Flying of the Dead v2

Hi all.

This is a much faster, much less laggy, not as buggy, version of flying of the dead. Well, it's so different that I decided to actually create a new thread for it, as the SEQUEL TO FLYING OF THE DEAD. The concept is essentially the same though.

This is not a completed map, it still needs a lot of improvement, so it's under this section. In terms of content it's mostly done, but it needs polish, balance, and visual improvement.

I'm too lazy to write another description of Flying of the Dead, so I'll copy it from my old post.


What's changed in this version:
- You can turn and fire a little to the left and right. (courtesy of Anitarf)
- Memory leaks fixed. No more 15 minute unloading time, and you can actually play this thing with a full 6 players, and as long as they are within your region they will feel almost no noticable lag (well for me, since I'm living in Singapore, everyone in my region is within about 20km of me so I don't know if this applies for you).
- It's stage based. So you can redo stages, jump stages, do whatever you like.
- You can do missions with two people. Currently this just makes twice the amount of enemies. Unfortunately, it's the same with bosses. I'm thinking of making it so it's a boss with 50% spell resistance if there are two people, but currently you can live through 2 bosses with the firepower of 2 players for the first few stages.
- It's much, much, faster. This makes it much less dull.

This is still under development. This is what's to be done:
- Balancing. Much needed.
- Only one boss spawns in partner mode.
- Custom loading screen and minimap. The minimap looks worse than harry potter in the cover of the 6th book.
- Terraining of the starting area.

Note that this is meant to be a beta version, for testing. As such, there are no victory conditions yet, and there are cheats to increase your gold and set your lives to 10 (they are "-jedisfat" and "-resetlives" respectively).

This thread is mostly to gather feedback, I would really really appreciate any feedback, comments, criticism, the like. Balancing is quite an issue here.

Also, if anyone knows how to do the following, I would love to know:
- Display when a unit is hit, instantly. I can check for bosses and the player controlled ship periodically whether they have lost any life, and create special effects. However, what I want is that any unit hit by the carrion swarm projectile will have a visual indicatio that it has been hit. Carrion swarm, I think it's hardcoded or something, creates "black stuff" on any unit it hits. Even if the buff is removed, the graphics changed, it still creates that special effect, so I'm wondering how to change that effect to say, FragBoomSpawn or something.
- Dynamic terrain for each stage. Right now each lane is flat. The problem is that the same lane is used for different missions. Is there a simple method to make the lanes look different for each mission? I am aware of the fact that you can use triggers to edit terrain but from a top down view, along with the fact that carrion swarm follows the ground level, jagged hilly random terrain wouldn't be a good thing.
- Display the health of a boss. Leaderboards or multiboards would look ugly. I'm currently toying with the idea of creating 10 units beside the boss so it looks like a health bar, and using that to display the health, but I'm sure you'll have a much more brilliant and simple idea.

It's a little late, so the part of my brain that remembers English is mostly asleep, but I hope you understand what I was talking about above.

If you don't, then even more reason to test the map. Wahahaha.

Edit: I wanted to edit this so I could post the the map and screenshots but it seems the window when I click "manage attachments" DOESN'T WANT TO APPEAR!! HELP!!! (Will check again in 8 hours and hope this problem is fixed).

Edit: Yay. The forum is online again, and I can post attachments! Unfortunately, NOT OF W3X FORMAT. !!!!

Edit again: It's FINALLY UP!! This version I haven't worked on for a while, but it's meant to be tested on. As such, there are still no victory conditions, and ummm... player one has shared control of player 2 for those who want to do pair missions with a computer player, or bug out your friends in that slot ^^
-jedisfat gives you 1000 gold
-resetlives sets everyone's lives to 10

Since this map is STILL under construction (feedback feedback! Anything is fine! If you tell me to scrape the whole idea and give good enough reasons to back your point up, it's perfectly fine) I understand there will be a heck lot of balancing problems, resulting in a heck lot of frustration, so I included cheats so at least people might bother testing stuff out to give me feedback and actually have some fun while doing so. Of you can test it out in single player ^^

To change the "Black Stuff", simply get the special effect you want, so Extract Fragboomspawn using wc3viewer, then import it into your map and change its path to the path of the Black Stuff, which is, I think, the "Buff" for Carrion Swarm.

Sounds terrific, hope you find another place to upload (and post the link).

o.o thanks

Currently having finals. Will find a host and post an updated version sometime soon... or I could procrastinate until wc3campaigns is fully functional again (or starcraft: ghost is released. I wonder which will come first).

New version of FotD posted up top.