Town Portal destination and doodads as special effects.

1) Is there any way to alter the destination of where you get when you double click on the town portal scroll? Instead of the closest town hall it would help the easiness of my map out profoundly if I found a way to designate another place.

2) On my map I have these control points where you get extra gold per minute for holding them. It works great, but as a finishing touch I'd like to see the Horde/Alliance flag (whoever's currently in control). For this I applied the doodad flag as a special effect, but then it appears in profile, so you don't really see the flag after all. So is there a way to rotate this special effect 90 degrees?


I understand that these issues could be something I'll have to live with, but I thought it would hurt to ask

1) I think I remember something about town portal items defaulting to the location at which your purchased them. I don't know if there's a way to trick the system so that when you purchase the item at point A, it removes the item, has a dummy purchase a new item from point B, and transfer the item to the original purchaser. This is all speculation, I really have no solid advice, and I doubt you will be able to find a real solution.

2) Use a unit with the flag model, and make it face any direction you want.

Yeah, for number 1 I don't think there is a perfect way to do it. I'm sure it's hard-coded. We could help you find a way to work around it with some more info. On your map is there more than one town hall or just one? If there is only one, then just make a non-scroll of TP item and give it a dummy effect. When that item ability is used, make it portal to the townhall to which you would like it to go.

Szythe is correct in saying that Scrolls of Town Portal teleport you back to the hall closest to where the hero got them/picked them up. Now, it might be possible to exploit this by, say, moving the hero to the location where you want to portal to go to, having it drop the item, forcing it to pick up the item, and then moving it back to its previous location instantly... but I've never tried that.

It's possible, though not very likely, that you can do something about this by screwing with the start locations, there's a whole API for start locations, but I don't know if that'll get you anywhere.

I think you're wrong about that. Double clicking on a Town Portal Scroll clearly gets you to the closest building with "Town Hall" status. Else the above suggestions were really good.

Strange, I seemed to remember this problem occurring in Elimination Tournament, and it was discovered at that time that TP's would return to where you bought them. After making a test map to confirm this though, it appears that Neversleeping is absolutely right, and TP's will always return to the closest town hall-type building.

Here's a very simple solution to this problem:

I could have sworn they sent you to your highest level town hall (and if you had more than 1 of the same level, probably the closest). In fact, I think the original TP tooltip says "Highest level town hall". I might be confusing it with a different teleporting item,t hough.

Well, regardless of where the TP tries to send you to, the above trigger will work to redirect you to whichever one you want.

That trigger will override the double-click teleport, but it will also override the single click teleport. This might be okay for your use, maybe not.

I was pretty sure when you double click an item (actually you are ordering the item to be used on itself) it will work as if you pointed at the location where you picked it up/purchased/received. You might try moving the unit to where you need to teleport and then drop/give the scroll to it and move it back. This might be unnoticeable, I haven't tried it.

Also I remember having a problem with issuing an order as a response to "issued order" command, making WC3 crash. That was a long time ago though, maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah, the problem will be that it overrides the normal precision teleport as well, which is extremely important to my map. It's huge, and you'll sometimes need to TP around to defend bases and control points.

This isn't crucial anyhow, but would certainly be less painful for newbies to easier butt out of combat and back to the altar to heal, in an easy manner. Veterans will know exactly where the altar is, and if they don't, pressing the esc key will move you screen there. It'll have to work for now.

Many thanks anyway. You guys are really helpful! :)

Actually, if you looked at the trigger you would notice that it does not interrupt the normal single-click teleport. The target of a single-click teleport is not an item, its a building. The trigger checks that the TARGET of the order is a TP scroll. The only normal way you can issue an order targeting an item is to use a TP scroll on itself, the trigger only activates when you double-click the scroll, NOT when you use the scroll on a building

You're absolutely right. It works like a charm!!

A thousand thanks, man.