Problem with Ability Special Art

[DeathSamurai187]

Alright, so I'm trying to make a special ability based off of carrion swarm with a special art using an explosion, so that the impact of the waveagainst a unit comes up like an explosion (Just like how they have that black smoke for carrion swarm, or that splash for crushing wave, etc.). I make the custom spell and change the appropriate fields...I even take the Carrion Swarm buff and make a copy of THAT especially for the spell. I test it out, with a changed missile graphic, and I -still- get the smoke from the original carrion swarm. Then I tried editing the original carrion swarm effect on the original spell and try it, and it works.

I tried doing the same with a Shockwave spell, only to see that special art had no effect in that area. Turns out that's only because the original spell doesnt have a special art set. I changed it for regular shockwave and, well, there you go. It worked on that try. It's as if setting the special art for any of those two seperate abilities affects EVERY other ability based off of it.

This isn't just for custom spells either. The Crushing Wave spell is actually based off of Carrion Swarm. After some testing, I noticed that Crushing Wave's special art may be listed as that water splash, but on impact all I see is the carrion swarm again! Did Blizzard seriously overlook their own error in their own in-game spell? That's simply beyond just forgetting to make the special art editable.

I don't think this is the only spell with that problem. I remember Stampede having this problem, and Impale might have it as well. I'd have to double check.

Am I missing anything here? Was there something I forgot to set before editing to make it work for a seperate custom spell, or is this just another one of Blizzard's screw ups that they just forgot about? If so, is there any way around it? The most I'm capable of is trigger editing, because I haven't the time or patience to learn JASS. It would really suck if one had to make a custom map and only had two possible differences in impact art with line spells, and one of them causing an indent in the ground, too. You'd have to sacrifice having normal shockwave and carrion swarm all for the purpose of making two sperate ones, when one may have ideas for multiple types of wave attacks. Sure, it's only a minor limit to creativity, but just knowing you can't do that irritates me.

It's a shame that there's no way to report this bug to Blizzard now. I mean, sure, there probably is, but with them currently so busy on Burning Crusade and Star Craft 2, would any of them take the time to fix one lousy hardcode error? Or did I miss a field in the editor? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Rui]

This thread has been moved from the World Editor Help Zone to the Spells and Systems Forum. A redirection link has been left in the original forum to provide a conection between the original place and the new location of this thread. This redirection link will expire in 24 hours.

 

[Silvenon]

Wow, what a long post......what irritates me is that blizzard is too busy for fixing their stupid bugs, I would love to send them some suggestions for fixing (in JASS) so we can work normally.....

Anyways, I'm sorry, can't help you here, that's what happened to me too, it cannot be fixed (but you can fix it if you make your own effect, and then overwrite it with the existing in WE, but that would also be only one effect), that's just another stupid blizzard bug, same for Crushing Wave I think, it's too bad

 

[edge[d1]]

a lot of things are hard-coded, making some spells completely worthless (like autocast version of incinerate) and some spells VERY hard to edit (flame strike and many others)

you can always go with the silvenon's approach: take a new smoke model (if it is in-game model, extract it from mpq archive), import it in import manager and set its path to the path of the model you want to overwrite. that it how most people solve the flame strike problem...

 

[DeathSamurai187]

Is there any way I could perhaps make it into a dummy spell and put in all of the impact effects by triggering? If an experienced trigger maker knows this, it'd be much appreciated.

 

[edge[d1]]

you could, but...
enumerating (picking) target units in a circle (range from location) or rectangle (region) is easy;
enumerating units in a cone which faces any direction (whose length and widht may vary with level) - not easy.

find a way to change the existing ability

 

[DeathSamurai187]

It's easy to change the ability itself. The only thing is I need to alter the original spell in order for it to take effect with the custom spell. Every other spell after that that's based off of it will have the same graphic.

In such a case, that allows for two different kinds of wave spells...one being shockwave and the other being carrion swarm. And Shockwave has that annoying ground displacement thing, which limits its use slightly if you want to make things look perfect. Then there's Breath of Fire and Frost, and I'm sure Breath of Fire is its own spell because of the buff, but for all I know Breath of Frost is just a copy of Fire, so that'd only be three. Even with that, I'd be sacrificing three other spells just to make others look good. I can imagine that not being a problem for someone who doesn't plan on using shockwave or breath of fire in their maps, but I still think its limiting.

This may affect special art, but it doesn't affect target art. That thing's changeable, but it shows when you cast the spell instead of when the projectile ends, so it's useless to me.

If only there was an event like "unit takes damage". Then I could coordinate everything correctly based on what kind of spell a unit is hit with. Another thing I tried to do was simply give the incinerate buff to Shockwave in hopes that doing so would make units explode on death in one big wave. That failed, obviously, since that action is attributed to the spell, not the buff.