SC2Mapster

This is a repost of a question I asked in the terrain forum.

A space platform map is double-zoomed to create the illusion of more space. With the zoom, the difference in height between units using air movement map and the fog of war on cliff level 0, is very noticeable. Changing flier movement map to ground puts them on cliff level 0, which is what I want, but the selection plane (where units are ordered to move, attack, etc) is still at cliff level 1.

The below image illustrates what I mean.

Is there a way to lower the selection plane to cliff level 0, raise the fog of war to cliff level 1, or some other way to bring movement map and fog of war to or close to the same level as the selection plane?

Bump.

I'm not referring to terrain fog. I'm talking about fog of war. You know, the black veil that's revealed by a unit's sight. The attached shot displays the difference in height. As you can see, the difference is quite dramatic, even more so the camera is zoomed in. One would have to move two screens down to see the fog of war on the lowest cliff level.

I'm thinking I can help combat this by making the camera angle steeper, but it does not solve the problem. It would only reduce the two screen difference to one, unless I completely make the camera top-down. That would just be unfortunate.

Bump. I would really like to find a solution to this.

Bump, again. Does nobody know?

I've tried just about everything that I can find in data related to this, short of looking through triggers. I think it all comes down to changing the height of the plane of the cursor splat, because that's tied with mover height maps, which are then tied to the units. Fog of war remains at a constant height as long as I don't change the terrain height.

Another thing that may be possible is to create a completely transparent terrain texture and raise the height level to 1 using that texture. Hiding terrain cells drops the fog of war back down to cliff level 0, but if the texture is inherently invisible I can see the space behind the texture, and at the same time fool the fog of war to behave like it's on cliff level 1. Has this been done before?

If anyone remembers, the map "The Final Frontier" had a problem like this that I don't think was resolved in the end. That was a few years ago. Surely we've come far since then.

It's pathetic that I have to bump my own thread for 10 days with no real answer. This will be the last time.

Is what I'm asking too hard/impossible to do, is it too obscure, or is the forum just not populated with experienced data editors? DrSuperEvil is pretty much the only person responding to data request threads. If suddenly SuperEvil decides to up n' leave, does that mean the data forum will die almost completely?

have you tried changing the UI: Height of the units in the Units tab? just did a quick test on a marine unit and the selection plane adjusted itself to the UI height of the marine.

edit: nevermind taking another look at your first post i realized this wouldn't really help with your problem. sorry about that.

@DrSuperEvil: Go

I'm not the kind of person who expects or even want to be spoonfed, but as the forefront forum for sc2 map development I expected this board to be more active and populated with experienced data editors. Not that I don't appreciate what you do for the board, and people who ask questions. That's the opposite of what I meant.

Anyway, I did say "I've tried just about everything that I can find in data related to this". This actually means probably around 6 hours spent across several days on this problem alone, which really isn't much. Specifically I played around with how base height, terrain height, unit height, and mover planes work in conjuction with each other and concluded that fog of war is fixed on cliff level 0 regardless of other fields.

Cliff level 0, which is space on space platform tilesets, is unusable for ground units, but fliers can still fly over them and reveal fog of war. The selection plane for fliers over cliff level 0 remains on cliff level 1. That also seems to be fixed. Trying your suggestion with the invisible water layer affects unit height, but since fog of war and selection planes are constant, it didn't work. Believe me I really tried.

What isn't fixed however is the height of cliffs. Some cliffs have height difference of 8 from cliff level 1 to 0, and space platform cliffs have a difference of 4. The first picture I posted in the OP is using Korhal Manmade, so the difference was 8 for that one. When I switched to Braxis Alpha Manmade with the difference of 4, cliff level 0 is now 4 units higher, and so is fog of war. Thus, I've concluded now that changing cliff height from 4 now to 0 is my best bet, but changing the values in Cliff Mesh Data doesn't seem to do anything.

Is the cliff height in Cliff Mesh Data fixed?

@QuantumMenace: Go

That's genius, and when I read it I went to try it out immediately. Though it didn't work, it yielded another finding. It turns out Fog of War level isn't fixed after all. Fog of war will always appear on the lowest visible cliff level. Hiding terrain cells makes the lower cliff level visible. Lowering terrain height on cliff level 1 lowers cliff level 0 along with it, so fog will still appear on level 0 beneath the lowered terrain, as if nothing was changed.

I tried editing cliff mesh data in raw data mode. No dice. I'm convinced this is what I have to play around with to fix it. As you can see from the attached pic, there's an inherent difference between each cliff mesh with respect to the heights of their cliff level 0s.

I was too quick to jump to conclusions. It worked. Brilliantly. One has to really make sure there was "NO cliff level 0 terrain anywhere on the map". Thanks a bunch man.