Abilities that add Special Effects

06-03-2004, 07:28 PM

Greetings.

I'm trying to nail down a solid ability to use as the cradle for special effects. For example, rather than attaching a teamcolor glow to heroes, you can make an ability that has the teamcolor glow model set to the origin of the unit.

Rather than attaching special effects to units willy-nilly, it's better to add abilities that have those special effects on them. This makes it easier to manipulate the special effects and allows you to more easily discover whether a unit has a special effect with triggers. I have heard that it is also less memory-intensive, but I can't verify that.

But, now that I've been paying more attention to the carrier-abilities, I'm finding that it's a little harder to find a good ability to put the special effects on than I thought.

The ideal ability will have no command card icon and will attach models to any point on the unit without extra behavior.

The three most obvious abilities to use for this are "Item Orcish Battle Standard", either "Sphere", or any of the "Orb" abilities. However:

"Item Orcish Battle Standard" appears to only work when it's attached to an item. Converting this to a unit ability doesn't work. Even when the default ability is given to a unit, there's no visual change.
"Sphere", either for the Bloodmage or Vengeance, has a hidden behavior. Whenever the unit attacks or casts a spell, the attached model is remade; that is, it goes away during the attack or spell, and then comes back, playing its birth animation. There are 6 attachments points available, and they go away in order. So, if there are 5 consecutive attacks, the first 5 models will go away, 1 per attack, and then they come back.
The "Orb" abilities don't stack with each other or with "Arrow" abilities. That is to say, if the hero buys an orb or has an "Arrow" ability, the effect of that ability will be overwritten by the special effect dummy orb's ability, which should be nothing.

So, this leaves me in a lurch. What other abilities are there that add a special effect and don't have a command card icon? Permanent Immolation is one of the few other abilities that has a special effect, but it has an icon. There are many passive abilities that have no icon, but most of them don't use the special effect fields.

06-04-2004, 03:46 PM	#2
DoCa-Cola	The 'Item Capture The Flag' also does it... At least I think that's what it's called..

06-05-2004, 08:51 AM	#3
Panto	It looks like the Item Capture the Flag abilities work the same way as the Item Orcish Battle Standard. They don't function whatsoever, except as an item ability.

06-05-2004, 05:42 PM

Bulletcatcher

After a bit of searching, I believe I have found the perfect ability for special effect attachment:

-It does not affect spell casting, attacking or anything else.
-It allows attachments just like the orb and battle standard abilities.
-It has no icon.
-It works just fine as a unit ability.
-Multiple versions of the ability stack properly, so different effects can be added.

The ability with all these properties is, somewhat unexpectedly, the 'Slow Aura (Tornado)'. It does not normally have any art, but adding one (Into the "Art - Target" field) works just fine. With Area of Effect and Movement Speed Factor both set to 0, it has no effect I can see.

Try using it, and do let me know if you find some sort of problem with it, since I'm using it as well.

06-05-2004, 06:17 PM	#5
Panto	Hilarious. Right you are. I actually went through the process of using the Slow Aura ability as a skill, with a dummy icon and all that, and never thought twice about it. It has a buff icon, though, so it needs to have its Targets Allowed edited so that it won't show up. Thanks a lot, I'll look into this right away.

06-06-2004, 06:01 AM	#6
Panto	Confirmed, using the "Slow Aura (Tornado)" ability with targets set to "None" (the specific value) works, as yet, flawlessly. A model in the Art - Target field will show up on the unit with the ability, and it has no command card icon. You'd probably also want to set the ability to have no effect, and the range to be 0.00, just to be safe. Thanks a lot, Bulletcatcher.

06-06-2004, 08:45 AM

Anitarf

Good job, bulletcatcher.

I have a question regarding attaching the Hero Glow with such an ability. In the previous threads I have read about the glow, you had to either import 12 different heroglow models for each player color or use a special all-color model which had some problems and required additional triggers to get the color right. Does attaching the glow with an ability instead of a special effect trigger eliminate such complications?

06-06-2004, 12:26 PM	#8
Panto	No, you still need about 4 simple triggers to make the teamcolor match. I can post the ones that I use, or you can find Lord Vexorian's thread on attaching Hero Glow.

06-06-2004, 09:05 PM	#9
JTG	When I tried that the best thing I could find trigger-wise was to run a For Loop 1-12 that checked player color and assigned the ability color accordingly. If you want it I'll post a map with this functioning. You DO require all 12 models in this method though.

06-07-2004, 01:43 AM

#10

Panto

Indeed, JTG, that's what I used to do, too. I switched to this method because it allows the units to have a "Hero Glow" ability attached to them, which means you never have to add special effects in-game. And the teamcolor glow works for it, which means you only have 1 imported file as opposed to, uh, many more.
The only triggering required is to enforce the player color, so that that attached model matches. It's kind of like a bug on Blizzard's part, but not really, that attached effects use red for the teamcolor unless the color of the unit is switched.

Here's my triggers. They're quite simple, and in GUI:

Code:

Map Init
    Events
        Map initialization
    Conditions
    Actions
        For each (Integer A) from 1 to 16, do (Actions)
            Loop - Actions
                Player - Change color of (Player((Integer A))) to (Color of (Player((Integer A)))), Changing color of existing units

Code:

Hero enters Train
    Events
        Unit - A unit Finishes training a unit
    Conditions
        ((Trained unit) is A Hero) Equal to True
    Actions
        Unit - Change color of (Trained unit) to (Color of (Owner of (Triggering unit)))
        Trigger - Add to Hero Reincarnates <gen> the event (Unit - (Trained unit)'s life becomes Equal to 0.00)

Code:

Hero enters Revive
    Events
        Unit - A unit Finishes reviving
    Conditions
        ((Reviving Hero) is A Hero) Equal to True
    Actions
        Unit - Change color of (Reviving Hero) to (Color of (Owner of (Triggering unit)))
        Wait 2.00 game-time seconds
        Unit - Change color of (Reviving Hero) to (Color of (Owner of (Triggering unit)))

Code:

Hero enters Summon (for Wand of Illusion)
    Events
        Unit - A unit Spawns a summoned unit
    Conditions
        ((Summoned unit) is A Hero) Equal to True
    Actions
        Unit - Change color of (Summoned unit) to (Color of (Owner of (Summoned unit)))

Code:

Hero Reincarnates
    Events
    Conditions
    Actions
        Unit - Change color of (Triggering unit) to (Color of (Owner of (Triggering unit)))
        Wait 2.00 game-time seconds
        Unit - Change color of (Triggering unit) to (Color of (Owner of (Triggering unit)))

If this thread goes into the trigger aspect more, I'll move it over to the Trigger Haven. If you've got a question about these, feel free to ask.

06-07-2004, 06:59 PM	#11
JTG	That looks VERY well thought out. I'm impressed... You could even move several of those to one trigger if you're using the UMSWE conditional events.

06-07-2004, 09:37 PM	#12
Anitarf	Basically, the color of a hero must be reset whenever he enters the map. I get it. But why is a 2 second wait and an additional re-setting of the color required when a hero re-enters the map?

06-07-2004, 10:11 PM	#13
Panto	Sometimes the hero doesn't seem to be at the point where its color can be changed right when the event fires, so that's just to wait until it is. In the case of Reincarnation, it's due to the slight delay built into the spell.

06-10-2004, 08:50 PM	#14
JTG	The first color change fires instantly if it can, then it waits in case of a spell or built-in system delay. I would put the wait down to one second though. Unless you've tried it with that and it didn't work with Reincarnation...

06-11-2004, 07:31 AM	#15
Panto	The Reincarnation, at least in the map that I was making, quite certainly has a two second delay.