This is a map combining some experiments I did lately. The name is a placeholder for now, and its meant to be an homage to Kingdoms of Amalur (which I enjoyed).
This is fully experimental, I am not sure, what kind of map this will become. I am just throwing stuff in the map, try out, if it works and feels good and eventually change it up again.
Currently, it is a sort of prototype for a Hero Siege map with visually customizable heroes and a unique casting system, however, this might change drastically.
Theme
This, as well, is temporary and based on the name. Heroes of Aiur of course suggests a Protoss scenario, and hero play :)
You pick one of various mighty protoss heroes to fend off an invasion on your homeworld, Aiur. Since everyone does Terran or Zerg invasions, I went for an invasion of critters and other animals; we will see, how that works out.
The terrain is purely a placeholder for now, terraining is by far my worst skill with the editor :).
Hero Pick and Customization
As you can tell, I made a crude hero selection and customization screen. You can pick 1 out of 4 heroes, their "names" are actually ranks/titles within the Protoss society. You have the choice between:
Prelate
Executor
Judicator
Hierarch
You have various skin options, only variating in base color currently. The color of your armor and accessoires can be adjusted individually. The heroes shown use different customization options, as you can see you can make the heroes as cool or as ugly as you want ;)
Gameplay and Casting System
The footage is quite laggy, however that is mostly because my computer sucks, not because the systems cause huge performance issues.
The gameplay has an interesting twist to it. You control your hero from top-down view with an 8-way WASD movement. Nothing special, so far.
Casting spells however is done by drawing shapes on the ground. So you click and hold the mouse button, draw a line, release the mouse button, and you will cast a spell on the drawn line.
Currently, 2 different shapes are supported: A line and a circle. Also, the location of the shape matters, drawing a circle somewhere on the map has a different effect than drawing a circle around your hero.
I do not plan on adding many more shapes, the casting system is meant to be intuitive and easy to use, not a test of your memory and drawing skills. If I would want to support tons of different spells, I would be better off using hotkeys.
Mentioning this raises the question: Why not go for hotkeys anyway? What is the advantage of this system?
The answer is simple: Drawing a shape provides more information. Pressing a hotkey selects the skill or casts it on the position of the mouse cursor. Drawing a circle selects the location and the area of the cast. Draw a small circle and you spell will affect a smaller area. A bigger circle will affect a huge area instead; something, we could not achieve that easily by just using hotkeys.
Also, it is very intuitive. You want to hit a small group of enemies? Draw a circle around them and watch them being pulverized. You want to set up a wall of force fields? Just draw a line instead of creating the force fields individually.
Casting on a big area will need to have some drawback, of course, like higher energy costs or lower damage or whatever, otherwise you would always try to cast as big as possible. Also, the shape detection obviously needs some tolerance, since you cannot draw a perfect circle with a mouse, especially not in the heat of combat.
In fact, it feels best, if the tolerance is quite high. The casting should feel intuitive and fast and not cancel half of your cast attempts, because you messed up the shape just a little.
Enemies
I plan on adding various types of critters and animals as enemy waves. They should be unique, have interesting weapons and abilities etc.
Currently, there are only 2 types of enemies, and they are only for testing. They don't cause any damage or use any abilities.
I tried to add some custom kill animations to them, depending on their cause of death:
Exploded:
Disintegrated by a beam:
Progress, To-Do List
This project is not yet released to Battle.net
This is once again just me playing around with the editor. Knowing me, it might never become a playable map :D
The spells for the heroes are just tests for the system, they are subject to change
Only 2 heroes have spells currently and work correctly for the customization system.
The terrain is basically non-existing
The enemies don't cause any damage or use any spells
Only 2 types of enemies
No UI
No limitation on spell casting (energy costs or cooldown)
...
Technical details
The customization/recolor system uses modified models and textures as well as team color, so you cannot set your team color in the lobby (it will not have any effect), also you won't see any differences in team color ingame.
Some customization effects will not be visible on low graphics settings.
The WASD movement system is made by myself (since there didn't exist any in Galaxy++ yet) and uses trigger events to check key input.
The shape detection is based on various commonly available methods for detecting shapes in images. It uses trigger events to check mouse input.
Since the movement and casting both rely on trigger events to check user input, they are susceptible to Battle.net delay. However, in my tests it still felt pretty much okay, due to the nature of the casting system. It is not all that dependant on timing, and if you think, you could miss an enemy, you can adjust the area of effect yourself to account for that.
Amazing, but why not Protoss vs Protoss? Lore tells us there were civil wars and even during original SC Tassadar's followers had to battle the Conclave, that's just one suggestion though.
Amazing, but why not Protoss vs Protoss? Lore tells us there were civil wars and even during original SC Tassadar's followers had to battle the Conclave, that's just one suggestion though.
Could do that as well, but for now, I will continue to experiment with the critters. If I don't like it, it will change.
I myself have refrained from using any mouse locatin/wasd systems purely cause the possibly clunky/lagg issues. But hopefully you can make it work (bountys wasd on photon discs seems to work fairly well).
It can still become easilly repeative and maybe even teadious, so there sure is challenge to preventing that.
I personally would like to have god simulation with mouse movement mechanics (black&white lol). It would nice and relaxing to cast spells to help villagers and such.
This looks fresh and creatively. While watching the video, I thought about making abilities like runes: player paints a sign of a spell, and the spell shots. Something simple like '+', 's', 'a', and so on. Maybe even combinations, so while the player holds a key, he can paint some different runes to create a combined complicated spell.
Or maybe even create a continuous multidimentional space of spells, so any curve sould adress a point of this space to define the substance of a spell, like corellation between damage types. For example: longer lines within a curve->mighter fire attack, more sharp angles -> mechenical attack, more smooth arcs -> some pushing forces, and so on. So, every possible curve to create a specific spell.
So, yeah. Just a couple of ideas while watching your videos. The whole idea is rich and lavish and may lead to a numerous playing mechanics. It will require deeper shape analysis, but I think u have no problems with things like this.
And a couple of questions questions:
What model do you use as a paintable line? By what criteria have you chose it?
Do you use dummy units to create beams for that "line" spell? Or you found out how to make beams without?
Hey :) didnt notice the thread earlier. The system seemed pretty cool when you let me test it :)
Ideas:
A sort of "<" shape for a conical attack (Only works if point of < is at hero), which should probably not interfere with the 2 current shapes.
Also, you could add hotkeys for spells, but instead of the hotkeys actually using the spells, they swap out your 2 main spells. Lets say you have a force-field hotkey, using it turns your line spell into forcefields instead of damage. So after you block all enemies you just hit another hotkey for lazors again. That way you can have heroes have multiple spells while still using a minimal amount of shapes.
You could use another shape for sort of "defensive" spells, like an 8/infinity sign centered on the hero maybe. A triangle would probably be better, but I think shape tolerance could get a bad triangle confused with a bad circle and vice versa.
Can't wait to see what you do with this, if you indeed do something ;)
I myself have refrained from using any mouse locatin/wasd systems purely cause the possibly clunky/lagg issues. But hopefully you can make it work (bountys wasd on photon discs seems to work fairly well).
I hope, it will still be playable. Not sure, though.
Quote:
It can still become easilly repeative and maybe even teadious, so there sure is challenge to preventing that.
You are right about that, there will certainly be times, where you might just want to cast with a similar radius or length over and over again. We will see, if it works out.
Quote:
I personally would like to have god simulation with mouse movement mechanics (blackwhite lol). It would nice and relaxing to cast spells to help villagers and such.
I didn't want to re-create B&W, I didn't really like the system they used. It had no real purpose, no advantage over hotkeys. It was nice to do the first time, then it just became tedious and I wanted hotkeys back. As mentioned, the main point is not to make you draw a shape. It is to select the exact area the spell should affect, to feel intuitive and "precise".
This looks fresh and creatively. While watching the video, I thought about making abilities like runes: player paints a sign of a spell, and the spell shots. Something simple like '+', 's', 'a', and so on. Maybe even combinations, so while the player holds a key, he can paint some different runes to create a combined complicated spell.
I probably won't do that.
Quote:
Or maybe even create a continuous multidimentional space of spells, so any curve sould adress a point of this space to define the substance of a spell, like corellation between damage types. For example: longer lines within a curve->mighter fire attack, more sharp angles -> mechenical attack, more smooth arcs -> some pushing forces, and so on. So, every possible curve to create a specific spell.
Interesting concept, but it would either need to be very precise, which would make spell casting in the heat of battle impossible or more of a gamble, or very forgiving, which wouldn't allow for many variations.
Quote:
So, yeah. Just a couple of ideas while watching your videos. The whole idea is rich and lavish and may lead to a numerous playing mechanics. It will require deeper shape analysis, but I think u have no problems with things like this.
Heh, don't overestimate me. The shape detection for simple things like a line and circle was hard enough, and its not like I ever learned picture analysis or proper coding.
Quote:
What model do you use as a paintable line? By what criteria have you chose it?
its the PylonSplat.m3, I believe. Criteria were purely, that it would create a nice looking line :)
It was about the third one I tried, not much thought went into that one. It might be changed, if I discover issues with it or find a better suited one.
Quote:
Do you use dummy units to create beams for that "line" spell? Or you found out how to make beams without?
Actually, full credit goes to Renee and the GAx3 mod for this one. Since Galaxy++ currently cannot utilize functions from mods, I don't use the GAx3 mod directly, but I implemented the functionality using the same principle.
It is actually quite complicated, it involves creating custom site actors at some artificial "god" unit you need to set up (GAx3 does this automatically) and move them to the start- and end points of the beam and attach the beam to it.
The original GAx3 functions look like this:
actorGAx3_ActorSiteFromPoint(pointp)//creates the site actor at the god unit and moves it to the desired point{actora;ActorSend(GAx3_GodActor,"Create TriggerSiteNoHarness");a=ActorFromScope(GAx3_GodScope,"::LastCreatedActual");ActorSend(a,"SetPositionH "+FixedToString(PointGetX(p),6)+","+FixedToString(PointGetY(p),6)+" "+FixedToString(PointGetHeight(p),6));ActorScopeRefSet(GAx3_GodScope,"scope.TriggerSiteHost",a);returna;}actorGAx3_BeamCreate(stringinModelLink,actorfrom,actorto)//creates a beam between 2 actors{actorscopeas=ActorScopeFromActor(from);ActorScopeRefSet(as,"::scope.BeamFrom",from);ActorScopeRefSet(as,"::scope.BeamTo",to);returnActorCreate(as,"BeamSimple",inModelLink,"::scope.BeamFrom","::scope.BeamTo");}
Ideas:
A sort of "<" shape for a conical attack (Only works if point of < is at hero), which should probably not interfere with the 2 current shapes.
Could work, will keep it in mind.
Quote:
Also, you could add hotkeys for spells, but instead of the hotkeys actually using the spells, they swap out your 2 main spells. Lets say you have a force-field hotkey, using it turns your line spell into forcefields instead of damage. So after you block all enemies you just hit another hotkey for lazors again. That way you can have heroes have multiple spells while still using a minimal amount of shapes.
I thought the same thing. However, I am not sure, how many abilities I will actually implement. It shouldn't be too many, either. Maybe, i can just use draw with left- and right click.
Quote:
You could use another shape for sort of "defensive" spells, like an 8/infinity sign centered on the hero maybe. A triangle would probably be better, but I think shape tolerance could get a bad triangle confused with a bad circle and vice versa.
Actually, drawing an 8 with the mouse doesn't feel all that fluid for me; also its quite hard to put information in it. If it is purely defensive and only affects your hero anyway, I could just use a hotkey again; the shape would only be there to fit the theme of drawing shapes, which i would like to avoid.
Currently experimenting with spells following a specific theme. For example, I would have the theme "Force Field" for one of the heroes. Each theme has 1 spell for every kind of shape, so Force Field would probably have 4 spells like this:
Drawing a line anywhere results in a line of force fields. Nothing special.
Drawing a circle anywhere creates a huge force field, which freezes all enemies inside it
Drawing a line from your hero creates a line of force fields in front of you; however they immediately disappear again, only pushing the enemies to the sides creating a path for you. Probably slows enemies and/or speeds you up.
Drawing a circle around your hero creates an expanding force field shockwave thingy, pushing enemies back and possibly dealing some damage.
Just some random ideas again. Every hero would have multiple of these themes, selectable with hotkeys. Some themes will do mostly raw damage, others like the Force Field are more support-oriented.
Dont want contribute any demotivation in your efforts but if you want to make dynamic fights (with boss or something) that requires fast reaction from player this spellcast system may bring some inconvinience to game experience, especialy if there will be any noticable lag. Just my thoughts..
Dont want contribute any demotivation in your efforts but if you want to make dynamic fights (with boss or something) that requires fast reaction from player this spellcast system may bring some inconvinience to game experience, especialy if there will be any noticable lag. Just my thoughts..
Yep, probably. Doesn't prevent me from trying :)
Anyway, thats why I chose a defense type map. I doubt, this would work in, lets say, a hero arena, where you fight against other players and depend on fast reaction and precise spell casts even more. I don't plan on adding intense, timing-based boss fights, at least not too intense ;).
I think, it is possible to adjust enemies and fights to this kind of casting system, and I definitely will try.
Small update: This is a first draw on the UI I am currently experimenting with. The skills shown are not final yet; its just to demonstrate, that the casted skill will vary based on selected icon. Also the numbers are just placeholders for real skill icons.
Looks awesome. I hope you actually make a finished map out of that, it has huge potential.
The drawings are based on triggers I suppose?
Are you also using some triggers for the abilities?
If you are not I would love to know how you can vary the size of the explosion area or the length of the beams with data. No need to get into specifics, just the basic idea :)
And does this recoloring work for every model or did you have to specifically prepare the models somehow to be able to do that?
Heroes of Aiur
This is a map combining some experiments I did lately. The name is a placeholder for now, and its meant to be an homage to Kingdoms of Amalur (which I enjoyed).
This is fully experimental, I am not sure, what kind of map this will become. I am just throwing stuff in the map, try out, if it works and feels good and eventually change it up again.
Currently, it is a sort of prototype for a Hero Siege map with visually customizable heroes and a unique casting system, however, this might change drastically.
Theme
This, as well, is temporary and based on the name. Heroes of Aiur of course suggests a Protoss scenario, and hero play :)
You pick one of various mighty protoss heroes to fend off an invasion on your homeworld, Aiur. Since everyone does Terran or Zerg invasions, I went for an invasion of critters and other animals; we will see, how that works out.
The terrain is purely a placeholder for now, terraining is by far my worst skill with the editor :).
Hero Pick and Customization
As you can tell, I made a crude hero selection and customization screen. You can pick 1 out of 4 heroes, their "names" are actually ranks/titles within the Protoss society. You have the choice between:
You have various skin options, only variating in base color currently. The color of your armor and accessoires can be adjusted individually. The heroes shown use different customization options, as you can see you can make the heroes as cool or as ugly as you want ;)
Gameplay and Casting System
The footage is quite laggy, however that is mostly because my computer sucks, not because the systems cause huge performance issues.
The gameplay has an interesting twist to it. You control your hero from top-down view with an 8-way WASD movement. Nothing special, so far.
Casting spells however is done by drawing shapes on the ground. So you click and hold the mouse button, draw a line, release the mouse button, and you will cast a spell on the drawn line.
Currently, 2 different shapes are supported: A line and a circle. Also, the location of the shape matters, drawing a circle somewhere on the map has a different effect than drawing a circle around your hero.
I do not plan on adding many more shapes, the casting system is meant to be intuitive and easy to use, not a test of your memory and drawing skills. If I would want to support tons of different spells, I would be better off using hotkeys.
Mentioning this raises the question: Why not go for hotkeys anyway? What is the advantage of this system?
The answer is simple: Drawing a shape provides more information. Pressing a hotkey selects the skill or casts it on the position of the mouse cursor. Drawing a circle selects the location and the area of the cast. Draw a small circle and you spell will affect a smaller area. A bigger circle will affect a huge area instead; something, we could not achieve that easily by just using hotkeys.
Also, it is very intuitive. You want to hit a small group of enemies? Draw a circle around them and watch them being pulverized. You want to set up a wall of force fields? Just draw a line instead of creating the force fields individually.
Casting on a big area will need to have some drawback, of course, like higher energy costs or lower damage or whatever, otherwise you would always try to cast as big as possible. Also, the shape detection obviously needs some tolerance, since you cannot draw a perfect circle with a mouse, especially not in the heat of combat.
In fact, it feels best, if the tolerance is quite high. The casting should feel intuitive and fast and not cancel half of your cast attempts, because you messed up the shape just a little.
Enemies
I plan on adding various types of critters and animals as enemy waves. They should be unique, have interesting weapons and abilities etc.
Currently, there are only 2 types of enemies, and they are only for testing. They don't cause any damage or use any abilities.
I tried to add some custom kill animations to them, depending on their cause of death:
Exploded:
Disintegrated by a beam:
Progress, To-Do List
This project is not yet released to Battle.net
This is once again just me playing around with the editor. Knowing me, it might never become a playable map :D
Technical details
The customization/recolor system uses modified models and textures as well as team color, so you cannot set your team color in the lobby (it will not have any effect), also you won't see any differences in team color ingame.
Some customization effects will not be visible on low graphics settings.
The WASD movement system is made by myself (since there didn't exist any in Galaxy
++yet) and uses trigger events to check key input.The shape detection is based on various commonly available methods for detecting shapes in images. It uses trigger events to check mouse input.
Since the movement and casting both rely on trigger events to check user input, they are susceptible to Battle.net delay. However, in my tests it still felt pretty much okay, due to the nature of the casting system. It is not all that dependant on timing, and if you think, you could miss an enemy, you can adjust the area of effect yourself to account for that.
The code is done 100% in Galaxy
++Credits:
So it's angry pictionary?
Amazing, but why not Protoss vs Protoss? Lore tells us there were civil wars and even during original SC Tassadar's followers had to battle the Conclave, that's just one suggestion though.
Looks nice. Using hotkeys can also instantly use abilities based on mouse position like Diablo 3.
The drawing would be awesome on an iPad :]
My thoughts:
You could call it that ;)
Could do that as well, but for now, I will continue to experiment with the critters. If I don't like it, it will change.
Yes, of course.
For me personally, it feels pretty good using the mouse as well. Well, I might be biased ;)
The spells are just placeholders and tests for the system. I plan on adding more variety to spells.
I cannot terrain, at all. So, if this map gets decent terrain, it will probably not be done by me :)
.. So this is what you mentioned on the IRC. I am impressed.
Could be a cool and fun gameplay mechanic.
I myself have refrained from using any mouse locatin/wasd systems purely cause the possibly clunky/lagg issues. But hopefully you can make it work (bountys wasd on photon discs seems to work fairly well).
It can still become easilly repeative and maybe even teadious, so there sure is challenge to preventing that.
I personally would like to have god simulation with mouse movement mechanics (black&white lol). It would nice and relaxing to cast spells to help villagers and such.
This looks fresh and creatively. While watching the video, I thought about making abilities like runes: player paints a sign of a spell, and the spell shots. Something simple like '+', 's', 'a', and so on. Maybe even combinations, so while the player holds a key, he can paint some different runes to create a combined complicated spell.
Or maybe even create a continuous multidimentional space of spells, so any curve sould adress a point of this space to define the substance of a spell, like corellation between damage types. For example: longer lines within a curve->mighter fire attack, more sharp angles -> mechenical attack, more smooth arcs -> some pushing forces, and so on. So, every possible curve to create a specific spell.
So, yeah. Just a couple of ideas while watching your videos. The whole idea is rich and lavish and may lead to a numerous playing mechanics. It will require deeper shape analysis, but I think u have no problems with things like this.
And a couple of questions questions:
What model do you use as a paintable line? By what criteria have you chose it?
Do you use dummy units to create beams for that "line" spell? Or you found out how to make beams without?
Hey :) didnt notice the thread earlier. The system seemed pretty cool when you let me test it :)
Ideas:
A sort of "<" shape for a conical attack (Only works if point of < is at hero), which should probably not interfere with the 2 current shapes.
Also, you could add hotkeys for spells, but instead of the hotkeys actually using the spells, they swap out your 2 main spells. Lets say you have a force-field hotkey, using it turns your line spell into forcefields instead of damage. So after you block all enemies you just hit another hotkey for lazors again. That way you can have heroes have multiple spells while still using a minimal amount of shapes.
You could use another shape for sort of "defensive" spells, like an 8/infinity sign centered on the hero maybe. A triangle would probably be better, but I think shape tolerance could get a bad triangle confused with a bad circle and vice versa.
Can't wait to see what you do with this, if you indeed do something ;)
I hope, it will still be playable. Not sure, though.
You are right about that, there will certainly be times, where you might just want to cast with a similar radius or length over and over again. We will see, if it works out.
I didn't want to re-create B&W, I didn't really like the system they used. It had no real purpose, no advantage over hotkeys. It was nice to do the first time, then it just became tedious and I wanted hotkeys back. As mentioned, the main point is not to make you draw a shape. It is to select the exact area the spell should affect, to feel intuitive and "precise".
I probably won't do that.
Interesting concept, but it would either need to be very precise, which would make spell casting in the heat of battle impossible or more of a gamble, or very forgiving, which wouldn't allow for many variations.
Heh, don't overestimate me. The shape detection for simple things like a line and circle was hard enough, and its not like I ever learned picture analysis or proper coding.
its the PylonSplat.m3, I believe. Criteria were purely, that it would create a nice looking line :)
It was about the third one I tried, not much thought went into that one. It might be changed, if I discover issues with it or find a better suited one.
Actually, full credit goes to Renee and the GAx3 mod for this one. Since Galaxy
++currently cannot utilize functions from mods, I don't use the GAx3 mod directly, but I implemented the functionality using the same principle.It is actually quite complicated, it involves creating custom site actors at some artificial "god" unit you need to set up (GAx3 does this automatically) and move them to the start- and end points of the beam and attach the beam to it.
The original GAx3 functions look like this:
Could work, will keep it in mind.
I thought the same thing. However, I am not sure, how many abilities I will actually implement. It shouldn't be too many, either. Maybe, i can just use draw with left- and right click.
Actually, drawing an 8 with the mouse doesn't feel all that fluid for me; also its quite hard to put information in it. If it is purely defensive and only affects your hero anyway, I could just use a hotkey again; the shape would only be there to fit the theme of drawing shapes, which i would like to avoid.
Currently experimenting with spells following a specific theme. For example, I would have the theme "Force Field" for one of the heroes. Each theme has 1 spell for every kind of shape, so Force Field would probably have 4 spells like this:
Just some random ideas again. Every hero would have multiple of these themes, selectable with hotkeys. Some themes will do mostly raw damage, others like the Force Field are more support-oriented.
Dont want contribute any demotivation in your efforts but if you want to make dynamic fights (with boss or something) that requires fast reaction from player this spellcast system may bring some inconvinience to game experience, especialy if there will be any noticable lag. Just my thoughts..
Yep, probably. Doesn't prevent me from trying :)
Anyway, thats why I chose a defense type map. I doubt, this would work in, lets say, a hero arena, where you fight against other players and depend on fast reaction and precise spell casts even more. I don't plan on adding intense, timing-based boss fights, at least not too intense ;).
I think, it is possible to adjust enemies and fights to this kind of casting system, and I definitely will try.
Will have to try it out when it comes out. Looks like an interesting idea. The character customization is rather impressive as well.
:3 Star Scribblenaughts
Small update: This is a first draw on the UI I am currently experimenting with. The skills shown are not final yet; its just to demonstrate, that the casted skill will vary based on selected icon. Also the numbers are just placeholders for real skill icons.
Thanks. However, I have the feeling, it is slightly out of place for this kind of map; it would fit better in a huge RPG or something.
I'm afraid I didn't catch that reference ;)
Awesome! That has a bright future!
Looks awesome. I hope you actually make a finished map out of that, it has huge potential.
The drawings are based on triggers I suppose?
Are you also using some triggers for the abilities?
If you are not I would love to know how you can vary the size of the explosion area or the length of the beams with data. No need to get into specifics, just the basic idea :)
And does this recoloring work for every model or did you have to specifically prepare the models somehow to be able to do that?
Küken, the only SC2 mapper who starts off every map with a 'the sims' engine.
Looking sick yet again man.
@Mozared: Go
Oh, how did I not notice there was another video? Looks awesome man :)