the only thing I can think of, but you don't need to use a unit here. There are now SFX natives to control animation timescale, (team)color, z-position, and a bunch more. While you can't queue a specific animation that way, if you knew how long to wait you could create one effect on map init and freeze it the correct moment and then just move it around for all players. You should even be able to move it locally so can show for different players simultaneously if you wanted to.

The issue is if too many misses happen too quickly then your single effect might not be sufficient for all instances. You could make like 4-10 of them and build a stack to use/recycle them.


Overall, editing the model seems like less effort.

 

[Uncle]

You can manually play a specific Special Effect animation as well. I don't think there's any limitations at this point, pretty much objectively better in all cases.

 

[E5una]

I totally missed the "Play Special Effect Animation" when reading over the Special Effect GUI options about 10 times. Thank you very much for pointing this out! Works great. Now I just have to figure out how to get rid of the special effect after a short delay. Since these could get created rather often if a lot of ranged units are attacking my unit and it is evading I won't be able to use timers and cleanup. I have a feeling "waits" are probably not ideal in this context either.

Feels like the right time to get over my fear of hashtables so I can reference the special effect created for that unit

 

[Uncle]

I totally missed the "Play Special Effect Animation" when reading over the Special Effect GUI options about 10 times. Thank you very much for pointing this out! Works great. Now I just have to figure out how to get rid of the special effect after a short delay. Since these could get created rather often if a lot of ranged units are attacking my unit and it is evading I won't be able to use timers and cleanup. I have a feeling "waits" are probably not ideal in this context either.

Feels like the right time to get over my fear of hashtables so I can reference the special effect created for that unit

There's plenty of libraries for destroying effects after a delay. It's a very simple concept:

Destroy Special Effect Delay

When I use Destroy Special Effect action the special effect is not instantly removed but stays in place for a couple of seconds. Any way to remove it instantly? I tried to set it's alpha to 0 and remove all sub animation but neither works.

www.hiveworkshop.com

 

[Pyrogasm]

Beware that destroying the effect will cause it to play its death animation which you might not want. To remove an effect instantly you can use the RemoveEffect snippet I wrote. It’s part of my Modular Mouse Spells resource.

 

[E5una]

Yeah I lucked out because the death animation is .03 seconds long and is blank for this so it works fine with destroy! Thanks though!