SC2Mapster

Hello again,

As any of you who have read my few previous questions (or looked at my post count) can probably guess, I’m new at this data editing stuff. I’m trying to make a small Super Smash Brothers-esque game where the goal is to knock the other player’s character out of the arena. For the concept to work, I need melee attacks to knock targeted units back in the direction the attacking character is facing.

To get started, I picked one of the characters who will eventually be in the finished map, Dehaka, and gave his Claws weapon a simple knockback effect (it’s the one in the “Trigger Free Leap” tutorial, minus the “Leap Impact Search” part.) As it stands, the setup has three major problems:

1. No matter what direction Dehaka or the target unit is facing, the target unit is always sent flying in the same direction: south. I have no idea why.

2. Units play their movement animation as they fly through the air, resulting in a “wire-fu” effect which is sort of awesome (see “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,”) but not what I need, which is for there to be no animation at all. Or, even better, if someone knows a way to have live units go ragdoll during knockback I will love you forever.

3. After landing, units automatically run back to wherever they were when they got hit. This is definitely no good for a fighting game. I need the units to simply remain where they are after getting up. Emberflare asked about the same problem (post title: “After knockback, unit runs back”) but I don’t think it’s been solved.

Finally, this is only tangentially related, but I was trying to test out the Hybrid (Zhakul’das) ability Psionic Shockwave to learn more about knockback, and it just isn’t working for me. The ability is there and the animation goes off fine, but no units are knocked back. All I changed about the Zhakul’das unit in the editor was its race (to Zerg, so Player One could control it) and the allowed targets for Psionic Shockwave (added Neutral and Ally.) Weird.

So, to sum up, it’s a long way from Street Fighter 4 at this point. Any help would be greatly appreciated; anyone who helps out answering my stupid questions will receive a credit in the final map! Thanks for your time.

Is your knockback setup based on a Launch Missile effect (Viper Abduct) or an Apply Force effect (Hybrid Psionic Shockwave), or something else entirely?

You can control animations through actors, but the ragdoll part would probably have to be integrated into each unit individually by using ModelSwap events. For standard animations you should be able to link a Simple type actor to a Buff/Effect and direct an AnimPlay event at the unit through the Target: line. Check the Mass Recall opacity controller.

@Photoloss: Go

The knockback effect is an Apply Force effect called periodically (again, same as in the "Trigger Free Leap" post if anyone wants to look it up.) The weirdest problem to me is the target always getting knocked southward by Dehaka's attack. (Anyone know why that is? Perhaps only projectiles and radius effects cause direction-specific knockback?)

As for the stuff on animations....starting to feel a bit out of my depth here. I'll go read some actor tutorials. Thanks for the help!

You need an origin point from which the force is applied. Try setting that to Caster Point for this case.

Doesn't HotS have more Physics? I saw Kerrigan's Kinetic Blast send Marines flying in the first mission.

Don't know how you could do that, but that might be a way if you can reproduce it without killing the unit.