[General] Nature of Thereisnospoon

[akaiharuki]

Hi, can someone explain the mechanism of 'Thereisnospoon' how it makes any ability cast of a player's units not cost mana and even abilities with mana cost higher than current mana of unit? As I'm making an item to allow units not losing mana from casting abilities for a short while which I found this cheat useful.

 

[Uncle]

Hi, can someone explain the mechanism of 'Thereisnospoon' how it makes any ability cast of a player's units not cost mana and even abilities with mana cost higher than current mana of unit? As I'm making an item to allow units not losing mana from casting abilities for a short while which I found this cheat useful.

It's probably just hardcoded behavior that you can't mess with:

if CHEAT_THEREISNOSPOON then
 // skip mana costs
else
 // check mana costs
endif

The not losing mana aspect would be easy to trigger yourself with a simple refund system, but bypassing "too high" mana cost limitations would be difficult.

If you need this in multiplayer - which can't rely on cheats, you could set all of the unit's ability mana costs to 0 temporarily using the SetAbilityField functions. This again would require some advanced triggers for tracking the abilities, the original mana costs, as well as handling cases where new abilities are gained afterwards. That's assuming you're on patch 1.31+ and can access these functions.

I could be wrong though, maybe they extended this behavior to be easily accessible outside of the cheat.

 

[akaiharuki]

Thanks Uncle for being helpful as always! Maybe this hardcode is similar to Mortred's Blink that cannot be cast on area with blackmask?

 

[Uncle]

Thanks Uncle for being helpful as always! Maybe this hardcode is similar to Mortred's Blink that cannot be cast on area with blackmask?

No problem, most things are hardcoded. Of course, you can always trigger things yourself.