I will let the screenshot do the talking

Demo will be out pretty soon

Also I just needed to show off the command card before I went to sleep... now the keys can actually correspond to the position on the keyboard.

Q, W, E, R would represent the 4 abilities on the top
A, S, D, F the 4 in the middle
Z, X, C, V are the commands along the bottom

Attack turned out to be worthless since you right-click on targets to swing... and if you have some ranged attack like a gun it can be treated as a skill since it's triggered anyway.

Stop is still useful.

The patrol button became a "face" button which rotates you in place (imagine guns or abilities that automatically fire in your facing direction, so this is used to aim it exactly). I thought this was more useful than patrol.

And the last button is level up since there was nothing else to do with it but I couldn't get rid of it. It was hold position, but that has no meaning since units without attack won't be auto-acquiring targets anyway.

Of course all this stuff is optional. You can use standard heroes in the physics engine if you want, but I think this is more fun if you are making a map where you only control 1 or a few units.

looking forward to ur awesome stuff ;)

A note: the Z hotkey is a problem because my keyboard, for example, has Y in that spot.

Also, you could say the same thing you said for attack for move as well, so why do you have it in the command card?

put in system requirement:
Not for messed up keyboard :P

Why not make the system auto-acquire targets? Then hold position could have a whole new meaning. For example, Tell a unit to hold position at a gate. The enemy comes by with a spell, that knocks the unit backwards, the unit then advances back up to the gate to the spot he was told to hold position, if there are enemy units in the way, he chops them down and proceeds.

I personally use the attack button more than the move button while playing. The attack allows units to attack-move which totally increases ease of play by the power of a few hundred. It also allows a group to kill to their designated point, while the player can then get other units to do stuff (I couldn't image 12 footman, all having to acquire a target manually).

Otherwise, its looking good. Can't wait till its released.

What kind of crazy keyboard are you using?

It was necessary for me to remove the attack ability to prevent auto-acquiring of targets.

It's impossible for me to get rid of the move, stop, hold position, and patrol buttons. I could change their art and intercept the orders (as I did with face and level up) so if you have some better idea of what should be done with the buttons let me know.

I at least wanted to support the option for auto-acquiring targets. I can make my system notice when a target is acquired and chase after it, but for some reason once WC3 gets near the target and swings it ceases to want to face the target anymore. I cannot control the facing angle of the units directly while they path because that would require me to completely bypass WC3's pathing system and I don't want to do that. Even if I tried, my turn commands get overridden by the times WC3 does want to make the unit face some direction. I tried a lot of different approaches but I was unable to get it working in a satisfactory manner.

You could also partially call it a design decision. This system is designed for controlling only 1 or a few units at a time. Your example of 12 footmen is something that I would really not recommend using this system for. You'd never be able to keep them in formation and they would probably wind up running in circles unable to reach their targets because of WC3 not understanding terrain in the way.

Also, the only way to reliably hit a human opponent would be to predict their movement and take into account the terrain interaction, so most of the time WC3 would just fail really badly at hitting any moving target.

I have a Y there to ...German keyboard layout ...i have some *funny letters on my keyboard too ...like "ä" or "ö" or "ü" ^^


consider the *minorities -.-
HF ^^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

Common people! How do you call yourself a programmer if you don't use the standard keyboard layout?!

On-topic:

I guess it makes sense, I just thought it would be a limitation to the system. But seeing that I have yet to even try it, I cannot judge.

For the keyboard thing, you could make it so the user selects (or types a certain combination of letters to determine) their keyboard, and then modify the hot-keys for them (or are they not abilities?).

I have no choice but to keep the regular movement keys otherwise it's impossible for a unit to move even using SetUnitX/Y.

To change their positions/art/descriptions I just imported a custom CommandStrings.txt/CommandFunc.txt

Anyways if you have multiple units selected, a single right-click will send them all chasing after that target until they swing at least once. So controlling multiple units at once is not too bad, up to maybe 3 or 6.

How am I supposed to support alternate keyboard layouts? Besides it looks like you could still reach stop pretty easily on a german keyboard, it's just 2 keys right of where you'd normally rest your fingers.

ahh kk


Didn't someone recently mention that if you remove the ability for the unit to move ('Amov' or something like that) you can then allow for set unit x/y and not allow the player to move it?

Edit: But then I guess you would lose the right-click functionality?

If it's possible to remove the movement ability but keep setunitx/y I'd like to know about it, but I haven't heard of anyone doing that before

Hm these problems are why im making a new system, which we have not seen before. It's name has not been written :P

But hmm wat does ur map do anyway, i dont get ur screenshot

Grim, how's your system handle collision with doodads? what happens when a unit flys over a doodad? into a doodad, but above ground level?

Reasonably dense forests of collidable trees and rocks and such should be possible. I have some ideas but I will need to work out the details performance-wise.

Removing the 'Amov' ability does not stop SetUnitX/Y from working, no fancy tricks or anything. You only need to reset turn speed to allow it to rotate.