Uh is it possible to have a human dds but keep it computer until needed because two things are annoying me:
1. the constant flickering of the supply counter (i need pylons to power my spell casting system so that cant change)
2. the vision on the minimap of all the scarabs running down their little channel.

You could have the option to turn it on for a couple of trigger loops, get the scarabs and then turn it off again. Would that work for you?

You could run a simple test and see what happens to scarabs when their reavers change owners, because I forgot.

Also, you could unally vision at the area with the scarabs by using run AI script at location, I believe.

You can't unally vision at an area. You can unally vision with yourself, however, so that all your unit don't provide any vision and then use the shared vision of another player to provide vision where you want.

That's what Ahli used in this file to prevent players from seeing the right half of the map. It's an interesting effect. And what's more interesting is that there are few consequences; just a few things that you have to work around.

You could consider using a nonhuman player for the DDS - I understand it works the same way, but without the fluctuating psi and the vision. If you can't fit that into your map, or if you don't want the player to be splash damaged by the DDS, then you'll have to find some other solution.

Well my dilemma is I need scarabs to be owned by the player to prevent splash damage and also to register kills for my EXP system.

Scarabs can't be changed players can they? I tried it and it didn't work.

Removing vision to the player presents numerous problems to work around.... The 100 frames vision reset I find hugely annoying and for anytime the player teleports I will need to create a unit owned by the vision giving computer in front of the teleport so the players unit isn't deselected... Eurgh a lot of work but maybe the best option..., changing vision still doesn't fix that ugly psi flicker though. :S

You have to give the Reaver that shot the Scarab for the Scarab owner to change.

Oh really?? Well hmm I guess if I modified the DDS to store reavers instead of removing them I just might be able to pull this off...

But then the psi flicker is still a problem oh well it was a minor annoyance I guess I'll have to live with.

I have designed a makeshift fix for the vision thing, just surrounded the entire area with blocks of high terrain.

Giving a reaver that has shot a scarab will also give that scarab to the new player, and will have the allegiance of the new player. So if the new player is an enemy to you, you will be hurt by the splash damage and any enemy units present won't be.

This is fairly obvious, but one useful facet of this is that you can give the reaver to P9-11, who are enemies of everyone, and thus you can have scarabs that affect all players in the game. Force the scarab to explode by moving it to a non-walkable location, as the P9-11 players may not properly target other players (no vision).

If anyone finds a way in which a DDS system does not create the scarab splash explosion graphic, but still has ownership of the player that fired it (so they get credited with kills), I would be interested in knowing how to do it. I haven't played around with this yet myself, but it'd save time if someone knows how to do it already.

Also, as an aside, I'm not sure if this is widely known or not, but spider mines owned by P9-11 will still attack P1-8 without any problems. It seems that spider mines work on a proximity system, rather than a vision system. I did a little testing with this to see if I could give a spider mine to P9 and get it to attack P8 (my CPU) and have P8 cast a spell in the vicinity where the spider mine was, but couldn't get it to work, probably because the mine itself suicided so there was nothing for P8 to target? I was going to use this to get P8 to cast spells on demand, like psi-storm or plague etc. Perhaps the two ideas could be combined: give reavers & scarabs to P9 so they injure P8's spellcaster and cause P8 to cast a spell. I guess it'd try to target the reaver itself, which doesn't make it terribly useful, but if they could be coaxed into targetting other P9 units (say, cloaked wraiths/ghosts), this could be useful.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 14 2010, 10:06 pm by Lanthanide.

I ran into a bug which had interesting side effects a while back lanthanide, I haven't done much testing but it might be a work around for that scarab splash explosion graphic you are looking for.

Basically the glitch goes, if you constantly order (or was it move) the scarab using preserve triggers, it still does damage but never detonates. The scarab doesn't shine blue either it is just its plain golden self. It didn't have any attack animation and it seemed to have a very fast attack speed.

I remember my glitch having this little gold scarab that was zipping around killing everything lol. If you are interested I will try and replicate it for you? Someone else might no more.

Ok, that sounds useful. Seeing the scarab for a split second will be fine for my purposes, it's just the multi-frame explosion that is the problem.

If you could do any experimentation in this direction to reproduce what you did, that would be most helpful. No rush though.

Yeh well now that I think about it it could well be the next gen DDS.

Just spitballing here gotta go and test it which I'll do later off to bed now, but using just one scarab that never dies, you'd only need 1 for each player, no storage system required because 1. they don't die and 2. u wuld regulate damage by X seconds the scarab is "attacking" rather then detonating multiple scarabs...

The non-dying Scarab can be replicated with a continuous looping Random Suicide Mission AI Script (computer players only), though it lasts only a few seconds before dying. However, I am unaware that manual orders could also produce the same effect. Quick tests of looping patrol/move/attack on a scarab unit to the anywhere location did not yield the same result.

yeh thats what it was a script sorry.

just do the script thing but do a move teleport first to put it nxt to the unit u want to deal damage to. then move it away after X seconds. that way you get rid of the blue explosion.

The problem is that the human player still needs to retain ownership of the scarab so that they get credit for any kills from it. Possibly giving the reaver to the player and removing the scarab might still get it to do damage without an explosion, but I doubt it.

Pinky. You just described the DDS system.

Can the regular dds system use players 9-11 for the scarabs?

If by regular, you mean the one that runs AI scripts: no. AI scripts can only be run by the player that owns the trigger, and P9-11 cannot run triggers. This is the same reason that P9-12 cannot be given vision with any other players.

There's more to it than just that. If you do have vision with p9, the units are just revealed. They don't give you vision, presumably because the don't *have* vision. By default they actually have shared vision with themselves, but it doesn't help, because the units don't give them vision. However, the reason they can't run triggers is probably the same reason they don't have vision. What's surprising is that players 13+ can have vision.