Messy situations importing object data...

[Lomacar]

Transfering my custom spells to a new map is turning out to be a real pain. :x I'm using the WEU Enhancer to import and combine w3a, w3s etc. files. But I end up getting this terrible problem. Abilities and other objects all use unique identifying numbers, whatever they are called, like A001 and and IaAC. You can see them when you "display values as raw data". I'm sure you pros know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, what happens is, say I have a hero with an ability A001 in one map, and I'm combining it with another map that has a different spell refered to as A001. Now when I'm playing the map and I try to use the hero's A001 ability, lets call it Beam of Death, instead it tries using the A001 spell that was already in the map, say Aura of Happiness.

Since I am dealing with hundreds of abilities, units, items etc that have all become hopelessly mixed up, I can't fix this by hand. All the imported object data is there, its just been reassigned a new XXXX number. I must find another way to combine these maps in a way that doesn't destroy things!

 

[Panto]

If you copy the objects by hand with Copy and Paste, it might assign the objects that you paste new, unused codes in the map you're pasting in to.

Might not, though.

 

[Lomacar]

No. I am trying to bring a hero I am making into The_Raven's spell testing map for example. So I copy the "Spell Book" item over from one map to the other. Now it is already broken because the "spell list" field of the spell book is pointing to spells already in the new map. When I copy the spells that it is supposed to use over from The_Raven's map they are assigned new number dealies and if I want the spell book to point to those spells I will have to do it by hand.

This is crazy. There must be some other way to do this or there would never be all these maps with custom heros and all these custom spells that people make online would be too much of a hassle to try to use in a map.

 

[Lomacar]

Do you people actually just do everything by hand?! Reconnecting abilities and upgrades to units and items every time you copy them into new maps? This is painful...

 

[Panto]

I can't think of a time that I've ever wanted to try to copy custom abilities wholesale into another map that already had many of its own, so no, I've never done it.

Exporting object data is as close as I've been to doing any major copying between maps. There's never been any good reason.

 

[Lomacar]

Well what I wan't to do is make a bunch of custom heros that could be used in any altered melee or completely unique map, so I guess I am bound to run into this problem.

I guess what I should do is just design every hero I make in one map, that way things won't interfere with each other, but if anybody else wanted to use these hero's there is no guarantee you could just import them into your preexisting maps. I guess that will have to do, but it would also make things easier to manage if each hero could be worked on in their own map.