Why don't you make the upgrade a buff instead. When the player uses the ability (or learns the ability) that upgrades, use a trigger to add an additional stack of the buff onto the hero. This way, you only need to make 1 effect.
15 heroes is a lot. Making abilities with levels takes a huge amount of time. Especially passive abilities (although, I decided to have triggers add an additional stack of a buff to the unit when the unit increases the level of a passive ability). The amount of effects you have to duplicate is very large.
If you really want to make that many, you have to decide very early on how you design your heroes. It might be easier to have abilities scale with stats.
The most important thing is not quantity. The three areas which to me are most important:
1) Having a logical reason behind each addition to the map. Everything you add should have an explicit reason. A hero doesn't need two abilities that do the same thing, but look different. There don't need to be two heroes that play with the same gameplay. If you correctly design the way each hero plays, you can get away with only having as many heroes as players. It's important that each one have a unique experience. If you have 10 heroes, and they each take hours of play to master their technique, then it's essentially 10 different games in one.
An example of good diversity in heroes is World of Warcraft (before the expansions, at least). You'll notice how few spells each class has, and how different the spells of each class were (everything is blending together in recent expansions, so I quit). If you really take a minute to look closely at each spell and class, you'll realize that it probably took hours, or even days (or months?) for teams of people to decide each ability, and which class it should use it.
Make sure your abilities can be used easily, but also that they can be used in ways that require much more skill. Look at the Shock Core (I forgot what it's called) from Unreal Tornament. Abilities with synergy are very good.
Players also love abilities that yield opportunities for 1-in-a-million kills. Look at all the videos on YouTube of Halo games where a player randomly throws a plasma grenade across the map, and it bounces off 2 forcefields, hits a wall, and sticks to a player, then kills the entire team at once.
2) Present the map well to the player. Add little things that are "cool". Players love it when maps keep track of how good they are. Print out a simple message at the start how many other heroes they've killed using the bank system. Or even display a leaderboard.
3) Awesomeness. Play around with movers and actor events. An example of a way you can make a simple damage ability awesome could be to take any generic missile mover, and add a stage to the beginning where the missile barely moves at all (so that it looks like the hero holds it for about a second before it flies at the target). In the missile actor's events, have its scale be increased to a larger size over half a second at actor creation.
Now, you've got a simple damage ability that appears to "charge up" (because it floats at the hero for a second, and gets bigger) before it launches. If you choose a model for the projectile that looks like a ball of energy, you've turned what used to be a generic (but required ability type for most heroes) into an awesome ability that looks like something from Dragon Ball Z.
Doesn't the cost of the unit in triggers reflect the total cost spent on it; if you specify in the editor that the upgraded tower costs 700, and the original 400, the upgrade will cost 300. I believe it should refund based on 700 if the tower is upgraded.
I could be wrong, however.
EDIT: Using "" apparently adds strike-through to text. Switched to semi colon.
I did... That's why I posted the suggestion. The way I used is 3 lines... Modify player resources, remove tower, display message stating how much was refunded.
silvermage, it's much much easier if you just use the function to get the mineral cost of the tower.
I couldn't find a way to do it with just data without making a separate version for each tower. I ended up making a dummy ability and a trigger with the event that the ability is used. The trigger gives the player a percent of the cost of the unit's cost (there's a function to get the cost).
I could be wrong about there not being a data-only solution.
It launches correctly from the weapon. Yes, there is an action. The ability is identical to launching a missile from a missile turret without the persistent.
The problem is, even though it correctly fires from the weapon, the unit (immortal, in this case, using the missile turret for its turret) does not correctly rotate its gun to face the unit.
What do you mean "is the turret actor being created?".
This a graph of how many graphs I've made in MS paint. The Y axis is the number of graphs, and the X axis is the number of times I've existed after having read your post with your graph.
So far, I've existed one time after reading your post about your graph, and, coincidentally, I've made one graph in MS paint.
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@Zero0018: Go
Why don't you make the upgrade a buff instead. When the player uses the ability (or learns the ability) that upgrades, use a trigger to add an additional stack of the buff onto the hero. This way, you only need to make 1 effect.
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@dgh64: Go
Funeral.
0
@Zero0018: Go
There's an option on the unit. "UI - Display kill count". I'm not sure ifits called exactly that.
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@Keyeszx: Go
15 heroes is a lot. Making abilities with levels takes a huge amount of time. Especially passive abilities (although, I decided to have triggers add an additional stack of a buff to the unit when the unit increases the level of a passive ability). The amount of effects you have to duplicate is very large.
If you really want to make that many, you have to decide very early on how you design your heroes. It might be easier to have abilities scale with stats.
The most important thing is not quantity. The three areas which to me are most important:
1) Having a logical reason behind each addition to the map. Everything you add should have an explicit reason. A hero doesn't need two abilities that do the same thing, but look different. There don't need to be two heroes that play with the same gameplay. If you correctly design the way each hero plays, you can get away with only having as many heroes as players. It's important that each one have a unique experience. If you have 10 heroes, and they each take hours of play to master their technique, then it's essentially 10 different games in one.
An example of good diversity in heroes is World of Warcraft (before the expansions, at least). You'll notice how few spells each class has, and how different the spells of each class were (everything is blending together in recent expansions, so I quit). If you really take a minute to look closely at each spell and class, you'll realize that it probably took hours, or even days (or months?) for teams of people to decide each ability, and which class it should use it.
Make sure your abilities can be used easily, but also that they can be used in ways that require much more skill. Look at the Shock Core (I forgot what it's called) from Unreal Tornament. Abilities with synergy are very good.
Players also love abilities that yield opportunities for 1-in-a-million kills. Look at all the videos on YouTube of Halo games where a player randomly throws a plasma grenade across the map, and it bounces off 2 forcefields, hits a wall, and sticks to a player, then kills the entire team at once.
2) Present the map well to the player. Add little things that are "cool". Players love it when maps keep track of how good they are. Print out a simple message at the start how many other heroes they've killed using the bank system. Or even display a leaderboard.
3) Awesomeness. Play around with movers and actor events. An example of a way you can make a simple damage ability awesome could be to take any generic missile mover, and add a stage to the beginning where the missile barely moves at all (so that it looks like the hero holds it for about a second before it flies at the target). In the missile actor's events, have its scale be increased to a larger size over half a second at actor creation.
Now, you've got a simple damage ability that appears to "charge up" (because it floats at the hero for a second, and gets bigger) before it launches. If you choose a model for the projectile that looks like a ball of energy, you've turned what used to be a generic (but required ability type for most heroes) into an awesome ability that looks like something from Dragon Ball Z.
0
@SouLCarveRR: Go
Doesn't the cost of the unit in triggers reflect the total cost spent on it; if you specify in the editor that the upgraded tower costs 700, and the original 400, the upgrade will cost 300. I believe it should refund based on 700 if the tower is upgraded.
I could be wrong, however.
EDIT: Using "
" apparently adds strike-through to text. Switched to semi colon.0
@SouLCarveRR: Go
I did... That's why I posted the suggestion. The way I used is 3 lines... Modify player resources, remove tower, display message stating how much was refunded.
silvermage, it's much much easier if you just use the function to get the mineral cost of the tower.
0
@EightLeggedJ: Go
I couldn't find a way to do it with just data without making a separate version for each tower. I ended up making a dummy ability and a trigger with the event that the ability is used. The trigger gives the player a percent of the cost of the unit's cost (there's a function to get the cost).
I could be wrong about there not being a data-only solution.
0
@DrSuperEvil: Go
Thanks.
0
@DrSuperEvil: Go
It launches correctly from the weapon. Yes, there is an action. The ability is identical to launching a missile from a missile turret without the persistent.
The problem is, even though it correctly fires from the weapon, the unit (immortal, in this case, using the missile turret for its turret) does not correctly rotate its gun to face the unit.
What do you mean "is the turret actor being created?".
0
Thanks.
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How is this done? In my map, the turret doesn't respond when an ability is cast, but the ability casts fine. It looks really weird on a tower.
The turret I'm using is missile turret.
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@RileyStarcraft: Go
I would like to know this as well. In my map, if a tower casts an ability, the turret doesn't turn at all, and it looks really weird.
0
What do you do if a member's work is not what you expected? Do you tell them to do it better? Isn't that awkward?
0
This a graph of how many graphs I've made in MS paint. The Y axis is the number of graphs, and the X axis is the number of times I've existed after having read your post with your graph.
So far, I've existed one time after reading your post about your graph, and, coincidentally, I've made one graph in MS paint.
Here is data.
0
I give up trying to understand. I can logically piece together your points and reasonings, but I don't comprehend them.