tree editing

for my upcoming map, I plan to replace the lumber with manacrystals, and to keep that realistic, I'd like to replace the trees with a crystal model (perhabs the frost nova iceblock or such), from which you can then gain the ressources like from a tree. Is that in any way possible?

Another question, is it possible to make the trees respectively crystals show their remaining lumber/manacrystalls like the goldmines do? In any other way then just using goldmines for that, that is.

Any help/tip is appreciated.

Well, trees are destructibles, while goldmine is a unit. In that way, you can't show the remaining amount. But you could count "attacks" on the crystal (each attack does some damage and after enough damage is done, the tree falls) and display "remaining amount" as a number above crystal.

I thought about that variant already, but the problem is that there will be a rather high ammount of these (a bit like trees) and a trigger and text for each of them = lag.

Unless I find a way to replace trees with crystals I would have to go with neutral buildings you can pillage from anyway. Or would it be possible to make a goldmine that gives out lumber instead of gold btw? (I know I could exange the icons so that gold=manacrystalls and lumber=gold, but that would be a bit silly IMO)

All you have to do is make a tree selectable, every time a tree has wood gathered from it it loses health(basically lumber).

doesnt even seem to be nessesary, some leet friend managed to change the tree-model and the other thing isnt really needed.

sorry for the double-post rather than editing, but otherwise noone would read this.

I got a couple of questions connected with gathering lumber (the way peasants, peons and ghouls do).
Do attack-speed and attack-damage in any way influence the speed of the gathering? I only know that movement speed does in the way that the lumber is brought to the drop-off point (lumbermill, graveyard etc) faster.
This would be important to know for my map, since the worker will probably be able to use attack-increasing items, but not for the purpose of better gathering, but fighting.

its unrelated, only the ability of wood harvesting would affect the attackspeed on the trees: remember, they do have an attack that can only target trees ut that would only be for killing/clearing, not for harvesting

ah, thank you.
Doubted it rather anyway but a friend of mine claimed it was so...
would make ghouls scary wood-choppers later on if it were so o_O

just use the doodad editor to change the tree model into that of the crystal model. Simple.

What kind of gathering unit do you use? If you use a normal gathering unit, you'll have to edit its model too so it carries cristals instead of wood.

hm good note. Well I am using a apprentice wizard, it wont really be needed.
I also dont think that you can add such an animation, or?

Well, you can transfer the animation to the wizard model, then add a few geosets (axe, cristals blocks), import the new model in game, and it should work.
EDIT: what wizard model are you using?

the apprentice wizard (creep), as said above.
I am not sure if its really needed to make a custom unit for that though (my aim is as few custom stuff as possible to keep the map size small).

ooh what tileset is he under?

The wizard apprentice. In many tilesets, let me think... cityscape, dalaran, dungeon... at least in some of them.