Hiding Special Effects. Can it be done?

Is it possible to hide the special effects of spells or possibly
special effects in a given region? I have a hidden paladin casting
ressurection and I don't want the special effects to be shown.
Anyway to accomplish this?

Doubt it. I do have a backwaterassed way to do this. Set a part of the map to be unreachable (Like an island or whatever). Put the hidden paladin there. Then before casting the spell, make a unit group outta all the dead guys in the region that the pally used to be in, move all units in unit group to the paly's new location, have him cast ressurection, and then move everyone from that unit group back where they started.

it ant perfect, but it's close.

-Insaniteus-
-------------------Trivia Point: When a Paladin ressurects someone, shouldn't they be undead? :gfu:

Is it possible to disable the special effects from the map then? Just all together?

If you explain exactly what's going on, maybe I can think of something more specific than this, but have you tried making the Paladin either a) very small, or b) very translucent (almost invisible). If memory serves me, special effects scale their transparency and size to that of the unit to which they are assigned. Perhaps a very small, transparent Paladin would be less noticable.


Just tested a simple case. A small (scaling of .1) Paladin has a small, almost unnoticable casting special effect, but the unit resurrection effect is still full sized. If you absolutely need no effects, why not simply replace a unit with another copy of the same unit via triggers (you can save dead units in a variable if neccessary)?

If you give some details on what you see in your mind, perhaps I or somebody else can think of some triggers that can pull it off.

Okay here it goes. The reason I want to kill the special effect is becuase of a problem with lag. My map is a remake of Marine Ranchers and if you know what MR is you'll know this is a madness map. The lag is horrible even in early game on fast computers with great video cards. Towards the end of the map its near unplayable. There are eight players and a marine spawns for each player every seven seconds. Well since the game has to keep track of all the units spawned in a game that obviously is a huge reason why the lag is so bad. So what I did was setup areas outside the regular map playing area where I put 36 marines for each player. So nine areas total with however many marines that comes to total. I chose 36 because I wanted that to be the max limit each player could have at one time. Another precaution taken to reduce lag. Now there is a region (we'll call it regionX) in each area where the marines are in and the paladin is right outside that region. I'm going to use player 1 red as an example. To create the illusion of spawning marines, 1 marine is moved from regionX every 7 seconds to regionY (the marine spawning point in player 1's base). As soon as any marine for player 1 dies a trigger runs that waits for five seconds (so death animation can complete) and then moves the corpse back to regionX. Now here is where the paladin comes in. He doesn't actually ressurect the marines but he has 1000 scrolls of ressurection, which revive six units at once. The paladin uses a scroll of ressurection every five seconds. Okay now you know the ENTIRE spawning setup. Now on to my problem. I'm still trying to reduce lag and I figured if I could just pull out the special effect for the ressurection then I could reduce lag a noticable amount. Well that is taking into account that those special effects are going for up to 8 players, every 5 seconds. Assuming each player always has somebody to ressurect. Anyway if you have any ideas please let me know. Oh yeah one last thing. I obviouslky dont need to use a paladin but i needed a hero unit so I could actually carry an item and he was my choice 8)

Here are some screen shots I whipped up. I know the above post is kind of jumbly so if you have any questions or would like to see any screenshots of anything in particular, just let me know.

Mini-Map
http://www.angelfire.com/clone/kitti...es/minimap.txt


RegionX
http://www.angelfire.com/clone/kitti...es/regionx.txt


RegionY
http://www.angelfire.com/clone/kitti...es/regiony.txt

Ya know I never thought of this but if you use the trigger to skip score screen that would not allow anybody to save a replay and therefore there would be no reason to save all the units on the map... maybe Blizzard implemented this.

As for special effects, I'd go with what you've been suggested, or maybe there's a way to find the special effect created by the paladin.

Well, first of all, is the paladin actually ressurecting, or just making the sfx?:

If he is not:
No paladins

Trigger INIT:
Make special effect at (ressurect point) using whatever
Set ThatEffect = Last created sfx
Destroy ThatEffect

Trigger Animate:
Reveive the sfx / play birth anim
Wait for it
Destroy ThatEffect

If he is:
No paladins
Pick 6 units in (revive spot) and do unit - ressurect picked unit, HIDEing sfk (if thats what you want)