SC2Mapster

Suspense is killin' me anyone know if they've sent out winner emails or anything? Need to know how much beer to buy.

Thanks guys, the idea of a trigger array could be just what i needed, i can try to "stop all instances" of a specific slot in the array and that just may do it :D, thanks!

So i'm reconfiguring all my triggers in my map to be array based, each index in the array being a different player and just having some core triggers that work for all players.

My question is how can i stop specific triggers if a key in unpressed by a specific player. Lets say i have a move forward trigger and it activates when any player presses W down, then i use the player # of the player who presses W down as the index to use the correct unit forawrd constantly. Now that player unpresses W. How would i stop the specific looping movement trigger for that specific player? Hope that made sense.

Edit: this probably wasn't the best example as i could have a condition, "W pressed down" in this instance, but there are other triggers i have that aren't as conveniently fixed.

@KratsAU: Go

If you do end up using beams the point defense beam is super low on resources, you can use tint color to adjust the look of it. Also don't underestimate the power of sound effects, get a nice loud chaingun sound effect going on and a few very fast beams and you'll have a very believable effect.

@voodude2008: Go

Just an idea...

You could give it a second weapon with a range of 3. have its attack target itself and give it a create persistant effect (allows for offsets). Have the initial persistant effect issue an order to move back some small incriment.

Sup Mapster!

First a link to the mod I'm recruiting for:

It's essentially PVP Asteroids with an RPG twist. We have lots of innovative ideas going on that we can discuss further if you are interested in joining the mod team, we're not super secretive or anything but talking about what we're doing could easily take up pages and pages!

What we're looking for: In general the ideal candidate just loves to mod fun games, is dedicated to making an "amazing" mod, realizes that doing so isn't going to happen overnight and can hit the ground running. The team is incredibly small and your contributions to the mod would be substantial! If you decide to give this thing a try things are very easy going, I try to let people take ownership of whatever task they want to do and let them just rock it as hard as they want, though i do have to make sure everything is cohesive everyone who's worked on the mod so far has been very happy with the team and how things are done. We're incredibly organized utilizing online spreadsheets and dropbox to stay organized and in sync. If you're capable and want to work on what could be a very fun exciting mod by all means drop us a line, if you quickly decide this isn't for you no biggie.

DATA EDITOR Looking for someone to expand Cosmic Eclipse into the realm of towers defense type stuffs. Essentially the mod is more about space combat right now, but we want it to be a bit more, to have ships that can build towers and other exciting buildings to compliment what we already have. What this entails is that you be very familiar with the data editor, know how ability panels work, how turrets work, how firing arcs work, how upgrades affect damage, range, and all that jazz. The better you are at making a kick ass, deep tower defense, the more we'd like to have you on the team! Nothing is set in stone at this point, we're open to new ideas and want you to have fun working on this stuff. That said we have some exciting stuff planned already and systems brainstormed to fit right into the game. If you have requests for custom assets that's totally possible too. We would also hope you know how weapons and projectiles work.

Scripter Someone able to artfully create triggers, actions, records, and presets. The mod has a lot of growing and polish to go and it would be great to have another designer on board to take ownership of some of these systems. I'll be honest, we need to polish some things up right now before we can move forward in terms of our scripts. I'm taking that responsibility on myself and learning as I go, but it's going to take a little time. Whether you can help in this area or not we could really just use more competent designers as we are spread very thin right now with all the other aspects of the mod such as art, level design, balance, you name it I'm pretty much juggling it solo right now.

Why am I recruiting? In the interest of full disclosure good help is hard to find, and when you do find it, it can be snatched up by someone who can give them an actual paycheck. I can't offer that, all i can offer is a mod that i think (and many who have tested it) is a ton of fun and has tons of promise. Some day some how it may pay some bills but that's all out of my hands and obviously not something we can bank on. It truly is just a labor of love at this point and if anyone wants to be a part of it that would be swell. I'm not the owner of the mod, just the guy that started it, and everyone who works on it will be on the credits owning every bit of what they created for the mod. Send me a PM on Mapster if you're interested or just add me on BNET. Even if you just wanna try the mod for sh*ts and giggles it's always fun to show people what we're working on!

crazyfingers 345 (US server)

About the Team: There are 2 main contributors to the mod. Myself: I'm personally a well rounded 3d artist who is spending all his time making triggers and content for the mod rather than art which i'm much better at! I'll find the time to add more art and clean up existing assets but for now gameplay is more pressing. My buddy from school was handling all the UI and high end scripting but recently found a full time gig, he may or may not be contributing to the mod in the future. With some luck he'll be back and everything will be sunshine and rainbows but either way we could use more hands on deck as it's a pretty big project. So yes, it's an incredibly small team that is possibly on the verge of not being a team at all. Nothing's lost though, i'm in the process of revamping things as we speak and i'll shoulder this whole thing myself to bring about a first release if i have to, but it would be nice to have more help. Anyway, enough rambling, if you want on board, know your sh*t, and have some free time send me a PM and we'll see about kickin' some arse on a fun mod :D.

P.S. If you're very strong in any other areas and might want to join drop me a line, I'll find a way to get you on the team in some capacity!

Great news, anyone have an idea how much of a % this will help WASD controls or why they lag in the first place in relation to mouse clicks?

In regards to data security, the general rule of thumb is the less you talk about it the more secure it is :P, just common sense.

What i'd like to have in my map is an arrow pointing from your ship at an enemy mothership, and a friendly mothership. I was thinking i could just use beams that are trying to hit the mother ships but have no speed, so they essentially just point at them from your main ship. Problem is i can't figure out how to make this happen!

Anyone have any advice?

@EarendilSphere: Go

If you can find an effect that reveals the map, you can use a series of offsets from "create persistent"s to reveal sequentialy larger radiuses from the base unit offset in the Y direction. Use a behavior with a fast periodic effect to have this happen very quickly.

I do the same thing in my map but i just use triggers to make it easy (point with polar offset centered on the core unit), reveal a few areas in front of the unit, each one progressively larger and further away.

Wish i had a 100% answer for you, but i'll help you with what i can, sorta been tackling this weapon acquire behavior myself.

What you want to adjust is the acquire behavior of your weapons, you don't want a specific enemy to be acquired for attack by another turret after the initial turret has decided to attack it. What you could do is add a second weapon to the turret that does no damage and fires instantly when the enemy is in range that applies an effect that applies a behavior to the unit. I would suggest making this behavior be something that makes the unit a detector, some sort of unit flag that doesn't impact the gameplay. Now adjust your weapon acquiring on the base turret weapon, make it exclude detectors. Your first turret should have already locked onto the target since it wasn't a detector and be readying its weapon to fire, but the moment it did that, it made the unit a detector, so moving into the range of other turrets should disable it from its target acquisition.

May be a better way but this is the only way i can think of right now.

@Sephiex Z axis would be cool, but there are a few major reasons we didn't go in that direction (get it? har har!).

In order of importance:

1. Full 3d space confuses players. Human beings have evolved to consider positions of things more or less on a 2d plane, even fighter pilots talk about things being in relation to the facing of a clock. I liked tie fighter and x-wing as much as the next guy, but when things got really hairy, i always felt like the game was reduced to finding the biggest red dot on the radar and trying to reduce combat to a 2d plane with that fighter. If you look at your favorite space battles in movies they mostly take place on 2d planes, both factions coming in from 2 directions, aligned on their y axis. The more "order" there is in combat, the more depth we can add to it without it becoming a clusterf#%$. The video doesn't illustrate it very well but down the line we're going for some very heavy RPG elements to offset the skill factor of movement a bit. If we add a 3rd dimension to movement, the skill gap grows exponentially and that's not something we want. We're trying to strike the right chord with exciting twitch movement, and ships that are able to go head to head with these ships without requiring lighting fast reflexes.

2. The engine isn't really build from the ground up to support 3 axis movement. Collision, control, everything would be exponentially harder to get running in a 3d space. Why spend months developing a new system to incorporate 3d movement when the system for 2d is so solid? Look at homeworld, the game was beautiful and revolutionary, but it was so hampered by trying to get 3d to work in an RTS, that the base gameplay became second fiddle to 3d mechanics.

3. We're not fooling ourselves into thinking we can make a perfect shooter, this engine wasn't built explicitly for this kind of game, we think we can make a fairly solid shooter. What we CAN do is throw all the awesome 2D RTS, and RPG mechanics that the editor does so well on top of a solid shooter and get what we think will be a pretty epic new experience.

Without getting into specifics, we have some really big plans to add some very compelling 2d gameplay. Tower defense mechanics, healers/ tank roles, and general 2d RTS NPC control (though greatly simplified). These genres are not exclusive, tower defenses have had heroes running around killing NPC's for years. Shaman throw down totems in WOW that behave like turrets. The 2d plane means we can implement these features and maybe even do it in a way that doesn't make the player's head explode.

The main issue we need address in terms of the 2d plane is the obvious flat horizon you get when playing. I've toyed a bit with background objects, tried adding asteroids to various heights, and it only serves to disorient the player. We haven't had much time to mess with the art yet, but it would be nice to replace many of the assets comprising the game with things that have more vertical scale. This way we can move them up and down in height without actually changing their XY position and the battlefield will look more populated from all angles, though again this could serve to disorient the player, making objects seem closer or further away than they actually are.

Bit of a ramble, I know, haven't really been able to talk about our mod and it was kinda pent up ;)

ha, very interesting.

I wonder if you could reduce the # of probes by attaching them somehow to the zealot, or by teleporting them very quickly with specific offsets to the zealot. This way you'd only need enough probes to fill one screen, could increase their base scale to optimize it on the outside of the screen. Anyway, very cool workaround and very creative!

@Zenx1:

My map actually uses custom animations in max, nothing fancy just a quick 360 rotation using Nintoxicated's tools, then i export the model and play the animation just like you would an attack animation, simple trigger action.

If you're not a 3DSMax user, I believe you could string together a chain of events in the data editor (or even with triggers) to have it adjust its Y rotation to achieve a barrel roll that way, youd just need a lot of them pieced together to achieve the effect. For example the shields i use, i set their opacity through trigger events, calling the right trigger at the right time. I have 21 triggers, each one changing the incriment of opacity by 5%, 0 - 100 percent. You run them all in a line and it gives the illusion that the shields are growing weaker or stronger. Just like piecing together a bunch of triggers that set an actor's y rotation together from 0-360 would make it look like it spins. In fact, you might even be able to use a blend to do it with 1 single actor adjustment of 360 degrees.

Oh and glad you like the video!

Yeah, damage response is the way to go. Make sure you set the odds of the event occuring to 1 at the top, and location of effect, change that to attacker, from defender. In the field where you choose what effect to be triggered put the damage effect (or set of effects) that you want to be initialized on the attacker.

Here's a video of my team's Map Cosmic Eclipse:

Hope it speaks for itself. There is PvP combat but i'd rather save that gameplay for an actual release which should be coming in a couple weeks or so! Gotta tune up some abilities among other things before we actually make this public.

Edit: Sorry for the low quality and lack of sound, haven't used fraps or the video compiler much!