GitP WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne group (thread II)

[Winterwind]

Ah warcraft 3...if only I was any good at multiplayer....that said I've not played in a while...

I might start up again. Anyone have advice for multiplayer?

First of all, there is more to WC3 than just regular multiplayer - there are also the infinite numbers of custom maps. As Lego outlined, we have one session on Friday dedicated to those, and one session on Sunday dedicated to regular multiplayer (and if you should choose to join either of them, welcome to the group! ). And I agree with him, the best advice for learning how to play it would indeed be joining us - we have people on various skill levels, and we can help out new players, explain to them how to play and have patience with them, quite unlike what awaits one in the ladder (I'm inclined to comparing it to learning how to swim with peers and teachers as opposed to just jumping straight into the water never having swum before).

It's difficult to give specific advice without knowing how good you are and what race you play (if you don't, I'd advice you pick one and focus on it for the time being; it's difficult to learn playing all four races well at once).

This said, here a few pieces of very generic advice:

• Get a hero out quickly and start using it. When not fighting the enemy, you should be fighting creeps. Keep your army on the move, from fight to fight - an army is a major investment, and it should be constantly used.
• Micro: There are many aspects and fine facets to it, but two things are arguably the most basic and most important: Firstly, to pull back your own hurt units, so they survive and can be healed up again, and secondly, to have units attack whatever they are best at damaging. Units have different attack and armour types; one should know which is good against what and use each unit against whatever it deals the most damage to.
• Spend your resources. When you do not manage to spend them, this is a sign you need more unit production facilities. Upgrade, buy items (potions on your heroes in particular, and never leave your base without a Town Portal scroll) - every point of resource sitting there, not being spent, is a point of resource your army could have been stronger by.

[dresdor]

I've played all the races more or less equally and its been a while. I've done the best (and at times the worst) with orcs, and I think that is the race I like to play the most.

In terms of skill at the game, any skill I had has rusted away to nothingness. I can hero rush, creep, and maintain my own for the initial parts of the game, but fail miserably to move up the tech tree, and at that time am horible at resource management.

Don't get me started on micromanaging when it gets more complicated than retreating hurt units. One of my problems is I don't have the time to play consistently to learn it. I'm a bit gamer ADD and jump around to a few different games.

And I'm more used to the custom maps than regular multiplayer, DotA, jailbreak, vampires, footmen....probably out of touch with the new versions but I've played them all.

[icastflare!]

Wait, there is a frozen throne group thread? Maybe this is a sign that I need to start playing it again.

[Inhuman Bot]

Wait, there is a frozen throne group thread? Maybe this is a sign that I need to start playing it again.

There's been one since before you joined up.

[icastflare!]

There's been one since before you joined up.

Huh.Ya, I think I will start playing again soon.

[Winterwind]

We'd be happy to welcome you amongst us, then.

Speaking of which, reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. I hope to see you all there.

[Inhuman Bot]

I'll be there, but leaving a bit early.

[The Orange Zergling]

My apologies for the short notice, but I'll be absent from tomorrow's session due to meeting an IRL friend. I tried very hard to get to see him on Saturday but I think Fridays and Sundays are the only days of the week he exists.

[nooblade]

Well, I was going to have something silly prepared for today's session, a simple JASS map to see how many Timers could be added to a map before it goes laggy and otherwise bad. Maybe also a bit fun, like an arcade game, like Worm Wars. But I think it will likely not be ready in time.

Progress is slow, but I'm having a lot of fun with JASS.

[Winterwind]

Because I may not get to do so tomorrow: Reminder, our melee session is on Sunday.

I will be having RL friends as visitors then, so probably won't be able to participate, unless they should want to watch me play WarCraft (which has happened in the past, so I wouldn't count it out).

[Legoshrimp]

So I'm not going to be able to attend either. I shall be going to Disneyland! So sorry to miss it.

[nooblade]

So, the bad news is that my JassCraft doesn't like the World Editor, and has caused a few crashes for the latter and other oddities. There's plenty of good news, though. That little hiccup won't stop me from bringing something silly to the session on Friday.

The Warcraft 3 engine is awesome, performing as well as my highest expectations, it could easily handle more than 132 instances of my trigger while I tested it in single player. After the thing loaded, my music wouldn't even skip, and sometimes that happens just because I join Battle.net with this computer. But I am eager to test it on bnet, for those extra networking conditions and also for the extra control from players. Getting 132 instances to go through the trigger in the exact same time would really point out what bits of JASS scripts are slower than the others, if that's possible.

Edit: open the spoiler tag for a teaser screenie, in which you'll find 5-8 (I forget) fireballs of various progressions.

Spoiler

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FYI, these were cast much faster than should be possible in the game version. Actually, I think I'll arrange a command to enable either the slow or fast cast version of the fireballs. I'm having too much fun with the fast ones to give them up.

[Winterwind]

That looks quite nifty. Looking forward to it.

Reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. I hope to see you all there.

[The Orange Zergling]

I have a rehearsal for my taiko student recital on Friday and then an actual performance on Sunday so unfortunately I'll have to leave early on Friday and I'll arrive later on Sunday. Won't have to worry about this for another year after this weekend, though.

[nooblade]

Thanks for testing with me today! I just fixed all the bugs we encountered today except the lack of code to deal with players leaving, which I think isn't very interesting for early stages of testing. It's on my todo list.

Anyway, if you're not entirely sick of it:

Spoiler

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There are just a couple more things I want to play around with in Fireball Arena before moving on (to BfG or whatever). The collision in particular is troublesome, so I've disabled collision against mages, unless they're burning, which allows some more interesting maneuvers instead of forcing you into a line or to send out all your mages one at a time or try to take advantage of bugs.

Another thing I want to try (and haven't started yet) is to overwrite the "move" command with a trigger so that those mages don't always line up into tight rows (where their fireballs easily collide, even with the change above). It might require some extra smart-ness around the barriers or the map edges, but should be do-able. I want to also use some of this code on the targetting wisps to prevent a barrage of fireballs from colliding with themselves halfway to their destinations.

From there, I know it will make it even more like Warlocks, but I think adding knockback to the spell will make it more interesting. A big problem with Fireball is that you'll hit an enemy once, and then they'll be protected from further explosions by the residual fire. Unlike Warlocks, since collision with mages is now disabled for the initial projectile, you'll be able to knock them toward you (or to your side, or whatever), where they're more vulnerable to fireballs. And since there's friendly fire, you might be able to use your own fireballs like a TF2-style rocket-jump. It might also get rid of an annoying solo mage who walks around your side or something. And with multiple units available to you, I think it won't hurt so badly if a few are taken out of commission (should I have allowed mages to be killed? Eh).

And if I do get to all that before next Friday, which I think is possible, I'll want to give it a real game-like bit, with a well defined ending. I want to make the overarching goals of one of the modes to play "Steal the Bacon" with some objects that may be moved around only by fireball knockback (inspired by the balls in Myth 2 multiplayer, except I heard you like fireballs, so I put balls in your fireballs so you can fire balls while you cast fireballs). I'm debating with myself over whether to change fireball to a mana cost instead of only a cooldown so that these objects might give a more tangible bonus to your side, but eh.

Unfortunately, I have work in the morning tomorrow, so I don't think I'll have anything new ready by the session after that. And then, in a couple weeks, I'll be going on a nice little vacation to the mountains. Actually, the busyness is probably the reason why I want to finish off the silly map instead of starting on a bigger project, but eh.

Whoa. By the time I get back, SC2 will be out.

[Winterwind]

And reminder: Tomorrow is our next melee session. Hope to see you there.

[SirSigfried]

I am home again. Dunno if I'll join you tonight though.
The ordeal was rather tiring.

[Winterwind]

Either way, I'm really, really happy to hear you are back and (presumably) feeling better now.

[icastflare!]

Good luck on the melee session guys. I would attend, but I have been practicing on Meduim bots and have been getting dominated.

[Winterwind]

I would say that's all the more reason to come to the session, because we will be able to tell you what you should do differently, and we don't mind how well or poorly you play.

[Inhuman Bot]

I am home again. Dunno if I'll join you tonight though.
The ordeal was rather tiring.

Good, now try not to do this sort of thing again.

[nooblade]

So, I fixed that problem I was talking about yesterday. It turns out that the "effect" of a spell takes a fraction of a second to happen even when you set the casting time to zero, plus a little bit longer if the mage isn't initially facing in the right direction, so it was resolved when I changed my trigger to operate when the order is issued, instead. And it works out great because of the triggerized casting delay, I can cancel it if any other orders are given (but you still lose your CD).

But now moving onto the knockback. Part of me wants to send mages flying across several screens, and something else wants to just jump in (I don't think I'll have any problems with the code, it'll be a lot like moving the fireball itself) with something more reasonable, taking examples from other games, so I thought I'd compromise with myself by looking for a realistic situation. I was hoping to find a simple "Force" in a google search, like the examples I remember we played with in Physics for a bullet fired from a gun, but no luck yet like that. Wikipedia indicates that the velocity of a shockwave traveling through an explosive is important, but this is just a number like 1800 m/s, not very useful for me. Maybe if I had something like energy, then I could do some Calculus to change it into a radiated value.

Could it be that the situation demands more exciting skills than what I posses?

[Winterwind]

Could it be that the situation demands more exciting skills than what I posses?

Well, you also lack some crucial data - you have no idea how strong the explosion of the fireball is, for starters. So, I think I'd just pick some arbitrary value for the force at the origin of the explosion (one that gives you fun results), and have that drop with distance from the origin squared.

[nooblade]

Well, that gives some values that're really fun to play with from a developing point of view. But unfortunately, I don't think I can make this into an interesting game, and interest is waning rapidly. Maybe I'll think of something new later.

But the main goal is complete, I have a working Fireball spell pretty much exactly how I wanted it to appear in BfG.

[Winterwind]

So, reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. I hope to see you all there.

[Winterwind]

And reminder again: Tomorrow's our next melee session. Hope to see you there!

[Inhuman Bot]

I won't be there, or at the sunday session, as I'm traveling and won't be back until Wednesday.

[Bunny of Faith]

I won't be there, or at the sunday session, as I'm traveling and won't be back until Wednesday.

Sunday is tommorow.

[Inhuman Bot]

Sunday is tommorow.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU-

[742]

if anyones still there by the time i show up i absolutely look forward to mutual genocide, and whatever you call it when you re-kill undead.