Hero spells and thier Position

in the battle.net post it seemed like he was editing the mpq, i only skimmed it though. if this is the case, bah to it! i'm going to reread it. if it is the case, i have another possible solution to the button thingy.

Nautilus, as far as I can tell there's no way around it. I've done a series (about 30) of trial & error tests, using specific things, like adding Blink! only, and adding the modified AbilityFunc's, and only using protection.

EVERY GAME, With a map modified by EITHER AbilityFunc.txt's, or the Unitdata file the Enhanced WE thing puts in, the game would drop people as soon as it started, 'split' the game into two, drop randomly.

Only the protector seems to be safe to use right now imho.
Which is unfortunate.

I'm really tired, I still had a couple ideas but I'll test them out and post any results tomorrow. One of them involved the hotkeys and stuff. I was thinking if you made a trigger that checked for the key typed in, then would cast the spell, that might work. Of course you'd have to check to make sure that player's hero already had the spell ability and I'm sure there's a couple of variables in here. Again, I'm sorry this probably seems rather incoherent but it's almost 3 A.M. here :D Anyway, I'm wondering if there's a way that you can sort of 'cycle' through abilities. That is, once some abilities are fully upgraded, the slot that it's in (when you click to upgrade your ability) is replaced with a new ability. Once you return to the main options, you'll still probably have just the original learned spells visible and can only click on them, and that's where you bring in checking for stuff typed in or the like. So, basically, you could have tons of spells and upgrade through a chain of them, but in order to cast additional spells you would need to type something in. Is this plausible? It is this early hehe. I'm hoping someone will back me up and explore the scripts/trigs with me to try and make it work.

I am a newbie at this and so my simple question is, does the mirror image ability give you blademaster images no matter what hero, or does it copy the actual heroes image and change the color? The second question is, how do I edit the stats of the abilities, like the damage of Inferno? Thanx to all these veteran map creators for their knowledge.

mirror=all heroes units can use it =)

dmage of inferno=change stats of inferno creep
=)

The spell placement stuff is really INSANE. Seems like it would have been better to have button placement and hotkeys attached to unit types. Pick a spell, placement, and hotkey. That would have elmintated most conflicts.

Anyway, I have a hero that uses ablilites along with hero ablilies. Now nothing gets pushed off, but there is a conflict of hotkeys. So I want one spell (an ablilty) to come first because it is more used than the other one.

Now here is the tricky bit. With NO changes made to the unit type, OR any changes made to the order in which the hero abilites were picked, the posisions changed on me.

I have 2 ablilites: Hurl Boulder, and Firebolt (Warlock).
and 2 hero abilites: Mana Burn, and Sleep

Sometimes when Mana Burn is selected, it goes after the 2 abilites. So the buttons look like this: Hurl Boulder, Fire Bolt, Mana Burn

Then sometimes, it pushes the 2 abilies down the line, and get put at the front: Mana Burn, Hurl Boulder, Fire Bolt

This doesnt make any sense to me. In my map, I have a trigger that fills a bunch of rooms with random monsters. It seems to be that when i disable the trigger, the first configeration happens. When i turn it back on, the second one happens. I really don't see how that trigger can have anything to do with ablilty placement.

Lately I've been working on skins and ideas for a either a new CTF or a Corrupted Night Elf team. When on battle.net, I noticed that someone had got the slot change to work on a ancient protecter hero for a gladiators map. After thinking out what method would be best, I think that a combination of using abilities that work for the slots they normaly go in and choosing some other non-hero abilities to go to the top two button slots (where shadomeld usually goes) would work best. For example, I would make a hero called Corrupt Farseer with the hero abilites of Death Coil, Farsight, Dark Ritual,and Animate Dead. I would then place a Raise dead skill in the top left skill slot. Does anyone know a problem with using this method before I go and make a level?

PS-DON'T USE MY CORRUPT FARSEER HERO WITHOUT PERMISSION

Oh yeah, will having a limit of only four players allow me to edit it without messing up anything?

I AM CONFUSED!!! Say I created a new Hero and I want to add current spells and a created spell, how will I do that?

With Excel file I just downloaded from the first post, Excel said it wasn't a valid file format... Maybe I'll redownload it.

Naut, yes you can do it through typing and to disable/enable spells simply make triggers to turn on/off the trigger that supports the spell. I've done this in my maps and it works just fine but the problem with these verbally initialized spells is that in multiplayer maps, it WILL be a spamfest...ability positioning, from what I understand, is not possible to do due to the inability to transfer it through maps due to some map reading error that causes people to disconnect. Cycling through skills to upgrade certain "branches" or what not can be done too, but I dont think cycling them through whats visible is possible.

I just had a funky idea.
What if you gave it the ability to build things, then make it able to build a bunch of custom buildings with the icons and tooltips and hotkeys (So, therefore, impossible to tell the two apart) of spells. Then when you click on the icon to 'build', it registers this and casts the appropriate spell. It's like an 11-slot spellbook.

-DM

Thanks for all your help. I have encountered a new problem with my map. Let me give you the scenario. Each player has a custom building near their town hall to start (There are five players so I used the dragon roost buildings). I have designed three special hero "generals" for each player. These generals are super powerful, so at the dragon roosts, you have the option at the beginning of the game, to select and train one of the heroes for free, and never be able to build or ressurect him or any other hero after that. Here is where I am in the process, and where my problem has occured:
-The heroes are created and imported
-The dragon roosts have been customized to be able to build each hero, and have been placed near each persons town hall
-Upon testing my setup, the dragon roosts allow for infinite reproduction of the hero, and other selectable heroes even though I think I have set all the options such as "stock number" etc. in the unit editor to 1.
Can anyone tell me how I can make this scenario work? Thanks for your time! Happy map making!:D

I tried this and the new abilities never appeared, even with EditorSuffix= added to the string file. Also, someone in #wc3campaigns just told me that changes to AbilityData.slk are ignored by the game.

I have run into this behavior from WC3 as well. When modifying skill positions purely by editing *Func.txt, WC3 will use the old button postions if yoy load your map as soon as you start the game - but WC3 will you the modified positions if you have previously loaded any map.

It seems as if *.txt gets precached at load time, and the cache does not get purged until after one map has been played - or something to that effect - maybe because the mpq's have already been loaded for showing the title screen credits?

I guess it is only a small problem, as your map works fine for everyone after the first game played - but it is annoying. Has anyone found a technique that will work upon first load?

Yes, so i've seen many posts back and forth concerning this issue and decided to hopefully leave a post that will answer everyone's questions.

So:

Hero abilities, as you know, default to a certain position when they are researched and used. Now, you can't edit any spells as of 1.01, but i have heard that you can add rows to Units/AbilityData.slk according to weaaddar here. i'll have to try that out.

so you can't edit spells, how are you going to get all those kickin' auras on if they all overlap and thus push a few other abilities off the command menu?

all the buttons in all of the command menu have a position array that determines where their graphics goes during gametime. it's a two dimensional array, the first value is from 0 to 3, indicating the x position on the command menu. the second value is from 0 to 2, the y position. so the button [0, 0] is the top left button, which will always be Move. You can actually edit these array values so that you can put the abilities wherever you want. in this case, youll just move the buttons around so that you can get at least 4 abilities you wanted for a certain hero.

now, how do we go about doing this? well first, youll need to have your hands on an mpq viewer, the popular one is WinMPQ. this link just downloads a program that will in turn download winMPQ, im sure someone has a direct link, but this is what i have. get mpq, load up war3.mpq, find and extract these files:

Units\HumanAbilityFunc.txt
Units\NeutralAbilityFunc.txt
Units\NightElfAbilityFunc.txt
Units\OrcAbilityFunc.txt
Units\UndeadAbilityFunc.txt

but them in a temp folder or whatnot. when you open them up, youll see all the units corresponding to the respective race with multiple varibles. the only two youre concerned about are the where # indicates a value from either 0 to 3 or 0 to 2 (see above explanation). the Buttonpos is where the button will be when its available to use, the Researchbuttonpos is where the button will be when you want to learn it.

example:
Divine Shield in Units\HumanAbilityFunc.txt:


we're worried with once again the Buttonpos and Researchbuttonpos. you wanted the keeper of the grove to have this in is 3rd button bottom row, and when you want to add it, for some bizarre reason you want it in the 2nd button middle row. it should look like this when youre done editing:


save the text file into a folder where you put your map. finish your map, and now grab MPQ2K. now youre ready to add the text file to the map so that those settings will overwrite the default values. the way you do that, get into DOS, get into the directory where they are both kept, copy the MPQ2K program as well, and type this:


where <mapname> is, well, if you can't guess, kill yourself right now
and <race> is what Race you edited whether it be Human, Orc, Undead, NightElf, or that non-race Neutral...race. right, so just do that and BAM!

you map is now ready with all the changes, so open up war3 and play it.

IF IF IF IF IF IF IF you want to make changes, note that you have to do the whole merging process again, changing the map in the world editor after this step will save the map, overwriting the old map, and by doing such will delete your precious text file.

have fun with it, please feel free to point out if i've made any grammatical errors.

and if i have, you know what i meant to say.