Cube Defense Balls Edition

OK. Its a TD.
Just Another TD ?
-No way.

Cube Defense Balls Edition is the sequel of my good old Cube Defense New Edition. It will be very original, with many UNIQUE features unseen before.

Here are most of me of the already implemented features :
-Upgradeable Hero Builder that can freely blink or auto blink.
-Difficulty dialogs for attackers HP and Speed.
-Player Lives multiboard with colored bars that dynamically resize.
-Scrolling Text Display Panel on each player's ground.
-Dynamically chooses Host.
-Host & players special chat commands.
-REAL WALLS - based on the basic Blocking Tower, that automatically links to all nearby blocking towers will walls and unlinks when sold/killed.
-Blocking Towers also have a very useful ability for mazing :
"Build Blocking Towers Wall" that builds a gold costing line of Blocking
Towers to the tageted point.
-3 different upgrade series for the guard tower : Defense/Cannon/Magic
-3 'function' towers : Poison / Ice / Fire / Stone or Metal (upgradeable)
-2 special towers for outside maze : Anti-Air and Energy (upgradeable)
-a powerful Bouncing Tower that costs 1 bonus point to be upgraded to its
ultimate form, having then a "roar-like" ability.
-a special serie of towers, Strange Towers :
Air Elemental -> Sword Tower -> Electric Turret
-All towers & hero builder upgrades have detailed tooltips.
-The spawned attackers are Balls, Flying Balls, Giant Balls (boss, magic
immune)
-Balls are fully recycled.
-The tileset chosen is cityscape with Sunken Ruins sands rather than dirt,
not to hurt eyes like Cube Defense NE custom tiles used to.
-The interface has been customized to be more informative.
-The whole map custom triggers & functions are coded in optimized Jass2.

Err i am sure i forget some features, but that's a good start :)


The map is actually nearing completion, but i am still planning to add some original features to make the map even more fun to play.

In the meantime, here is a small screenshot of the map in full action :

I love this map. It's completely lag free, and the mazing "spell" is simply awesome, keep up the good work Chryd

Nice to see your back Chrydgod

Cool!
I was very in too the 'regular' Cubes, so this might
proove really interesting.
Keep the good work up Chryd!

-Blue

Finally!
a new good version of cubedefense!

I´m a big fan (have over 40 different versions...)
and I really hope this version will be as enjoyable as the old ones...

After a short chat with kharma, i decided to implement a 'sexy' alternative to Darky's itemify Tower.

The new feature is called Movement Mode. When a tower enters movment mode, it looses its attack and spells, its splat and gains the ability to move, then chose a new placement and settle down there.

At the same time, working on this feature allowed towers to automatically face attacked targets, the only glitch is that default angle doesn't always reset.

I'd like to thank Panto who made the 2 icons for that ability, that i edited to match the map's sand tile.

For practical reasons, that Movement Mode has not been given to Blocking Towers.

In the same time, i have optimized the code further, using a better sell unit method version for the sell button that displayed the gold returned on the icon itself.

I have also replaced the ice cubes that appear on Balls death from unit type to destructables, removed the tower replacement functions that used to fix some upgrading issues and initial angle for towers depending on player, esp as that one became useless.

Now the Towers upgrade and automatically fix their sell button.

This results in a map nearly free from ingame unit create beyond map init, as ii only kept the smart replacement method to fix upgraded heros.

I will keep you updated on any further improvement/new feature on the map, but here are some screenshots showing the Movement Mode :

Oh God that's so sexy.

Hey Chryd,
did you update your custom SLK thingy to get thoose custom building splats, or did you just import the models over the existing splats?

Ah, yes, i remember your cube defence of old, was a giant mushroom trip of colour i seemed to remember...

good fun.

It makes me want to work even harder to add other features making the game even more fun. :)

zotax -> all i did is modify UberSplatData.slk as i realized it still worked in TFT.

Regards.

whit all this new features it can be even more exiting then before..

The map has been beta-tested with AIAndy's help, and here are the changes discussing the bugs with him brought:

1) The Blocking Tower model's selection detection has been fixed, allowing easier actions within mazes.

2) When a Giant Ball dies, it always gives euros & bonus point to the right player, not the killing one.

3) The lag building up near the end of the game was caused by Ultimate Bouncing Towers.
The bounce caused the EVENT_UNIT_DAMAGED event to make the trigger changing balls size fire too often.
-> I made sure the ResizeBAlls triggers are created at level start and gave their actions a call TriggerSleepAction(0).
Now the problem should be easily solved as this adds an avarage 0.25 second delay between every ball resize.

4) AIAndy noticed i was not properly preventing locations leaks, it has then been fixed.

5) I have added an autocast system that includes all tower spells but Web & Curse, as these were working as expected.


I won't submit a screenshot this time as the changes aren't visual.

Now i'll be looking for some more "sexy" features to add spice to the gameplay, as i planned before.

Regards.

After a chat in #jassvault on mirc, it seemed i forgot to kill hidden units before removing them, wich can eventually cause a desync.

Also it seemed that de-referencing local handles at the end of every function seemed to help a lot, especially when these were called at a very high frequency. This has been done too. Note that if you look at the code, that i even overabused de-referencing (setting to null for example) but thats just to make sure i didn't forget anything.

This time, as the version seems to reach maturity, and even if it hasn't got the extra "sexy" features to be implemented, i'll submit the beta version here so that everybody can test it and eventually give me some feedback on it.

Note that it is fully unprotected and can be opened in any version of WE for TFT.

Regards

oh...
man...
this owns...

I really like the blocking tower...
ownage in making...

After some beta testing phases, i realized the implementation of autocast was buggy.
Also, i realized that there was a major problem with the scrolling text panels, as when the game was played with the full 8 players, it took more time to calculate & update every player's letters to be displayed, than the length of the timer that did separate every refresh. it ended up in another cause of desync.

I have seriously fixed these issues, completely remade the scrolling text feature using doodads & optimazing letter animations calculation.
They both now work a treat.

I have also found and fixed another problem that made some players wrongly get defeated.

In addition, i have added a tower, modding one of Killst4r's turrets to give it an attachment point, a slightly different texture, and a camera. the camera isn't right as i am now trying to resize the model on the z-axis, wich i'll have to do manually as it refuses to import in 3DSMax. I added this turret as another upgrade for the Strange Towers, it will have the same damage as the Electric Turret, but with bash added and a 2x fater cooldown.

While i was there, i made a few minor improvements, such as giving the flying hero his proper flying height before his upgrade finishes.

Here is the latest version :