Stop Units' Decay Completely?

[DozerMan]

In World Editor, how do you prevent dead units from becoming a distorted pile of blood and bones - and keep their dead bodies 'til all the way to the game's end?

I'm aware of the "Can raise, does not decay" option in the unit editor, but changing that value unit after unit is just too time-consuming and impractical. I know of the editing of constants, but as I remember, constants only allow a limited amount of time before the units' corpses disappear.

Can anyone help me out here? If it involves trigger, please be so kind and describe the trick in the details, since I've never experimented with triggers before, and frankly I don't really know how they work

 

[Dr Super Good]

Periodically pick units around the player camera position (say every 10 seconds) and order them to play their decay animation with an animation speed that is very slow. They might be dead but I believe their actors are still animated.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

There is a trigger action for that called "suspend corpse decay".

Event: a unit decays
Action: suspend corpse decay for triggering unit.

 

[LordDz]

In the gameplay constants there are two fields, one for flesh and one for bones.
Increase the flesh one and it will keep the bodies.

HOWEVER.
Have too many dead units ingame and they will start to glitch out, I've had corpses starting to attach themselves to nearby units when there were too many dead units.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Have too many dead units ingame and they will start to glitch out, I've had corpses starting to attach themselves to nearby units when there were too many dead units.

That has nothing to do with number of dead units but rather there being too much to render. The same happens with too many alive units in sight at once.

Dead units are more a problem for performance. They not only still consume memory and a handle index but also are involved in area searches so slow those down as well.

 

[LordDz]

"That has nothing to do with number of dead units but rather there being too much to render."

I would say having a lot of dead units to render on the screen has something to do with rendering a lot of units on the screen.

So having a lot of dead units on the screen makes it easier to reach the amount of units on the screen limit, than not having a lot of dead units on the screen.

 

[Dr Super Good]

I would say having a lot of dead units to render on the screen has something to do with rendering a lot of units on the screen.

So having a lot of dead units on the screen makes it easier to reach the amount of units on the screen limit, than not having a lot of dead units on the screen.

The limit is scene complexity and not units. After a certain scene complexity all kinds of weird stuff happens. This is likely a result of limits of the Direct3D 8 API (and OpenGL counter part) which WC3 used. The Tauren Chieftain model is most infamous of this with all it taking is a few hundred on screen to cause a swirling mess.