Having lots of levels of abilities = bad?

07-28-2007, 06:42 AM	#1
burningice95	I'm making a map, and its going to have a system which requires 12 abilities to have 100 levels (1200 level abilities, bringing the total to about 1500). Will this add significantly to map size, or loading time? (The abilities only differ in 1 field).

07-28-2007, 06:54 AM	#2
Earth-Fury	It will add to the map size, and the loading time. Loading time can be reduced by wdigitizing the map (check the tools section), and map size you're kinda screwed on. But it shouldn't be that bad, allot of maps have insane numbers of abilitys, but manage to still be relativly small.

07-28-2007, 07:18 AM	#3
Ignitedstar	Is that one field going to be damage? If it is, as an alternative, you could just make the damage stat-based and trigger the damage. However, it's your map, so it's your decision. A number of maps have a lot of abilities. And as Earth-Fury said, they still manage fine. You may need to widgetize the map, though.

07-28-2007, 07:39 AM	#4
PitzerMike	Widgetizer can only convert the first 4 levels of an ability. So it won't change much for you. If it's possible, rather use many abilities than few abilities with many levels.

07-28-2007, 08:19 AM	#5
Pyrogasm	What exactly do you need so many abilities for? Maybe we can inform you of a workaround.

07-28-2007, 05:28 PM

burningice95

@ PitzerMike. So having 1 evasion skill with 2,4,6%, and another with 8,10,12%, is better then having 1 skill with 6 levels, giving, 2,4,6,8,10,12%?

@ Pyrogasm, okay bear with me, this is kind of complicated :). I'm making a hero arena, but trying to deviate from the standard and add some unique systems. One of them is the "favor system"

Quote:

Originally Posted by clansnow.com

Lets start from the beginning

When you start the game, you choose your hero. Duh. This hero has 4 abilities, 1 being his ultimate, and each of these abilities level up 5 times. Awesome

Then you get to choose a god to worship. There are 12 different Gods in the game, and by choosing to worship them, you gain access to different abilities. These abilities are called, for the time being, the "Favor Abilities".

Once you choose your god to worship, your hero gains another ability, the "Favor Ability" of the corresponding God.

The "Favor Ability" levels up like a normal skill. It can be leveled up 10 times (think attribute bonus). Leveling up your "Favor Ability" gives you 7 (Let's call them Worship Points for now to avoid confusion) Worship Points. Your Favor Ability gets more powerful as you get more Worship Points.

Example: Thor, The God of Lightning has a "Favor Ability" that gives the hero a chance to purge the enemy it attacks with each attack. These are the rough stats:

5%+.25% (per Point) Chance to purge enemy. % chance cannot go above 30%
Removes all buffs and effects from the target
25 damage to summons + 5 damage per Point
1 second slow +.02 seconds per favor Point
Slows to 25% of original speed +.1% reduction of speed per Point. 12.5% of attack speed + .1% per Point

You may be asking "What's the difference between the Favor Abilities and normal abilities?
You can also gain Worship Points by killing your enemies heroes. For each hero you kill, you gain 5 extra Worship Points.

You can also lose Worship Points by dying. Every time your hero dies, you lose 10 Worship Points. You amy not, however, lose Worship Points until you have less than your hero's base amount of Points. The base amount of Points is your level in your Favor Ability x 7.

For example, if your level Favor Ability is 5, then your base amount of Worship Points is 35.

When you reach 100 Worship Points, you gain another ability. This is the "Ultimate" Favor Ability. The Ultimate Favor Ability does not get its stats based off of the number of Worship Points you have, as you have to have 100 Points to be able to use it.

o if there are 12 gods, and each has 1 ability thats 1200 levels of abilities. The only workaround i could think of would be if i upgraded your ability every 5 levels or so, instead of 1. (This would reduce it to 21 abilities per god, which would make it 252, a much better number). However, this would be slightly more difficult to code (sorry, i only know GUI :( ).

Thank you for the speedy responses :)

07-28-2007, 09:28 PM	#7
Pyrogasm	Well shit. You could modify all the percentages and attack damage bonus things and all that sort of crap with the CasterSystem Orb template... but the tooltip wouldn't change. You could easily do Worship points with multiboards on a per-player basis... but I still don't see why you need 1200 abilities... it would appears as though you only needed 120.

07-28-2007, 11:08 PM

burningice95

How do you get 120 abilities? 12 abilities * 100 levels per ability = 1200 levels, which is like 1200 separate abilities (if my understanding is correct?)

The reason i would need multi level abilities isn't for keeping track of how much favor the person has, but for giving the actual bonuses and such. For instance, one of the gods has a slow aura. As far as i know, the only way to make the amount slowed depending on the level is to have the trigger set the ability to a different level.

I've never worked with any of vex's systems before, except the hero selection , and I'm not versed in JASS (although I'm framilar with it enough to import non jesp spells, usually). Could you elaborate on the caster system?

07-28-2007, 11:24 PM

Pyrogasm

For some reason I thought you only needed 120 was because of this:

Quote:

It can be leveled up 10 times (think attribute bonus).

I thought the level of that ability determined the bonus; I did not realize that Worship Points determined it.

The Caster System.

As I was saying, the CasterSystem templates can do the effects you need and such for all appropriate levels (someone might have to modify things slightly for you), but you'll still need all the abilities for display on the command card, so that gets you nowhere.

07-29-2007, 04:02 AM	#10
burningice95	Ok new question. How much will it hurt me to have 1200 abilities, in terms of loading times (or 4800 abilities, with 4 lvls each for widgetizer), and map size. If the answer to this is unacceptable, i'll just making all the favor abilities upgrade every 5 levels or something. And wow....Caster system looks VERY useful.

07-29-2007, 10:00 AM

#11

Lej

Quote:

Originally Posted by burningice95

Ok new question. How much will it hurt me to have 1200 abilities, in terms of loading times (or 4800 abilities, with 4 lvls each for widgetizer), and map size.

I just had to try. Created a empty 64x64 map with default settings. Deleted triggers and placed a starting loc. Took about 2 seconds to load.

Copied Stormbolt, set level to 100, made it a nonhero ability and copied it 12 times. Added it to paladin and placed one on the map. Took about 46 seconds to load.

Set stormbolt to 4 levels and made 300 copies (equal amount of levels as 100x12). Added them with a simple loop at map init:

JASS:

    local integer i = 'A000'
    loop
        exitwhen i > 'A08B'
        call UnitAddAbility(gg_unit_Hpal_0001, i)
        set i = i + 1
    endloop

(not going to add 300 abilities to a unit by hand >_<)
Took about 1m4s to load.

Ran widgetizer on the above map without really knowing what I was doing (default settings). Then took about 2 sec to load.

Change in mapsize was neglectable, around 2kb from 15kb to 17kb, until I ran widgetizer which increased size to 136kb. But as I said I've never used widgetizer before and I didn't fool around with any settings.

07-29-2007, 06:01 PM	#12
burningice95	Conclusion: More levels doesn't affect map size, but does to loading time. If you use widgetizer and make the abilities 4 levels, it doesn't effect that either. Based on that, i think i'll make the system use many abilities with 4 levels each. Thanks for the help guys, + rep

07-29-2007, 07:26 PM	#13
Dark.Revenant	Well, a 97% improvement in loading time is certainly worth looking into...

07-29-2007, 11:59 PM	#14
PenguinEmperor	On a related note, If you need any godly info on the dieties you are implementing, try the awesome site of GodChecker!

07-30-2007, 03:38 AM	#15
burningice95	Wow the people on these forums are so awesome.