Team Micro Arena Various Questions/Help

[Gradius]

Hi everyone! I don't have much experience with the war3 editor, so I figured I'd do something simple for my first project: recreate my favorite map from SC1 - Team Micro Arena.



It's going pretty good but I have a couple things I need help with.

1) I have a sacrifice command, but I want it to cost the player points. How do you add up the kill points for all his units, and more importantly, subtract them from his point value of units killed score? I've looked everywhere for this.

2) A feature of my map is that it doesn't have civilians selecting things like in the original, but you just click on the beacons. Unfortunately if you have a beacon already selected when the timer is counting down, and you reselect it, it doesn't work. Is there a command for automatically unselecting a beacon for a player?

3) Since I don't have civilians anymore, I need to make my map more intuitive by showing the player which corners he still has selections available in. Would it be possible to create a green circle on the minimap at a specific spot and switch it up with a black circle via triggers? I'm guessing this is done with pings, but I'm not sure how to get this done.

It's published as "Team Micro Arena" but I don't know if anyone can access it, and creating/joining custom games doesn't work for me anyway at this point. Thanks in advance to anyone that can offer some insight.

 

[Dr Super Good]

1) I have a sacrifice command, but I want it to cost the player points. How do you add up the kill points for all his units, and more importantly, subtract them from his point value of units killed score? I've looked everywhere for this.

Try modifying the units killed score with triggers, im pretty sure this is possible. If it is not then you can always use an offset system for the displayed score. Eithor read the actual number of kills he has made or, if that can not be done, count the number of kills he makes with a trigger.

I would like to ask why there is a penalty for this, as it should eithor be turned off when the unit is in combat or triggers so as to award the kill for the unit to the last enemy to damage it.

2) A feature of my map is that it doesn't have civilians selecting things like in the original, but you just click on the beacons. Unfortunately if you have a beacon already selected when the timer is counting down, and you reselect it, it doesn't work. Is there a command for automatically unselecting a beacon for a player?

Try forcing their selection to something else, or changing the becon system so as to take advantage of customizable UI that SC2 offers thus removing them.

3) Since I don't have civilians anymore, I need to make my map more intuitive by showing the player which corners he still has selections available in. Would it be possible to create a green circle on the minimap at a specific spot and switch it up with a black circle via triggers? I'm guessing this is done with pings, but I'm not sure how to get this done.

Consider using mini map pings with added glow effects so as to be clear as to what choices he has avaialbe. Also if you take advantage of SC2s full screen customizable UI you could probably remove the need for buildings alltogether or atleast add an overview menu which by clicking an option will take you to the right buidling and show you what options you have available.

It's published as "Team Micro Arena" but I don't know if anyone can access it, and creating/joining custom games doesn't work for me anyway at this point. Thanks in advance to anyone that can offer some insight.

Its not published on the EU (if you tried to publish it on EU then it failed), thus this is not very helpfull. Consider attaching the map to the thread so everyone is garutneed to be able to axcess it.

 

[Gradius]

Out of the three mapping sites I posted this on, you're the only one to reply. Thanks man.

Try modifying the units killed score with triggers, im pretty sure this is possible. If it is not then you can always use an offset system for the displayed score. Eithor read the actual number of kills he has made or, if that can not be done, count the number of kills he makes with a trigger.

I would like to ask why there is a penalty for this, as it should eithor be turned off when the unit is in combat or triggers so as to award the kill for the unit to the last enemy to damage it.

A common tactic in this game is to ignore a player's units and just attack his nexus, thereby winning the game quickly, so a sacrifice command is definitely needed. There's a penalty for sacrifice because people could just remove their units from play before any of them die and not award their opponents any points.

But yeah, the trouble is that I can only find the trigger for reading the point value of units killed that a player has. I can neither find how to get the individual value for a unit, or how to modify the player's score. It will probably have to be an offset system then.

 

[Dr Super Good]

A common tactic in this game is to ignore a player's units and just attack his nexus, thereby winning the game quickly, so a sacrifice command is definitely needed.

If that stratergy is not meant to be viable, consider re designing th game play in such a way that the stratergy is less effective or harder to perform (aka the ballence approach). In this situation it might be good to add a damage reduction or bonous armor to the nexus while the player has more than X (a number) units in the area, thus meaning it is harder to kill the nexus until you kill the units.

I am aware of the dinial axpect of sacrifice but I am still not understanding its nescescitiy as eithor way you lose out heavilly wether you use it or not (using it lowers your score, not using raises the enemies score) which seems to defeat its intended purpose as far as I can understand.

As for the problem with player kills, yes there seems to be no way to interact with them however making your own counting system or offset system should be easy enough.

 

[Gradius]

Development of this map has been seriously stifled by a huge roadbump: I can't get teams in multiplayer to work. Example: somebody joins up for a 1v1 and puts himself on the other team in the lobby, and we go. But even though he was in the fifth player slot in the game, he's the second player overall, so it puts him in the player 2 slot, which is on team 1 - so both players end up on the same team.

I've tried messing around with start locations, player placements and game variants. Anybody interested in helping can download the map here and try to see if they can publish it and get it to work. You can test it by adding an AI to the other team in the lobby. You'll know that it works when you can hover over the second marine from the left on the arena and it won't show "player 2" under him.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Slots are allocated by order of joining. Teams are variable.

The result is you should make adjustable game attributes which determin the player position which are mutually exclusive (no 2 players can have the same number).

This will require expermentation (sorry I can not give a clear answer) but I am sure this is the key to player slots.

 

[Gradius]

Slots are allocated by order of joining. Teams are variable.

The result is you should make adjustable game attributes which determin the player position which are mutually exclusive (no 2 players can have the same number).

This will require expermentation (sorry I can not give a clear answer) but I am sure this is the key to player slots.

I've tried, but nothing I do in game variants remotely affects player slots. :/

I've spent quite a while experimenting with this, and I'm not sure what to chalk it up to other than some random bug or the fact that it's just impossible to change.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Try making your own game slot attribute. Basically seach slot is unique to each player so no player 2 players can have the same slot attribute.

Your triggers then give the units based on what slot they choose.

 

[Gradius]

Another question: I've imported a minimap ping texture as a dds file, but how do I access it to get it to show up as a minimap ping? Apparently minimap pings use models, but I thought it should be able to use textures. Do I have to make a model?

Try making your own game slot attribute. Basically seach slot is unique to each player so no player 2 players can have the same slot attribute.

Your triggers then give the units based on what slot they choose.

An update on this: I think this could have worked, but I found a method which adds you to the team based on what team you are in the lobby: simply check if the person is an ally of a player to see if they're on the same team. This was a pretty easy fix for me.

 

[Dr Super Good]

No, overwrite the texture path that the ping model uses. If it is an actual model data, you might be able to do so in that data. Otherwise you will just have to find the ping texture and replace it with your own texture.

 

[Gradius]

Question: anybody know how to decloak all units in an area on the map? So far I've tried applying a buff that changes the state flags to enable "detected". It doesn't work.

 

[mrzwach]

Check how the EMP buff for ghosts does it, then try and make your buff do the same thing.

 

[Dr Super Good]

The EMP of the ghost I thought only worked on terran cloaked units cause they use energy to cloak and by draining all energy it means they can not longer cloak.

I do not know if it reveals protoss invisible cause they are always invisible (no energy needed).

 

[mrzwach]

No, you can use Ghosts to reveal Dark Templar and knock out observers.

Also, just checked it myself, it has the State Flag "Suppress Cloak" enabled in the Behavior tab. Add this to your behavior and it should work.