Destructible information variables and changing terrain - switching.

Okay-ee, long time, no see, not much of the seeing in the first place, but whatever. Made a similar post in the terraining-forum, realizing this is something of a repost, but anyhow, was suggested that this was more of a trigger thing... So, well. Blah, read on.

Point of the matter is that I peered a bit at the old WEU and discovered some interesting functions which weren't there... eh... last time I checked - changing terrain tiles by triggers, for example. What I suddenly felt like doing was creating a map which could switch between seasons - a summer and a winter version, basically.

What I want to be able to do, but haven't figured out in, ach, an hour of twiddling, is to 1) switch a specific tile inside a specified region with another tile (preferably keeping tile variations intact) and 2) switch destructibles of a particular type inside a given region, maintaining position in X, Y and Z axes, scale and variation.

That is to say, I'd plan to make two versions of every tree-type: one with a summer texture, one with a winter. And at a given event, all trees would - poof - be given wintry appearances, but maintain all other aspects, preferably. I'm keen on the z-axis to stick; I do twiddle around quite a bit with that. WEU had some Advance-type trigger which allowed you to specify all these things - X, Y position, scale, variation, height(Z) - but I didn't manage to figure out how one could convert the values of one destructible into variables to use when placing the new one.

The terrain-changing thing I found under Environment - Change Terrain Type, I believe. It seemed a clever tool, but I didn't figure out how, if possible, to change only a particular terrain type - it seemed limited to just circles and rectangles. Would be neat if one could, well, yeah, do what I want. Hee hee.

Of course, I don't know very well the inner workings behind the terrain-change-thing. Would it put a huge load on the computers to switch terrain around like that in a big, action-filled multiplayer map?

Much obliged!

That's likely. It most likely would be less effort to just make the terrain on one half of the map, then duplicate it and modify the tileset and destructables, and then modify the camera bounds and move units ingame to make the switch.

You'd have to iterate every single tile on the map and perform a few operations on it, so if the map is sufficiently large you'll hit the thread OP limit quite easily.

Aside from that, I know of no way to keep destructible Z-height, variations, or even facing intact when replacing the destructibles, so the only way I can think of it is to use units with locust, and then block pathing by using pathing blockers manually.

That would allow you to replace the trees easily.