Hive's Nexus - Beta 8.2

For general map info read this thread....

http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...ighlight=nexus

Think we have closed in on the desync problem. The Master alchemist quest looks like the problem. Its a massively looped quest engine that will need to be reworked. Its disabled this ver so no infused weapons. Infusers can be used in the faction quest still so they are useful.

We also disabled item decay. It was not working as we wanted. That will need to be retooled as well.

Factions are there but not fully implemented yet. They will only give simple item quests. You cannot ally with them yet. Much more will be done with them latter.

We are going to remove the random terrain in favor of more detailed fixed terrain. This will make the map look much better and get rid of the big lag spike at the begininng of the game.

If you have lag issues while playing turn your graphic settings down. Especialy particals and model detail. You will hardly notice the difference and it will help a lot. This goes for any custom map. We learned this trick while playing TD's. WC3 was not made to handle the number of units that are often used in custom maps so it has issues handling them. Even if you have a good graphics card and comp it can still make the games smoother.

Please test the map and give us feedback here or by e-mail.
Contact - [email protected]

Edit: Updated ver in a latter post

I dunno what it is but i'll try it out:D , a pitty lots of features haven't been implemented yet.

desty

hive mind, i will never get yoused to you refering to yourselfs as us and we. its cool, but it still wil ltake getting yoused to.

will try map. sounds awsome. btw; this is mainly a bump on an awsome map

I will never get used to your typos, EarthxFury.

Awesome map Hivemind, glad to see that the desync stuff is fixed.

Well here is my short feedback.


I started as Undead and picked the Deathknight.

The first annoying this was: There was a big ugly other death knight in the middle of the base.. and it was mine.. on f1 and my main hero was f2... whenever i tried to select the big ugly death knight, he got deselected by trigger. Now here comes the fun in: all items i bought went into the inventory of the big ugly knight, not into the inventory of my hero. cause of the deselecting i had to waste 5 minutes finding a way to get my items from this big ugly thing. BUAH!
next...thing..is.. this.. big ugly guy was shooting the whole time all over the map (i think at the other big ugly guys) for no reason and that was pretty annoying.. not to mention that a creepcamp of a dark troll priest and 2 dragon whelps just did this: the priest put my hero to sleep and the dragons shot over half the map at my big ugly guy.....
The Items are..... boring, really boring, and not really balanced. C'mon an Evasion Items for 700? So easy to get 95% evasion of gg.
Well my hero... not to mention that he got 2 passiv skills and nothing really special or cool (if u look at all those dota, aos, .. maps and the possibilities)... and one of the passiv skills was like "1.lvl "+110% attackspeed" ... *cough*

and the last negative thing:
its ugly like hell. the bases, the middle and the rest is just ugly




BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT:
I think the "style" of the map is great. You just need to get creative on the items and make everything look at least decent.. maybe some works on the heroes and get the big ugly guy be gone and place a stupid castle there or something

Thanx for the feedback.


That is the undead king. His portate is different than the Black Knight (Deathknight) so as not to confuse ppl who play that hero. He is suposed to stay in the middle of the castle. Thats why he is deselected by trigger and told to return there if you manage to click fast enough to actualy give him a order. This is also why he moves at a snails pace.

He shouldnt ever be close enough to a item shop to buy anything. Except maybe hiring a mercenary, which we have never seen show up in a inventory. Maybe the 300 rapid select and move orders you had to give him to get him near the item shop should have been a clue. Or maybe not. We will buff up his anti select/move trigger for those who insist on trying to get him killed. You lose when he dies btw.

Not sure exactly why you couldnt just press f2 to select your main hero instead of trying to get to him with f1 since that only sends you to the king. We will look into this problem.


Never seen that before. Maybe has something to do with the fact that he was moved. Define "shooting all over the map". No exactly sure what you mean by that.


Most of the items are just filler for now. We want to finish the hero skills before we create and balance all the items. There are some cool quest items you can get once we get the quest engine to stop randomly booting players.

Item evasion stacks? Didnt think it did. If so we will change it. As it stands 700 for that item is a fair price.


Most of the hero skills are quicky mods of standard spells. Some have a little work put into them, most dont. None are finalized yet. We have just started enhancing them with triggers. Some will be jazzed up and some will be replaced. Yes, that hero has nothing special yet. That will change latter.

All skills have 5 levels so they wont be all that impressive at lvl 1. By lvl 5 they become mighty. You failed to mention that 110% attack speed skill also comes with a move speed bonus that can (when pumped up a bit) make him the fastest char in the game. Even so that is one of our least favorate skills and will prob be replaced/modified. We dont like him having 2 passive skills either. It will prob be replaced with a self buff of some kind.


There was something negative? Hmm musta missed it. As we said in the first post the terrain was set to be randomly genorated. It works but looks like 3 day old toe cheese. So it will be scrapped and replaced.

We do like the bases though. We have never seen another AoS with castles that have functional gates. Or even just castles for that matter. They are mainly empty so you have room to build inside them. Yes, you can actualy do that. Infact you can do all kinds of cool things. Try walking realy close to a cave (goldmine) and see what happens. Take a look around the outside walls of your castle. You will find a faction building there. get close to enter it.

As it said in the map description...This is a beta ver and is not complete. It has been hell getting everything working on the technical side. We are close to hammering out the basic game functions into a well oiled machine. When that is done we will add all the polish you could ask for.

As far as we know nobody has even tried to make a map like this. We have done the whole thing alone. It has been a long hard haul but we can now see the light at end of th.............................. Oh %$#@ TRAIN!
0_o

I figured that also out ;-) But there is the annoying part...


Well. He seems to have an "overallrange" that is quite wierd. All items i bought (without moving him.. ) went into his inventory, cause ALL shops selected him by default.
I didnt move him anywhere.


I can press F2. After pressing F1 since somewhere in the warcraft3classic beta it is harder then u think to just press "f2", cuz in every battle that gets hot, ill press f1 again and thats annoying. This big guy doesnt need to be a Hero at all. Make him a basic unit^^ No portait


He wasnt moved. He did it from the beginning. He was the whole time fighting with someone on the other side of the map.. he was leeching.. evading.. using his avatar whenever possible...
AND I DID NOT MOVE HIM...


Ah ok, just wanted to mention it :-)


Yea. In Maps like SurvivalX I just sell my ankh and healpot and buy 95% Evasion at the start with vampaura^^ :-)


Ah ok, just wanted to mention it :-)

The 110% Attackspeed seems to be wrong or unbalanced anyway. I think it was a typo and it is 10% ...




Yea the caves were quite cool :-P I checked that all out and I look forward to play the next versions ;-)
Overall this is already a cool map and would be already awesome if it would look better^^ :-P

Thats strange. We have tested the map many times and never seen any of that kind of thing with the king nor has anyone ever mentioned a problem like that. He doesnt have a realy long range. We have seen realy strange bugs that will show up one game and then never again.

For example we played a game where our hero would not follow a command until he completed his previous one. So if we told him to move to the other side of the map we would have no control untill he got there. If we gave him a command while he was moving it would follow that command after he got to the other side of them. It was realy wierd but only happend one time. There are no triggers that should have caused anything like that.

Maybe it was a onetime bug like that. Can you see if you can make it happen again. Chose the same hero and go to same shop and all.

We might go back and change the king setup. We are using his level to effect some quests and latter we wanted quests that would add things to his inventory. But we could change all that if he is too much of a problem.

Hehe the 110% attack speed dosent mean +110% it means 110% total. So you are right it is 10%. We can change the tool tip.

We cant do any testing right now but when we get a chance we will check out the evasion thing. It normaly says does not stack with evasion so we expected it wouldnt stack. If it does then thats a problem.

Edit: We checked the item Evasion. Stacking doesnt seem to make it any better so we will leave it as is for now.

Well.. he did it from the beginnung. The test started with 1 Player in the first Nightelven Slot and 1 Player in the first Undead slot. We had a server split at the starting lag and so i was alone, even before i did anything, i noticed the big guy shooting big necromancer balls around...

You didnt mention the server split :bgrun:

Thats one of the main things we have been trying to fix. Thought we had it. Found and removed several causes already. Including a severe one that droped everyone shortly after the game started. Hopefully removing the random terrain engine will stop what happened in your game.

Has anybody elce had a server split? Please let us know. This has been the major hold up with this map. It should have been finished a month ago. If its not stable its not playable. Unplayable = worthless. So we need to know if there is still a lot of server splits going on. If you hear the rolling thunder sound that means a player has dropped. Check to see how many drop at once. If its more than one its probibly a server split. Better yet test with ppl you know so you know for sure they didnt just drop.

About the King-
We werent questioning what you saw. We where wondering if it was a one time major feak out bug with WC3 or a problem we need to fix with the map. As we said we have run a lot of tests and never seen anything like that. We dont use the f keys to select heroes so as far as we can guess that would be the only thing you did that we havent. However the odds are many ppl used them in games we ran and nobody mentioned anything like that.

Replacing the kings with a non hero would be a pain since they are called as variables about a hundred times. But if there is a major problem with them we will do it. The inventory would be a easy fix...just remove the Inventory-Hero ability.

BTW: We figured out something cool with Inventory-Hero. If you give the ability to a non-hero they can carry items and use them. If they die all items drop on the ground unless they have an ank which will activate. We did this with the Pack Mule unit and other transport units you can hire.

We tried using the Pack Mule ability. It made it so you could trasfer and hold items but if you tried to pick up or drop a item it would dissapear. Not sure how this was ment to be used. Maybe it was ment to be combined with select hero or something. The standard Pack Horse unit has no abilities at all.

OK, we havent had much time and the comp we are using right now cant run the game to test. We can use the editor tho. So we updated the Master Alchemist quests and item decay. This should fix the bugs (we hope).

Please test and let us know if you get desync or if items decay right after they spawn. Decay is set to be around 15 min. We will prob reduce this time latter. Quest items (Infusers, Eye, Urn, Heart, Hammer, Shaft, Crystals and a few other things) should never decay. Items held by heroes shouldnt decay. If any of that happens let us know.

We may get some time this weekend to put out a larger update, not sure yet. We are going to try to streamline the unit control prevention code. The King code needs to be updated and the rest wouldnt hurt. We also want to redo the terrain and do some more spell and item work. Maybe even finish all the heroes. Btw, the yellow heroes in the corners are going to priest types. They will focus on healing, buffs and troop support skills. If all that goes well we might have time to expand the faction system. That will add new game dynamics and more quests types.

The last game function we have plans to add are statues. They will be activated by a quest item. Once activated they will cast spells (and maybe do some other things) for the team that activates them. They prob wont walk around or attack things and will prob always be invulnerable. To stop one you would need to get the quest item that activates them and turn it to your side. These may be linked to factions, not sure about that yet.

Edit: Updated ver in latter post

What about making the king a neutral passive unit? There doesn't seem to be any specific advantage to having him be controlled by a player.

Also, someone (I think dataangel) mentioned that if you give a unit the Locust ability (something like "ALoc"), it will become unselectable. That seems like a better plan than the unselection trigger (which has always seemed a little sloppy to me).

I have learned to use parentheses.

The king needs to be attackable by all 3 opposing forces. This could be done with triggers. That would create a situation where all opposing units would attack the king in favor of all other targets. We want other units to be part of the battle around the king. For example we might add a quest that adds bodyguards around the king.



The Aloc ability does make units unselctable. However it also makes them unattackable, invisable on minimap and turns off collision both for and against. Its works great for units used in spells but not good for player forces.

We have a lot more going on than a "unselect...stop" trigger used in most maps. Our situation is different since the units cant be unorderable (the get orders via trigger) and we have no empty player slots to put them in. We have 3 triggers that work together to deny control and still allow them to get orders from triggers.

It works great with regular units but the king has slightly different code since he is suposed to react different. That code could be refined some. The code for units is hardly noticeable. You have to work at it to get them to do anything. When you do they follow your order for half a second then go do something elce. Since we have some ideas on how to improve the kings code we can also apply it to spawned units even they dont realy need it. All it would do for them is make it less noticable that you have been denied control.


:D

Good news. we have a few days off so we will be able to get some more work done. Will have a new ver out soon.

All new terrain. Looks much better now. Fixed some bugs and reduced the spawn. Some hero changes and quests should work now. Undead sometimes has a problem with floating text showing which is used in quests. Not sure whats causing it.

Still getting desync. This is getting old. its not as bad as before but its still there. The good news is the map is playable with only a few people. Teams do auto balance for dropped players so its still a good game.

We wont be able to run any more tests for about a week but we can do updates. We work out of town and cant play it on our laptop. We can use the editor though. Wont have a lot of time to do anything big till we get back. We will run some major crash tests to try and locate the last causes of desync when we get back from work.

Here is a screen shot of the new terrain...

Still have a lot of hero work to do. No big fancy skills yet. Some are cool but most could use a overhaul. The items will be done after we get a feel for the hero balance. Then Finish factions and do final balance and polish. Its coming along....slowly.

And the map...