Specialization and inheritance

[Nortander]

Hello there everyone!

So, I have some ideas for a new campaign of mine but there are some features that I'd like to make that I've never did before and I'd really appreciate any suggestions or help.

The biggest issue that I have is that I would like to give the player an option between different ways to improve the main character (like the specilizations in WoW).
However, I don't know:
-How to give this choice (I remember seing something similar in a Hive campaign; you could pick the two or three characters you wanted for a mission, this is the kind of system I want to introduce);
-How to proceed for the specialization itself: should I duplicate the character in the editor and give each version the different abilities or can I do the whole thing with triggers only?;
-How to pass on these abilities/ the good version of the character to the next maps (I've read a lot of things about game cache but it never worked for me on previous campaigns and what I plan this time seems even more complicated).

I hope I'm clear enough and that you guys will be willing to help me a little.
If you do, please put as many pictures as possible. Even though I'm rather good in English, this isn't my mother tongue so it can be tough to understand when we talk about things that are a bit technical.

Anyway, thanks a lot for any help you can provide, I really, really appreciate it! Have a great day!

 

[SAUS]

I don't know how to do the first and last parts, but I would go with adding abilities and stuff for the second part. It takes some harder triggers (depending on what you do), but it is cleaner, easier to maintain (say you want to reduce the main character's health), and better for amount of data in your map (makes it a slightly smaller download).

 

[Nortander]

Thank you already SAUS
I think you're right.
("say you want to reduce the main character's health" - kind of the opposite of what I have in mind actually but that could be interesting as well!).

 

[SAUS]

Thank you already SAUS
I think you're right.
("say you want to reduce the main character's health" - kind of the opposite of what I have in mind actually but that could be interesting as well!).

Oh I meant like if you want to nerf the main character - you would have to do it to all of the versions of the main character which would be a pain.

It also makes it so you can't easily have combinations of special abilities. As an example, if you have one specialisation which gives him an aura and another specialisation that gives him bonus armour, you would have to create one version for the bonus armour, one for the aura, and one with both.

If you add another specialisation, say a war stomp ability, you would have to add one with the war stomp ability, one with the war stomp and armour bonus, one with the war stomp and the aura, and one with all three.

It gets worse and worse when you add more specialisations.

 

[Nortander]

Yes, that's what I thought :/ Humpf, I hope I can find some other way then ^_^
Thank you again!

 

[PublishedShadow]

You should look into Spell Books and the Engineering Upgrade... There's a lot of flexibility with those two.

 

[SAUS]

It's not hard to do it with triggers though Don't worry!

You can basically just add the abilities with a trigger when the player does something (selects a specialisation). If you want the icon to be invisible, disabled spell books will do that for you.

 

[Nortander]

Okay guys, I'll check that! Thank you!