Using Spells While Burrowed

How can a unit have spells and use them while they are burrowed? It's a hero unit.

If you've played DotA recently then you should know about the Sand King bug. If you learn spells underground you can use them. So yes but I don't know how you would do this.

Hmm... I tried learning the spell underground and the unit still couldn't use it.

Here's my take: Burrow makes a unit unable to move, attack, cast, or be seen.

So, if you want to make a different version of burrow that still allows some of those aspects, you could simply make a morph spell that has an exact copy of the hero, but with appropriate things disabled. If you don't want it to be seen, make sure it has a passive invisibility. If it can't attack, disable attack. If you want it to be able to cast, *don't* screw with the abilities at all.

As far as making it look like it's burrowed, you can give the morphed form unit the model of anything that burrows and if it doesn't already use the burrowed anims (because a lot of morph spells trigger alternate animations) just force it to use them in the object editor or through a short trigger.

Thank you for the idea Panto, but there is just one problem: there is no animation I can use that looks like the unit is burrowed, because the animation for "burrowed crypt fiend" is the same as the crypt fiend. I don't understand why they made it like that. If you don't understand what im saying jsut take a look at the model for "burrowed crypt fiend" and you'll see. Again, thanks for the idea though.

The point is that the crypt fiend model itself has an alternate animation, which is him being burrowed. It's the same thing with demon hunter: his alternate form still uses the same model, but the model plays different, alternate animations.

The problem with burrow is that units who can burrow only have an alternate animation for standing still (because no unit in original warcraft can do anything while burrowed). So, if you allow a unit with a model that burrows to attack or move while in alternate form, the game engine will realise the model it's usign has no alternate attack or alternate move animations, so it will just use the default ones. That's why, if you allow a burrowed crypt fiend to move, he will apparenty unburrow whenever moving. He will still be burrowed, but the game will be displaying it's unburrowed walk animation because he has no burrowed one. The demon hunter has alternate animations for all things he can do, like walking, attacking, dying, so he doesn't have that bug.

The solution to this problem would be to get a special burrowed model, a model of a hole in the ground that has only one animation, so it is used for everything the unit with that model does. I suppose someone has already made such a model, since it's a very simple moddeling job. With such a model, you can have burrowed units that can do anything by using any morph spell.

ok sounds good. Hopefully it won't be too hard to find. Thank you Anitarf.

Depending on the spells he casts and the spell animations options for that spell in the object editor, you might not need a custom model. Forcing it to use the alternate burrowed animation will be enough if it never gets a trigger to do a spell animation, or if it does and the model has none.

I don't really understand... how would I force it to use the alternate burrow animation?

On the unit, there's something akin to "Art - Required Animation Names". For comparison, you can look at most of the morph-form units to see what values they have in the related fields.

Ok, so now the unit can use spells while burrowed, but while its moving (ya i should have mentioned I wanted him to be able to move while burrowed) it shows the crypt fiend walking animation and not the burrow animation.

Then you'll either need to get a completely modified model with the appropriate animations, or open the model you want (after converting it to .mdl with Yobgul's) in Notepad and put anything besides "walk", or another used animation name, in the animation names for any of the walk anims. This way, it will not find the normal walk animations, and thus should not change from the static burrowed animation.

At any rate, at this point, this is a modelling question.

Oh, awesome. I got the file and deleted the part where it said "walk" and the frame numbers where it was and it worked. Wow this is great thank you so much.

Nice i'll keep this in mind if I ever want to do this. Still its slightly strange you coldn't cast underground like in DotA.