Creating invisibility

I'm trying to create an invisibility effect using triggers. Ideally, it needs to be able to keep a unit invisible for an arbitrarily long length of time (as opposed to 2 minutes) and in a perfect world, it would be completely trigger based. In theory, most buff-like effects can be recreated with triggers by altering a given stat and creating various special effects. But since invisibility isn't really an effect, that won't work. Btw, when I say invisibility, I mean enabling a unit to be visible (faded, or normal) to the ownign player, but invisible to everyone else. To the best of my knowledge, this is *not* the same as the "remove unit" function.

Is there some way to create an animation that would only be seen by one player? At that point, I'd simply fade out the unit for non-allied players. Failing that, I'd love to create a shadowmeld-type effect that works both day and night. Is that possible by spell editing, or is that beyond the scope of what we can currently do?

My current fallback is to use an invisible sorceress to keep recasting invisibility every minute on a unit to keep them invisible, and use the "remove buffs" trigger when I need to get rid of the invisibility. For the moment, that's ok (though very, very lame), since I don't currently plan on giving the player access to *any* other non-trigger-based buffs, but I'd love to leave my options open if I could, and "remove buffs" is pretty non-discriminate in what it gets rid of.

I'd love to hear any suggestions.

Without looking in editor I can't say for sure on this.

You could give your unit permenant invisibility which is under the unit ability list. Then when you want it to deactivate, use the remove ability action. I'm not positive, however, if you can give them the ability back.

Another method could be to give the unit a spell based on DH morph, where the unit it morphs into is perm invisible, but in every other way resembles the unit prior. Again, I can't remember if you can deactivate morph, or if it would fit into your idea concept since it isn't exactly a timely spell (although it could be edited to make it such).

Is that what you're looking for?

Use bear form - ive tried it and it works

I'd try Trav's idea. If that doesn't work I don't know what to do about it.

Tried bear form. It doesn't work, but it's interesting the way in which it doesn't work. I went into the unit editor, and first gave the rifleman the bear form ability (and some mana). Next I set "DotC grandmaster training" to "researched." Finally, I went back into the editor to create my "bear." I took the DotC (bear form) unit and altered it to have the rifleman model. Next, I gave it permenant invisibility.

When I tested the map, the rifleman had a bear form button, as expected. When pressed, the unit's stats, sounds, selection circle, etc all changed to reflect the fact that he was using the bear model. However, he wasn't invisible.

I decided to experiment a bit. When placed on the map as-is, the DotC (bear form) was invisible, as expected.

Playing around a bit, I gave the DotC (bear form) the ghost ability and just for kicks, also gave him permenant immolation, and *removed* the "night elf form" ability. To my surprise, when I placed a rifleman on the map and tested it, none of these abilities were present, and weirder, the night elf form button was still there and functional.

This leads me to conclude that when you morph from one unit to another, only certain aspects of the morph model are used (including stats, sounds, and selection circle but excluding abilities). Either that, or there's hard coding that forbids morphed forms from having *any* abilities (does anybody have a counter-example?). I didn't test the demon hunter, medivh, or DotT morphs, but I can't imagine that they are any different.

The silver lining to this from my POV, though, is that the idea itself is pretty good. I think it should be possible for me to use a trigger to replace a unit with the same unit with permenant invisibility, and then switch back to the first unit as needed. In the context of my map, there's no ability mapping that needs to be done, so I think that should work.

Why not just give invisability to a unit, hide that unit somewhere in the map, then (transport and) reveal it when invisability is needed? The Invisability spell lasts 1 minute I think, so you could use a timer to time when to add invisability back on. I believe casting invisability again on a unit resets the buff timer.

Theres a game called tormented RP that has a command -tint ghost. See if you can track down a copy of the map and look and see how they did it.

A method is to when the invisibility is set, replace the unit with another instance of this unit, but this unit has ability ghost. If you want it to appear more like a Ghost, you can play around with transparency, probably 50%. Note: The instance of the unit with ghost will be nullified if this unit attacks an enemy unit, and the unit by default will want to attack the enemy units ( I am not sure how to get around this one).