I just thought of a new way to figure out who casted Dweb/Dstorm: Give each player two Corsairs/Defilers and tell the players to hotkey them both to 0 (or whatever), then move one to an out-of-play area. Then tell the players that to cast a spell, they need to press 0 (or whatever hotkey you told them to use) and then cast Dstorm/Dweb. When a player casts the spell, their other Corsair/Defiler will move, too. You can detect that and that will tell you who cast the spell.

There are a few problems with this method which you should take into consideration:
1. People forgetting to use the hotkey: If someone forgets to press 0 (or whatever) before casting the spell, it won't work. Not much you can do about this. Best solution would be to kill the Dweb/Dstorm and ignore it, possibly with an annoying text message warning them not to forget to press the hotkey.
2. People not hotkeying their units: If someone only hotkeys one Corsair/Defiler by accident, this will glitch. Nothing you can really do about this either, besides stressing the importance of hotkeying correctly. Adding a function to let them fix their hotkeys (by Moving the out-of-play sair/defiler to them and maybe pausing the game for a few seconds) might help.
3. People casting at the same time. This is a problem common to all the detection systems. It's unlikely that two people will manage to cast during the 1/8 seconds it takes for a trigger loop to run though.
4. Units dying: If a player's Corsair/Defiler dies, the system won't work. Solutions for this will vary depending on your map.

This method works wtih any spelltype also, even Nuke.

Can't you detect who controls a Nuke normally?

You can, but I think only while launching...

EDIT: Dstorm = Dark Swarm?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 24 2008, 8:11 pm by DeVouReR.

Yeah forget the nuke part.

It always annoys me when people label their idea as new. So presumptuous.

Well if someone had thought of this before me, my bad, I appologize. I hadn't seen this used anywhere, so I thought it hadn't been thought of. If I am wrong, I'm sorry.

I have, in fact, tried this method before. It doesn't work.

My system was a little more developed. It consisted of 3 defilers: the main one, one off to the side with energy, and one off to the side without energy. The player selected all of them. When the defilers are normally ordered, both defilers on the side move. When the player casts dark swarm, the main defiler remains stationary while casting, the defiler off to the side with energy moves, and the one without energy remains motionless.

The reason this system doesn't work is due to SC. It takes a defiler more than one trigger loop to cast dark swarm, opening a large timeframe for other players to interefere. It just isn't reliable.

Unless I misread something, I don't think that there is any way to get the system to work. I'd be more than happy to send you my work if you want to try to find other ways.

But, it's a good idea! Kudos.

Just wondering, ya know how you select two queens and you order them to ensnare one spot and the one on the right ends up ensnaring to the right of the mouse and the on the left ends up ensnaring to the left of the mouse? Ya know? Would that affect this idea or would the distance make it so they both dswarm the same place?

I think that units only do that if they're within 10 squares of each other, but I might be wrong.

It might work if they don't have to walk at all to cast the spell, however, there's still issues if players do it within 83 milliseconds of eachother.

You could detect which unit stops right before the swarm is created if the defiler does need to move before swarming. It always seemed to me that defilers swarm a pretty consistent set time after stopping if they need to move.

If, by chance, they happen to make swarms within the same loop you can either do nothing and tell them it failed, or you can assign the dark swarm to whomever is nearest. A preferable system would mix the two.

I'm tempted to make a concept map tailored to these designs except that I don't have the time.