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

[Level8Mudcrab]

Ok, my username on Battle.net is Level_8_Mudcrab.

Well that was a fun first custom map session for me. I think I'll try and attend some more in the future.

[Winterwind]

Glad you liked it!


Also, reminder, everyone: Tomorrow is our next melee session. Hope to see you all there.


EDIT (15th April): And reminder again: Tomorrow is our next custom map session - hope to see you there.
It's already kinda late (yeah, I... almost forgot to post this ), and I'm kinda tired, too, so I think I'll skip the PMs for once.

[Woodzyowl]

Just a question, how many of you guys/gals on Skype are from Europe or Asia or, well... not North America? I have never left the U.S., so all of the accents from all of the above are pretty alien to me. I do think it's pretty neat to talk to people thousands of miles away, though.

[Winterwind]

Faith is from England, and I'm from Germany. All of the others who tend to use Skype are from either the US or Canada.


Also, reminder: Tomorrow is our next melee session. I fear I'll have to skip it for once - RL friends want me for a movie-watching evening, basically - but I wish you all lots of fun.

[The Orange Zergling]

CynanMachae is French-Canadian, too, though he rarely joins us nowadays.

Anyway, unfortunately I'll also be absent tomorrow, as I'm also seeing a friend that day. My apologies.

[742]

so bane and winter are not allowed to both be absent from these things. not at the same time.

[Winterwind]

Well, in that case, better start making sure you capture Bane soon, so you can force him to be there, for I'm afraid I'll be going to my parents over the entire long weekend, and hence will be unable to attend either tomorrow or on Sunday.

Which brings me to, reminder, tomorrow is our next custom map session. As I said, I won't be able to be there, but I hope you all come in great numbers.

[The Orange Zergling]

I'm sorry for the short notice, but due to the Easter holiday and everything I'm going to have to be absent from the session today. My apologies again.

[Inhuman Bot]

Holy

****

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMTdr026bZU&t=6s

Doodad

defence

[Winterwind]

Holy

****

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMTdr026bZU&t=6s

Doodad

defence

I'll watch it when I'm back home, Slaan.
EDIT: Wow... it really is the same music.
Well, I guess it was to be expected that the creator of DD borrowed his music from somewhere (at least, I'm assuming that's the direction it went)...


So, reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. I hope to see you all there; I might be a bit late though (up to an hour or so, I guess; my local Games Workshop store owner has challenged me to a Warhammer game tomorrow to show off his new Tomb Kings - who just got a new army book and models release, you see - and I'm not sure how long that will go. ).

EDIT (30th April): And reminder again: Tomorrow is the next melee session. I hope to see you all there!

EDIT (5th May): Reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. Hope to see you there.
Kinda busy today, hence, no reminder PMs. I hope that's fine.

[nooblade]

Midnight (for me) post!

I just finished that project I was talking about the other day and turned it in (Electronically, so it has a timestamp, so it was turned in before midnight and everyone knows it, I hope. I have a receipt from the software though. If that's worth anything). That was fun. Some hilariously bad errors on my part. Gee, you think that this thing works if gravity is in the same direction as this magnetic force? And some pretty terrible math at times. But enough of that.

I did this thing with Fogi to celebrate. It's not like I'm drinking or anything, but I feel slightly less inhibited. I could totally make controls for Fogi. That game is my small, furry, levitating neodymium magnet that can reach out to like a meter with maybe like ten thousand percent overshoot and negative feedback and amplification just like the power armor in starship troopersupers.



There's a thing where I could've built like 2 extra towers in the middle but who cares. Notice 2 things:

1. When you get ranged attack upgrades, you don't to have support to keep building burrows, you have about 10 waves between when the game gets going and when things do lots of damage to unarmored burrows in construction to build up real estate. Maybe more if you really push it by focus firing things that might attack the burrow in construction, I didn't try that. Also there's one really nice point on the second wave where you can get a couple of engineers and not worry about them being attacked much at all.

The strategy of building around the edges? Terrible. You want to build in a nice snaky conga line where you spend the most time building possible. Loop around the perimeter with 3 workers for the final waves where the burrows are in danger of being killed before finishing, but other than that, the center right next to the neutral tower is a great place for ranged burrows.

But the point is, extra players really are useless. And a drag. So sad. The guy who makes ranged attack towers doesn't need a wall and it's a hindrance because all the towers in the wall wouldn't have the awesome attack power. The wall is almost a quarter to a third or at least a sixth of all the towers.

Someone needs to make Fogi 2 fix this so it's actually a team game. Or I dunno, I think there are other games with similar premises (zombie survivals with construction?). I'm kinda not interested in this fixer-upper. Actually I've been dreaming about something more like Myth like what I was going for with the fireball demo map lately. I think I would resurrect that to celebrate this summer instead of trying to do BfG.

2. Engineer man had 375 armor. Only 4% damage to that guy? Even though you can't repair him, he's way tougher than any building.

Something you don't notice from that screenshot: Each of those towers does like 500 damage. Way better than spikes. Another thing you can't see from that screenshot is that there were only a few dozen enemies attacking at any given time. Someone is always saying but spikes are like failproof. Buh. Spikes should like kill the guy who's trying to repair the burrow. You hit it with this hammer and it doesn't kill you because it knows you're fixing it? That's utter pork and so are spikes. It's like the mob. You pull out a gun, they pull out a knife, you win. This is why the second amendment is now incorporated into the federally instituted amendments or whatever. The knife doesn't stand a chance against the gun. You know Harry Potter? Should've had a gun. God made man and God made woman, but Samuel Colt made them equal. Although knives are rather phallic. But guns are more so, because they spit out hot lead rather than dribble in warm blood. I think I'm going on a train of thought that might lead to being banned again. Alright, time to quit. Although I did find a really funny website as I was procrastinating earlier today called "**** my students" say or something. I think it might be by the same guy who did "**** my dad says". That was hilarious and I totally recommend it to everyone.

Goodnight.

[Winterwind]

Okay, that was a very amusing read. Kinda confusing at times. But really, really amusing. Kudos, nooblade.

Quite informative, too. Yeah, a version of WFOGI where additional players are a benefit, rather than a handicap, would really be nice. I guess one could argue any team-based TD is sort of that, though not exactly. I'm sure there are some maps that would be a closer fit, though.

[Spartacus]

Wintermaul is certainly easier with only one person, but a large part of that is WC3 gets confused when too many guys try to move at once and they start moving really slowly.

[Inhuman Bot]

Midnight (for me) post!

Goodnight.

Massive spergin breaks the game? We need to get our best people on this immediately to fix this travesty.

[nooblade]

Massive spergin breaks the game? We need to get our best people on this immediately to fix this travesty.

Spergin? But I don't have Asperger anything...

But yeah, I guess if I ever do nonprofessional things like humor then "sperging" would be the most expressive type of nooblade there is. And that's what people say, be yourself. Or don't. But I don't think I could possibly be very serious about fogi.

I did have a dream about fogi where you play as the fel orcs. It was more of an "awesome situation" dream rather than a game mechanics-inspiring dream, so I don't have ideas about how to actually make it. The orcs had a few different humorous archtypes, too, like the be-monocled one or the fat, lazy one, and they go insane for different reasons in very amusing ways. And then I don't think that fogi is the type of game that would benefit from having players on either side. The resources are too strangely defined (unless maybe the new wave only spawns as soon as a current wave is wiped out? Maybe more numerous, smaller waves would work...). Plus there's the thing where I wonder what I would be making the players do. Fogi seems so deterministic now, it lost the amazing "you could die at any moment" kind of appeal.

[The Orange Zergling]

Heh, that certainly had a lot of effort put into it. Well done.

It is rather true that a depressingly large number of cooperative games (TDs in particular) have mechanics that harm themselves like a killing-blow based economy, though. For a pretty long time I've wanted to make a team-TD that fixed that, among other common qualms with TDs, but I've never really been able to bunker down on a theme or any distinguishing features (other than "Didn't mess it up") and I have too many projects already so it's been on the backburner for a long time now.

Though, on the other hand, WFOGI is such a simple concept that even making a sequel entirely from scratch probably wouldn't take all that long or be all that hard... hurm.

[Winterwind]

I started a TD map like that once, as my very very first WC3 map project - it was one of those TDs where the creeps follow a track you can't build on, with you building at the edges, trying to make the most out of all your towers, like in MTG TD, except here, there would be only one lane, not five, and all players would build on it. And yeah, it had shared gold rewards for kills, not just last-hitting.

Spoiler

Show

Further features included:
- every player also had a hero. The heroes had an attack, but mostly served for support, with slowing spells, AoE damage spells, summons, etc. In addition to gold, kills also gave experience - also shared - to improve the heroes. Gold could be used both to build and upgrade towers, and to buy items for said heroes.
- every player would pick two elements and build only towers aligned with these two elements; different elements would have different advantages, like some being better at killing masses of enemies, some better at killing single enemies, some being more durable, as well as only certain elements having access to slow effects, or armour corruption, or other such things.
- every few waves would, rather than follow the track, simply come and try to slaughter all towers in their wake. These attacking waves would, obviously, call for some towers specialized for fighting them added to the general tower mix (like extra-durable towers to tank their damage, or towers that did extra damage to attacker waves exclusively). They would also feature enemy heroes accompanying them.

It never got all that far, though. I guess I should work on it, too, sometime.


Also, reminder: Tomorrow is our next custom map session. Hope to see you all there!

[Winterwind]

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

(I've recently read that the mods don't like it when people delete posts in order to avoid double posts, so I'll stop doing that)

[Rigel Cyrosea]

I decided to come out to the session (for the first time in ages, for WC3), but nobody's here.
Is this session normally still active, or is it pretty much dead?

[The Orange Zergling]

Nah, this is still fairly unusual.

Very, very sorry that I wasn't there; I showed up on time but since nobody came on 45 minutes after the session started, I decided to mow the lawn to kill time. An hour later, turns out that was a really bad idea - I was way, way too exhausted to play at that point. <.<

[Rigel Cyrosea]

It's all right, Eve showed up and got to play at least one game. I even did a lot better than I expected to, after all that time away.

[Winterwind]

I was intercepted by RL friends, who basically dragged me away and never released me until now. Sorry about that.
And, no, RC, I'd say the norm is somewhere around 7-8 people for the melee sessions. We pretty much always find enough to play 3v3s, frequently with people still obsing.

[Rigel Cyrosea]

That's good to hear. I'll come out next week and hope for better luck.

[Inhuman Bot]

3:30, yessssss

[Winterwind]

Oh, darn... almost forgot, reminder: We have a custom map session tomorrow.
Hope to see you all there. Considering how late it is, I think I'll skip the PMs.

3:30, yessssss

Are you hunting down every possible instance where this music appears now?
That is a pretty nice sounding piece, though.

[nooblade]

Noone's here! And it's only like 3 hours after the session would've started. Anyone want to play CfG? I guess I wouldn't do it alone. I do have some interesting books to read actually, maybe I'll just give up quickly. But yeah... One of these days I'll play CfG again! Although it looks like I'll have to remake it first for that to happen. Now I remember why I dropped one project in favor of that one. But for now I still feel good about what I'm doing.

In other news, I am highly irritated by the editor's limitations in model animation stuff. I want to be able to make a unit that displays like a projectile (you always have good visibility on them even though they're 2D) where I've also changed the pitch to it dynamically in the game (another overly complicated process involving renaming the root bone to "Bone_Head" and calling "UnitSetLookAt" on it to have the entire thing shift instead of the head) and it works but it doesn't look pretty at all. You can't see the arrows as they're rising toward you or falling away from you or lots of the time when you look at something laterally. I might actually scrap the archer I had plans for because of this because the circular projectiles (troll's throwing axes, or the grenades that Brewmasters or Alchemists use) would be much simpler (no front or sides) and more visible.

I miss the full 3D stuff that Myth games had. Even though they used 2D sprites for graphics (redundant sprites, for side and rear and 45 degree angle views), you could put the camera wherever you wanted and it stuck there and displayed things nicely. But Myth doesn't have nearly as much modding stuff as Blizzard does sadly, I couldn't do things like portals in there without rewriting engine stuff.

Giving up again would be fun. Like I said, I have some really neat books to read. Maybe just for a little bit.

[Winterwind]

Noone's here! And it's only like 3 hours after the session would've started.

Actually, at the time of your writing it was more than 5 hours past session start... and when I left just half an hour earlier, there still were five people online.

Also, reminder: Melee session tomorrow. I fully intend to be there this time (though I cannot guarantee I won't be late ).

[nooblade]

I'm going to try to finish a couple of graduation requirements this summer. One class is about writing and I'm not terribly worried about it--that's just work. But the other class is for fulfilling a cultural diversity requirement. It is Women's Studies. The specific topic is Women's Sexuality, so I think I'll get something a little more intense than, "gender is socially constructed," or, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It's the only option for the summer (I wouldn't want it hanging over my head alongside actual bookwork) and the other classes aren't terribly different anyway. Class starts tomorrow.

I wonder if I'm going to be very grumpy indeed. Like, "go hide in a cave and disembowel intruders," style. I should clarify that I'm not worried about learning something, indeed, Heinlein had some very interesting female characters and it would be neat to judge them against some real thing. But still, you know, I don't get along with actual, breathing people very much and you've all seen my social skills in action at some point or another. There are going to be ample opportunities to cause a riot.

So why does everybody want to kick my ass? I never asked to be a hero like Eve did. Experience is such a tedious system (Har har... Wait, nevermind, that could be construed as an invitation to continue discussion).

Wish me luck. Or whatever. If anyone thinks this could be "revenge", I'll tell you if they can have a party or not soon.

[Inhuman Bot]

Are you hunting down every possible instance where this music appears now?
That is a pretty nice sounding piece, though.

Pretty much/ yes/

I'm going to try to finish a couple of graduation requirements this summer. One class is about writing and I'm not terribly worried about it--that's just work. But the other class is for fulfilling a cultural diversity requirement. It is Women's Studies. The specific topic is Women's Sexuality, so I think I'll get something a little more intense than, "gender is socially constructed," or, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It's the only option for the summer (I wouldn't want it hanging over my head alongside actual bookwork) and the other classes aren't terribly different anyway. Class starts tomorrow.

I wonder if I'm going to be very grumpy indeed. Like, "go hide in a cave and disembowel intruders," style. I should clarify that I'm not worried about learning something, indeed, Heinlein had some very interesting female characters and it would be neat to judge them against some real thing. But still, you know, I don't get along with actual, breathing people very much and you've all seen my social skills in action at some point or another. There are going to be ample opportunities to cause a riot.

So why does everybody want to kick my ass? I never asked to be a hero like Eve did. Experience is such a tedious system (Har har... Wait, nevermind, that could be construed as an invitation to continue discussion).

Wish me luck. Or whatever. If anyone thinks this could be "revenge", I'll tell you if they can have a party or not soon.

I read this 4 times and I have no idea what it says

[Winterwind]

Wish me luck. Or whatever. If anyone thinks this could be "revenge", I'll tell you if they can have a party or not soon.

Well, best of luck to you then.

Pretty much/ yes/

Watching it when I get back home.

I read this 4 times and I have no idea what it says

I think it's an elaborate way of saying "I'll be busy and unable to play with you in the next time".