Zephyr Competition #8 ~ The Poll

[Pharaoh_]

Illusion

Contestants should create a spell that had the conjuration of illusions incorporated, with the ultimate aim of tricking enemies. The illusion was free to be defined by the contestants.

Concept	How creative and unique the spell is?	/10
Coding	Is the spell bug free, leakless? Does it support multiple instances?	/20
Visuals	How does the spell look? Is it too overloaded with special effects? How explanatory is the tooltip of the spell's functionality?	/10

Final Score/40

• 70% of the winner shall be determined by the contest's appointed judge(s).
• 30% of the winner shall be determined by the results of this public poll.

• Bribe

• scorpion182
• -Derp-
• mckill2009
• drkninja
• watermelon_1234
• wolfman
• Creed Angelus

 

[Crazed_seal2]

Theres no poll. Or is it the other way we vote?

 

[-Derp-]

I believe it would be bad in tast to vote for myself.

Good luck all.

 

[watermelon_1234]

Who is judging this contest?

Anyway, good luck to all contestants!
I'll try to give everyone a short review.

 

[mckill2009]

-Derp- - seems nice, but not complete coz the caster is still visible when spell is casted...

drkninja - spell is not MUI and uses waits...

wolfman - the spawned hero has an icon and can be seen in the map, and if the damage source is a hero, it will create tons of heroes, spamming your icon also...

Creed Angelus - trigger leaks a lot from position of *something*...

watermelon_1234 - really nice, although I really dont see the point of the blind/silence spell, maybe for an enemy not to destroy the images?...

scorpion182's - the only thing I dont like here is there is no preload, and I dont think you need that onFinish and onDestroy since you are starting your timer by 0...

my vote goes to watermelon_1234...

 

[watermelon_1234]

Ok, so I managed to test all the spells.

-Derp-

The visuals were pretty nice. It's good for a WIP; I'm sure you could have gone farther with this if you had more time. The tooltip needed work but that's to be expected since this was a WIP.

• Some things I noticed were that the spell did not support a cooldown and that the ghosts sometimes still existed even after the portal had collapsed.
• There was some areas in the code that sorely needed looping.

mckill2009

The spell definitely had a nice entrance, though I think it would have been more illusion-like if the spirits had the same model as the caster.

• I think it would have been better for you to have indicated the host spirit by using an SFX that's only displayed to the player/allies.
• You should have checked if the spirit was alive before rotating it and issuing orders to cast spells.
• I don't think the spirits should have movement speed since that makes them look weird the if the player orders them to do something.
• The spirits should check if a target is magic immune before trying to cast a spell on it.
• This ability makes the caster lose invulnerability.
• In the preloading, just remove the dummy instead of giving it an expiration timer.
• 5 should be a constant in the preloading section in case the user wants the spirits to spam more/less abilities.

wolfman

I thought the spell's idea was nice, but allowing the illusions to cast spells is imbalanced. The tooltip was also confusing.

• You should have used a damage detection system instead of coding your own.
• You should have used the generic event for any unit dying instead of the specific one.
• The Deceiver unit that gets spawned shouldn't have any skill points.

Creed Angelus

The spell was good but a bit simple for my taste.

• You had some leaks with unit groups, like when you use Number of Units in group, and locations.
• You shouldn't have destroyed the group inside the group enumeration.
• In Moonlight Veil True Sight, you should have added a check to see if the veil was alive in the group enumeration.

drkninja

The spell's idea was nice. Unfortunately this spell is not MUI and was inefficient overall.

• For instance, you used the Taunt ability and a ward ability to summon the "illusion" when you could have just triggered it.
• There is no spell ability ID check.
• You really didn't need to have that wait at all if you used expiration timers and allowed the invisibility buff to expire by itself.
• Leaked a location in Illusion dies.
• The way you set the ability level is also inefficient; you should have used
  • Unit - Set level of Ability for Unit to 1

scorpion182

The spell was nice with the bouncing water splashes. Unfortunately, this spell ended up looking just like Mirror Image with water effects. If Mirror Image didn't exist, your spell (and mine >_<) would look much cooler.

• In Spell Effect, there's no need for this, just call data.create directly.
• The struct data is actually useless the way it was coded; I think that struct should have been used to handle the missile movement instead so you don't have to worry about that in the missile struct. I also think if you did it this way, you wouldn't need those global integer arrays.
• onDestroy is now considered an evil.
• There's no need for ShuffleIllusion since you already made it random with rand.
• You can use exitwhen true instead of using exit in the onDestroy method.

I voted for mckill2009.

 

[Magtheridon96]

If I was a judge, some of you would cry

scorpion182 - Using groups? Bad boy.
AutoIndex? Bad boy.
Allocate/deallocate? Bad boy.
onDestroy? Bad boy.
55/100

-Derp-
Repeating similar calls without caching into temp vars? D:
It's way too efficient to be GUI actually.
85/100

mckill2009:
Efficient.
Problems:
The spell will always pick the unit closest to the northern border of the map (Unit with greatest Y-coord)
80/100

drkninja:
Leaks, non-MUI, inefficient, waits
GAH 10/100

watermelon_1234:
BoundSentinel is like adding a TriggerEvaluation and a TriggerExecution after every 'SetUnitX' and 'SetUnitY' that takes the projectiles beyond the map bounds.
A check would be way better.

GetUnitX(GetSpellTargetUnit())
GetUnitY(GetSpellTargetUnit())
>.>
GetSpellTargetX()
GetSpellTargetY()

73/100

wolfman:
hmmm... uses waits.
Unmodular and map specific
Uses (Integer A)
30/100

Creed Angelus:
group leak, location leak.
Also, it's very inefficient. You'd be looping even if no one is casting the spell.
25/100

Can I judge the next Zephyr contest?

 

[mckill2009]

The spell will always pick the unit closest to the northern border of the map

that's why it's rotating ...

 

[watermelon_1234]

BoundSentinel is like adding a TriggerEvaluation and a TriggerExecution after every 'SetUnitX' and 'SetUnitY' that takes the projectiles beyond the map bounds.
A check would be way better.

It's listed as an optional library. Besides, I don't think the spell really needs an built-in check since it shouldn't even be cast beyond the map bounds.

GetUnitX(GetSpellTargetUnit())
GetUnitY(GetSpellTargetUnit())
>.>
GetSpellTargetX()
GetSpellTargetY()

That was left over from when I had the spell targetting only units. GetSpellTargetX/Y wasn't really accurate compared to actually getting the target unit's coordinates.
I should have changed it now though since it's not that visible. <_>

 

[Pharaoh_]

Our beloved Bribe has been added to the judges' list!

 

[Magtheridon96]

I feel like judging the next Zephyr Competition
I'm such an a**, thus I'm PERFECT for it xD

Anyways, good luck everyone
And my reviews above were done in like 3 minutes (not each ;D)
so errors are inevitable

that's why it's rotating ...

Good Job mckill, Should've voted for you
(-Derp- really deserved the vote though because his GUI makes me sh*t bricks)

 

[Bannar]

Where is Bribe in this poll? Why I can not vote for Bribe? ;/
^^ D;

mckill2009 +1

 

[-Derp-]

Sad that people are down rating the visuals for things that are intended and took a huge amount of extra time to put in.

 

[Magtheridon96]

The visuals in your spell are imba -Derp-

 

[mckill2009]

I should have voted for you -Derp- if your spell is complete...

 

[-Derp-]

What I didn't complete is the re-triggering into custom script, which would've boosted my triggering efficiency tenfold. The effects were as I wanted, but I guess my standards are too... impractical. (i.e. ghost's lightning decaying, lightning changing color, the invisibility delay, etc...)

My spell isn't as complete as I wanted, yet I doubt I'll ever have the motivation to re-trigger the entire spell. I thank you for your consideration, however I believe others who truly have a finished product deserve the vote.

 

[maddeem]

To late to join in?

 

[Pharaoh_]

This is a poll, obviously yes

 

[Bribe]

The poll lasts a long time

Btw I haven't seen any announcements that there was even a poll open for this.

 

[Magtheridon96]

This poll is TOTALLY wrong
Isn't coding the most important thing in the Zephyr contest?

 

[Bribe]

Coding is good, but you can still code well but make an inferior spell. Thankfully "coding" is not the only factor because then it would make this a "systems" contest.

 

[Magtheridon96]

A systems contest sounds neat to me :3
Can we have one?

 

[Bribe]

I can make a systems contest, I could ask what the community would want as a theme.

 

[Bribe]

Pharaoh_, is it time to show my review and make a public announcement for the winner?

 

[Pharaoh_]

Yeah, I'm on it!