Game Interface - Hiding the Hero Death Message

Hello,

I've got a small problem with the hero death messages ("Aliendil Ling the Lich (Level 9) has fallen!"). I can disable them, setting the "herodeath" data field in the Game Interface section to " ". This will work fine as long as I don't re-open the map. If I close the map and re-open it in WorldEditor, data field will revert to deafult. This seems to be a commong problem with Game Interface data fields, I had the same problem when trying to remove other messages. Does anyone know a good solution for this one? - one that will prevent the data from reverting?

Regards,
Martin

I've never had that happen to me. You're sure that you're saving the map after having made that change, of course. Are you using a non-standard editor or .slk enhancement files?

Not at all, I'm using the basic WorldEditor, Patch TFT 1.16 English. I guess the problem seems to be occur solely when I try to set one of the Game Interface fields to an empty string. I managed to change another data field into a nonempty string - no problems so far. I'll try with a blank next - I'll tell you if it worked later.

Regards,
Martin

Update - I tried with a blank. This produced a message "Error message missing!" - seems to be some sort of WC3 Engine default setting. It seems like the onlyoption for me will now be to manually check the "Hide Hero death message" data fields with the unit data of the respective heroes - inconvenient, but a sure bet. However, a certain pathological interest for the problem remains, so if anyone has experienced this sas well, or could even come up with a solution, I'd still be interested.

Thanks for your help,
Martin

How about you download WEU. It has a trigger that disables/enables hero death meassages.

~HarshaTeja~

Not really, thanks. I tried WEU, but in the long run, being able to swiftly respond to any patch Blizzard issues is more important to me. Some patches are incompatible with WEU though, and will require a WEU update - so basically, my map would be screwed until the next WEU update is issued, unless I delete all the advanced triggers and revert to a standard-WE compatible version.

Everything's working fine now with the messages disabled in the object data. I'm still curious about the strange occurrences with the game interface data though. Any game interface guru around here who can fill me in on that?

Regards,
Martin

Well, the only thing I can say for certain is that if you completely delete the field, it will use the default message instead of nothing. If you put a space in there, though, it will display just that, although it's not a perfect solution, since there's still a line break in the text where it should have been.

Uhh, I would've posted this yesterday but the server was SLOW. Heroes have a field called "Hero - Hide Hero Death Message". That should do the trick... Alternatively you could just set their death time to some insanely long period.

Yeah, thanks. That's what I meant with "object data" though :) I used that method, and it worked fine for me. I only wonder if it was the smartest method - and what if I want to delete another game interface field, where no such workaround is available. I'll do some more testing with the "blank method" or Alt-255 on some other data fields - I'll keep you updated on the results, if anyone's interested.

Regards,
Martin

About WEU, you can keep your map compatible with the latest patch by converting the WEU triggers to custom text. WEU works by creating its own variables and functions in the header of the map, so that the user can easily use the needed functions through triggers as opposed to making complicated combinations of triggers in order to get the same results, which you would have to do in normal editor to get some things to work like in WEU. So if your map doesn't seem compatible with the latest patch, it's not your map that's not compatible with the latest patch, it's the WEU version. You can just convert WEU triggers to custom text and the map will be openable in any version of normal WordEditor.

However, it would be valuable to your learning as a mapper if you were to look at the customized triggers from WEU and figure out how they did them. Most aren't generally that complex, and knowing how they made them in a general fashion will allow you to make some that are more efficient because you've tweaked them to your specific needs.