After doing some tinkering, turns out the solution was rather simple. I guess every weapon the Immortal uses requires a Turret instance to go with it.
In the Data entry of the Immortal Unit, all I had to do was add duplicate turrets to the Combat - Weapons - Turret field.
It now looks like this.
Combat - Weapons - Turret: Immortal | Immortal
Doesn't affect the Immortal visually at all, and allows both weapons to fire at their own intervals. I havent tried this with more weapons yet, but I'd imagine it'd work.
I still would like to know how to force a weapon to wait it's period before firing when it acquires a target. (Basically, unit enters combat with a weapon that fires every 15 seconds, but instead of firing it's first shot instantly like most weapons do, it has to actually wait 15 seconds.)
<s>Update: Okay, I think I see the problem. I disabled the Phase Disruptors through the weapon options and focused on the Ibiks Cannon. When I tried to attack, I got Error - Can't turn towards unit. I had a feeling this meant the weapon could only fire from a certain angle. After trying them all, it appears that the weapon will only fire when the Immortal is above (north) of the attack target).
<s>After figuring this out, I enabled both weapons again, started the Immortal above the target...and viola. Both weapons were firing at their correct intervals.
<s>I have a feeling this problem has to due with the interaction between the Ibiks Cannon Weapon and the Immortal's Turret. I'm thinking there's probably a setting or something I have to change to get the two to play nice.
<s>Any ideas?
END UPDATE</B></s>
<s>Okay, no luck quite yet. The method by which I was getting the Immortal to fire two weapons at once was an Effects Set containing the Disruptors and Ibkis Cannon damage effects. The Weapon used that set as it's effect, permitting each attack to deal both the Disruptor damage and the Ibiks damage + explosion.
<s>However, when I try adding Disruptor Weapon (linked to a custom Disruptor Effect) and the Ibiks Weapon (linked to a custom Ibiks effect), only the Disruptor will fire. I tried messing with the period, even setting the Ibiks Weapon to 0.1 just to see if it'd do anything, but he still wont use the attack.
<s>I'll give a quick layout of pertinent information
Unit: Immortal (I did not make a copy, rather, edited the base unit which generated a green-colored duplicate.)
Combat - Weapons - Turret: Immortal
Combat - Weapons - Weapons: Phase Disruptor (Custom), Planetary Fortress Ibiks Cannon (Custom)
Weapon: Phase Disruptor (Custom)
Stats - Backswing: 0
Stats - Period: 3
Options - Can Initiate Attack, all others are unchecked.
Effect - Effect: Immortal - Phase Disruptor Copy (Damage)
Weapon: Planetary Fortress Ibiks Cannon (Custom)
Stats - Backswing: 0
Stats - Period: 0.3
Options - Continuous Scan, all others are unchecked. (I have tried various permutations of Initiate Attack, Fire atr Attack Target, and Only Fire When Attacking to no avail.)
Effect - Effect: Planetary Fortress - Twin Ibiks Cannon Copy (Damage)
Also, as to BorgDragon's final comment: Is there any particular way to force the second weapon to wait for it's period duration before firing on an initial attack? This info will be more useful to me once I get the above snafu corrected, of course. x:</s>
</s></s></s></s></s>
I've been able to figure out how to get a unit to fire two weapons at the exact same time. What I'd like to be able to do is have the unit fire it's weapons based on the period intervals.
Ultimately, it does make sense to me. Designing the editor for power and capability will enable creation of assets, maps, and mods of high depth and quality. This is sure to come with an increasingly steep learning curve, as complexity is a natural byproduct of favoring control over automation. Me being less able to toy with the device is far smaller a loss than the community being unable to harness it's power for creation.
However, there are points at which tedium is expected and points at which tedium is unnecessary. There is also the matter of information overload, as well as the ability to get to what you need to get to in the most efficient manner as possible.
In no way should the editor be dumbed down. However, as being given control can increase complexity, it can also used to decrease it when it's not necessary. The Data Editor is the biggest point of discussion, in regards to it's layout, it's lag, and the amount of information presented.
Some beneficial changes would be permitting users to sort any list of data by their own criteria, such as moving the most-frequented values that you edit to the top of the list. As someone else mentioned, allowing us to hide / filter values in which we have little or no need to modify would also be a great feature.
I'm not sure if you can do this presently, but the ability to break any single aspect of the editor off as a separate window would be nice too, especially if you were to use it as a reference in other parts of the editor without having to jump back and forth between them.
I can certainly see the merit in the layout sentiment. It all seems so complex, so my mind begs for simplicity just to start cobbling things together again. But I wouldn't doubt a good portion of that complexity is simply inordinate amounts of tedium because somebody took a boulder to the drawing board when they were penning the UI and they thought the crumbly mess on the ground was a good idea.
It's...actually mind boggling to me that they wouldn't take better care of WorldEdit. I'd venture to say that the editor and UMS are why a big chunk of players even bother with the games. I hate WC3 melee, the whole creeping thing is a pain to me, but the custom content was always a hoot and hooked me for a solid five years. Outstanding value for the price paid. Then again, the melee is probably what makes blizzard big bucks, through sponsorships and e-sports and whatnot. Especially with Starcraft and the pedigree it carries.
The publishing limitation is ludicrous, that much is for certain. I don't see how that could have ever been a good idea. Nor can I grasp why they want to centralize Battle.net so badly. The old one was just dandy, and the P2P model worked fine. Strange how the new one feels less like a community than the old one.
I want to believe they're not dense enough to keep things this way, even if history says otherwise. I adore the base game, but all the new features that were supposed to be so exciting are...not. And to praise and hype this editor so much at blizzcon? Could they really leave it in such a sordid state?
Someone did a pokemon proof-of-concept with a single battle scene. It was wicked to see how it worked, and I've been rubbing my hands in anticipation for something awesome and poke-themed to come out. But from what I'm learning, the chances of that happening to it's potential seem...dull, if at all.
I don't have any reason to doubt what you've said but...I hope they deny history a repeated cycle and work to make this tool as awesome as it can be. I'm a bit put off that they've said nothing about what they intend for the editor in 1.1...but I'd love to be surprised, as I'm sure the whole community would be too.
Always wishing for the best. And trying not to let this blue news depress me, either!
Uh... Arsenal was not difficult to use. And if it was, Datedit corrected any of the issues. The difficulty came from the lack of publicly available information, but I tutored a total newbie to making AO-level effects within about a week or two due to how user friendly the Starcraft tools are. You'd be right if you said Iscript was a bit complicated, but it's easier to break into than even the most basic functions of the SC2 data editor. Meanwhile the BW tools were hardened to perfection and are amongst the best made tools I have ever seen in any game.
Datedit/the Arsenal series should have been used as a basis and foundation for designing the SC2 editor's layout but that would have required effort and Blizzard would much rather be lazy and rush the editor out at the last moment. What's more likely is they used an in-house XML editor for making their data in the campaign. The random locations of values, extremely slow loading of interface elements, and vague nature of naming schemes makes even the most mundane of tasks a trial of endurance. Making a large-scale project with a lot of custom data will drive even the most hearty of men insane.
There is no excuse for the data editor being as clumsy and lazily organized as it is, other than the obvious - it was rushed and not thought out.
I can't say anything about triggers because I'm a modder, not a mapper.
The only tools I'm familiar with are Arsenal, Stardraft, Stargraft, and the various MPQ explorers / packers. I was younger at the time, and probably just didn't click with it. Either way, the point I was making is that there are professional-grade tools out there which require a high level of expertise to use, but Blizzard's editors have set a precedent for user-friendliness that, for whatever reason, GalaxyEdit has seemed to ditch. It's fine if you want to update the swiss army knife, but I still want to be able to get the can opener with one flick and eat my spaghettioes. Layers are great for this, placing levels of simplified, possibly restricted functionality while also allowing the user to choose to open up deeper layers of complexity where control becomes finer at the cost of automation and ease of use.
It may all really fall onto the data editor, and if cleaning that up will make this something fun to use again, then by all means.
I'm hopeful that Blizzard will be making improvements to the editor in times to come. Nobody can say for certain why it's ended up this way, whether through simple neglect or developer oversight. Maybe the ascent to the editor's power overtook foresight regarding usability and form. Maybe they really wanted to finish up the game itself and get to the editor later. Even with it's labyrinthine nature, a lot of cool maps are coming out, so that if nothing else is great news.
It'd be really hard for me to imagine them leaving it this way. Unless they plan to have editor improvements as a selling feature of Heart of the Swarm. >_>;
The editor has a simple section, it's called the Map editor. All you need to do is make a map, no custom triggers or data editing required. If you want to make something more exotic, you'll need to learn like the rest of us. And once you do, and you make your first working unit or whatever at the point where it's not a struggle, you'll feel a sense of pride, because it was something that you done, all on your own. Happy days.
I wouldn't count on Blizz to make it any easier, though a helpful guide which explains things would be nice. The only reason it's dificult just now, is because somethings aren't explained fully. And I'm sure some modder will make a program to go along with GE to help simply the process involved, though it may mean alot of control would be lost.
Terrain editing is good fun in and of itself, but what I also like to do is make custom units, experiment with values and triggers, and see what kind of horrendous abominations I can come up with. I never had any problems doing this with WorldEdit. I grinned wide, opened it up, and dived right in, and it was a blast. I've made a few units following tutorials in Galaxyedit, but the process is always tedious and not fun at all. Unless one of the recent patches added some flow to this process.
I could understand the lack of user-friendliness regarding tools like Valve's Hammer Editor or the godforsaken Stargraft / Arsenal combos (which, actually, were also a lot of fun). Those tools are powerful and complex (moreso in Hammer's case), and designed specifically for users with the knowledge to use them with modding projects.
The problem here is precedent. StarEdit was very simple to use and recquired virtually no instruction (though, admittedly, this was also due to the game engine's inherent limitations). WorldEdit, while vastly more complex and capable, still made low-level functions like copying units and playing with the data or adding abilities / research to tech trees and whatnot. It was a powerful tool, but it was also a toy, and a lot of fun to play with.
GalaxyEdit, on the other hand, makes me feel as if I'd have to take a course in programming or spend hours plodding through tutorials just to work out basic tasks. While it may end up not being that hard, the tedium is still a factor. This may not be the best example, but James Rolfe, known widely as the Angry Video Game Nerd, has been making films all his life. In his younger years, he used mind-bogglingly haggard methods to do post-film audio and visual editing. It got the job done, but the limitations of what he could accomplish were tight and the methods time-consuming and error-prone. Nowadays, filmmakers can use digital editing software to both simplify and empower their practice in ways that simply were not possible before (on a consumer level) with programs like Adobe Premier and ect.
Those tools have a lot of depth, but also maintain a certain degree of user-friendliness that permits one to quickly edit and compile visual footage at their leisure. The range of possibility is infinitely greater than what it was before, and yet it turns out to be easier than some of the headache-inducers James Rolfe, and I'm sure many filmmakers, had to use.
Starcraft and Warcraft 3 had fame in big part to how expansive the range of possibilities that their editors permitted, while still being easy to use. I'm not saying that high level functions or triggering / programming tasks used to create some of the more ingenious maps be magically dumbed down.
But I would like to be able to play with my Starcraft Legos again without wanting to yank my hair out. In the end, it's likely I'll take the dive just out of desperation of wanting to resume my mad experiments. I'm just disappointed, I suppose, that the depth took a welcome step up while kicking the user-friendliness into the gutter.
I'll probably take the plunge when I get a free weekend. x: And thankyou for the welcome, EternalWraith!
I really loved StarEdit and WorldEdit for their ease of use, as I enjoy dabbling in terrain, unit, and trigger making just for the fun of it. They're like legos to me. One of the issues that I, and some other folks, have with GalaxyEdit is it's sheer complexity and tediousness involved with simple tasks, such as creating a new unit, changing building abilities, trigger functions which would seem basic (For the life of me I cannot figure out how to store a selected Unit's damage value and then modify it with triggers) but end up being headache inducing.
It seems the mapmaking community at large isn't having too much trouble with it, and that's great. But I'm wondering if there will ever be simplification / automation applied to editor for those who don't need the full range of depth provided? I was very excited to experiment with GalaxyEdit, but find myself overwhelmed by it. Will anything like this be in the works, such as the modified editors that were made for StarEdit and WorldEdit (EmeraldEdit comes to mind.)? I'd love to get back to carefree tinkering again. o:
0
0
0
I've been able to figure out how to get a unit to fire two weapons at the exact same time. What I'd like to be able to do is have the unit fire it's weapons based on the period intervals.
Example:
Immortal Weapons: Phase Disruptors (Custom), Photon Cannon (Custom)
The Disruptors would be set to fire every 10 seconds, while the Photon Cannon would be set to fire every 3 seconds.
The end result, when the Immortal attacks a ground unit, is as follows:
0sec: Target Acquired, Photon Cannon fires.
3sec: Photon Cannon fires.
6sec: Photon Cannon fires.
9sec: Photon Cannon fires.
10sec: Disruptor Cannon fires.
12, 15, 18sec: Photon Cannon fires.
20sec: Disruptor Cannon fires.
So on and so forth.
How might I go about accomplishing this? Thusfar, my attempts to figure it out have simply stumped me. D:
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0
I can certainly see the merit in the layout sentiment. It all seems so complex, so my mind begs for simplicity just to start cobbling things together again. But I wouldn't doubt a good portion of that complexity is simply inordinate amounts of tedium because somebody took a boulder to the drawing board when they were penning the UI and they thought the crumbly mess on the ground was a good idea.
It's...actually mind boggling to me that they wouldn't take better care of WorldEdit. I'd venture to say that the editor and UMS are why a big chunk of players even bother with the games. I hate WC3 melee, the whole creeping thing is a pain to me, but the custom content was always a hoot and hooked me for a solid five years. Outstanding value for the price paid. Then again, the melee is probably what makes blizzard big bucks, through sponsorships and e-sports and whatnot. Especially with Starcraft and the pedigree it carries.
The publishing limitation is ludicrous, that much is for certain. I don't see how that could have ever been a good idea. Nor can I grasp why they want to centralize Battle.net so badly. The old one was just dandy, and the P2P model worked fine. Strange how the new one feels less like a community than the old one.
I want to believe they're not dense enough to keep things this way, even if history says otherwise. I adore the base game, but all the new features that were supposed to be so exciting are...not. And to praise and hype this editor so much at blizzcon? Could they really leave it in such a sordid state?
Someone did a pokemon proof-of-concept with a single battle scene. It was wicked to see how it worked, and I've been rubbing my hands in anticipation for something awesome and poke-themed to come out. But from what I'm learning, the chances of that happening to it's potential seem...dull, if at all.
I don't have any reason to doubt what you've said but...I hope they deny history a repeated cycle and work to make this tool as awesome as it can be. I'm a bit put off that they've said nothing about what they intend for the editor in 1.1...but I'd love to be surprised, as I'm sure the whole community would be too.
Always wishing for the best. And trying not to let this blue news depress me, either!
0
The only tools I'm familiar with are Arsenal, Stardraft, Stargraft, and the various MPQ explorers / packers. I was younger at the time, and probably just didn't click with it. Either way, the point I was making is that there are professional-grade tools out there which require a high level of expertise to use, but Blizzard's editors have set a precedent for user-friendliness that, for whatever reason, GalaxyEdit has seemed to ditch. It's fine if you want to update the swiss army knife, but I still want to be able to get the can opener with one flick and eat my spaghettioes. Layers are great for this, placing levels of simplified, possibly restricted functionality while also allowing the user to choose to open up deeper layers of complexity where control becomes finer at the cost of automation and ease of use.
It may all really fall onto the data editor, and if cleaning that up will make this something fun to use again, then by all means.
I'm hopeful that Blizzard will be making improvements to the editor in times to come. Nobody can say for certain why it's ended up this way, whether through simple neglect or developer oversight. Maybe the ascent to the editor's power overtook foresight regarding usability and form. Maybe they really wanted to finish up the game itself and get to the editor later. Even with it's labyrinthine nature, a lot of cool maps are coming out, so that if nothing else is great news.
It'd be really hard for me to imagine them leaving it this way. Unless they plan to have editor improvements as a selling feature of Heart of the Swarm. >_>;
0
Terrain editing is good fun in and of itself, but what I also like to do is make custom units, experiment with values and triggers, and see what kind of horrendous abominations I can come up with. I never had any problems doing this with WorldEdit. I grinned wide, opened it up, and dived right in, and it was a blast. I've made a few units following tutorials in Galaxyedit, but the process is always tedious and not fun at all. Unless one of the recent patches added some flow to this process.
I could understand the lack of user-friendliness regarding tools like Valve's Hammer Editor or the godforsaken Stargraft / Arsenal combos (which, actually, were also a lot of fun). Those tools are powerful and complex (moreso in Hammer's case), and designed specifically for users with the knowledge to use them with modding projects.
The problem here is precedent. StarEdit was very simple to use and recquired virtually no instruction (though, admittedly, this was also due to the game engine's inherent limitations). WorldEdit, while vastly more complex and capable, still made low-level functions like copying units and playing with the data or adding abilities / research to tech trees and whatnot. It was a powerful tool, but it was also a toy, and a lot of fun to play with.
GalaxyEdit, on the other hand, makes me feel as if I'd have to take a course in programming or spend hours plodding through tutorials just to work out basic tasks. While it may end up not being that hard, the tedium is still a factor. This may not be the best example, but James Rolfe, known widely as the Angry Video Game Nerd, has been making films all his life. In his younger years, he used mind-bogglingly haggard methods to do post-film audio and visual editing. It got the job done, but the limitations of what he could accomplish were tight and the methods time-consuming and error-prone. Nowadays, filmmakers can use digital editing software to both simplify and empower their practice in ways that simply were not possible before (on a consumer level) with programs like Adobe Premier and ect.
Those tools have a lot of depth, but also maintain a certain degree of user-friendliness that permits one to quickly edit and compile visual footage at their leisure. The range of possibility is infinitely greater than what it was before, and yet it turns out to be easier than some of the headache-inducers James Rolfe, and I'm sure many filmmakers, had to use.
Starcraft and Warcraft 3 had fame in big part to how expansive the range of possibilities that their editors permitted, while still being easy to use. I'm not saying that high level functions or triggering / programming tasks used to create some of the more ingenious maps be magically dumbed down.
But I would like to be able to play with my Starcraft Legos again without wanting to yank my hair out. In the end, it's likely I'll take the dive just out of desperation of wanting to resume my mad experiments. I'm just disappointed, I suppose, that the depth took a welcome step up while kicking the user-friendliness into the gutter.
I'll probably take the plunge when I get a free weekend. x: And thankyou for the welcome, EternalWraith!
0
I really loved StarEdit and WorldEdit for their ease of use, as I enjoy dabbling in terrain, unit, and trigger making just for the fun of it. They're like legos to me. One of the issues that I, and some other folks, have with GalaxyEdit is it's sheer complexity and tediousness involved with simple tasks, such as creating a new unit, changing building abilities, trigger functions which would seem basic (For the life of me I cannot figure out how to store a selected Unit's damage value and then modify it with triggers) but end up being headache inducing.
It seems the mapmaking community at large isn't having too much trouble with it, and that's great. But I'm wondering if there will ever be simplification / automation applied to editor for those who don't need the full range of depth provided? I was very excited to experiment with GalaxyEdit, but find myself overwhelmed by it. Will anything like this be in the works, such as the modified editors that were made for StarEdit and WorldEdit (EmeraldEdit comes to mind.)? I'd love to get back to carefree tinkering again. o: