I already answered this in the misc assistance thread.

lol. no!

So amazing.

Hmm my mistake then...

news:
- Sorcerer has now Charged Bolt learned on level 1 at start. This will help him to stay in combat longer, will lower the initial staff recharge costs because you got another spell and to give him a mana dump right away.
- Buffed mana regeneration by approximately 50%.
- Monsters with melee attacks on the first 6 levels have a new cap on their final to Hit chance. It raises from 25% to 95% and is influenced by the hero's char level. The default cap stays at 95%. This is the final chance that a unit has to hit another unit. This % value is used after including other factors like level difference or armor class (defense).
- Gave Sorcerer 10 more Life to let him survive more at start and let health potions have a greater effect on him.
- Added more stuff to preload. So the game will lag less because of loading assets during playing time.
- Traps with projectiles spawn less projectiles in first 2 levels. On level 3+ there will spawn 2 or 3 instead of 3 projectiles.
- Holy bolt has 5 CtH more as its base: 57 + char level + spell level*2.
- added Firebolt and Fireball explosion sound
- added Relic of Healing and Relic of Mana as usable items. Costs 25 gold each and refills some life and mana over 45 game seconds.
- Doubled Heroes' health regeneration
- Hopefully fixed a bug with Town Portal casting in the moment of death. Casting town portal from the belt will trigger a command now instead of instantly creating the portal. So it isn't usable during other stuff like blocking, casting, shooting or hit recovery.
- added a message if a user loads or creates a new char. You get the level and the class information. So you don't have to talk about your classes during selection or ask what other people picked. So you won't end up with 4 sorcerers fighting over every book.
- buff UI is updated every game second now instead of every 2 seconds.

I will publish the demo map on EU tomorrow evening, the fourth of November 2011.
Hopefully US can come afterwards.

If you understand German, you might want to see the interview here:
I warned you that everything is German over there
It will start in 21 hours 50 minutes from this post (7pm on gmt+1).

If you want to play the map with an English community, I would advice you to join sc2mapster's EU mapnight after the interview.

Remeber that the map is still under construction. So balance might be to high for newer players, help text for new players is lacking or distracting, models are buggy, stuff looks ugly, bugs might appear, etc...
If you wish to complain about the delay with the controls, blame battle.net's architecture and keep in mind that Blizzard can only improve it and won't make it worse. I've only added a delay with the animations.
If you find bugs or have some suggestions how to improve the learning curve for new players, feel free to post here.

know problems:
- sorcerer and warrior model have a strange appearance in most games (freely moving chest, huge finger, huge shoes while running) [that is an exporter problem because these models are WoW models. So it can't easily be fixed.]
- the heroes might not play the attack animation, if stunned. I'm not sure why that is happening. I had some actor events inside the map to run the stand animation, but I think I deleted all reference.

If you play the map, it looks best on High settings. Ultra has a problem with the model that has been used for Griswold (Swann).
It can be played on low, too, and it doesn't require widescreen for the UI stuff (you won't have overlapping dialogs that shouldn't overlap).

edit:

Demo Map is public on EU

edit:
I guess the custom models can make the game crash in some random cases. I crashed and before I saw a green tint on a friendly warrior which shouldn't happen (only I saw it, the others didn't see it like that). So I guess that these wow models still cause some errors that shouldn't result in sc2 crashing.
Please report your crashes with a short description, so that Blizzard makes their game more stable and secure (any imported stuff shouldn't be able to crash the game).
They already fixed an after map crash (load any other map after mine -> crash), so they are already fixing my errors. ;D

news (changes aren't in demo map unless you find a new notification that I updated the demo map):
- fixed another problem with town portals: The town portal creation function has a delay because of the casting animation. If you can change your area (for example: you died) during that animation, the town portal connection will receive a wrong area data. That results in your screen and the minimap staying in Tristram while your hero teleports to the correct location.
- item creation functions can't hit the trigger execution limit anymore (forced a wait fo 0.0 real time seconds after 2000 tries). Also it should help with random lags appearing due to the creation. Now stuff might be dropped/created with a delay instead.
- items with curses (= bad magic modifiers) aren't equipped on pick up automatically anymore
- if the inventory is opened, newly picked up items are floating in the inventory (picked up in inventory)

Updated EU demo map to version 0.251
US will start with that version.

edit:
Demo Map is public on US

Post has been edited 16 time(s), last time on Nov 7 2011, 1:14 am by Ahli.

Good job Ahli.
And sorry for your dad.

PAYNE!!!!

also look forward to game!

news:
- buying items sucks with the floating item thing on pickup. So that feature will be bypassed, if you are trading. That happens if I add stuff late in the evening and publish it without a real test game.

- Leoric can't be attacked before removing the grates now
- Respawn starts at (34-2*playeramount) monsters left in dungeon now instead of 40 (which was first monster slain in dungeon level).
- Added a Healer tip
- Fixed heal spell sound being heard everywhere

edit:
I've been doing some unit count tests on the map and check its performance.
The result is, that 10k units are too much (that would be 9-10 dungeon levels).
Hiding units won't improve performance, pausing units to stop their pathfinding didn't improve performance.
Atm I'm at 80-90 fps with 5 levels (5.5k units), but 9 levels (9-10k units) lower it to 30-40 fps (0 levels are 180-270 fps).

I need to come up with a solution, if I want to add more content.
One solution could be that I store all levels in other data after creation and load them, if a hero enters them (and store them again, if he/she leaves it). The problem is the amount of units at the same time on the map and I do not need to have all units be count as full fledged units all the time.
So I need to find a solution or I need to change the map's scale.

Atm I try to serialize a complete dungeon with the data table and save and load it if needed.

edit:
I'm feeling not sane for trying that in a sc2 map, but it's working.

I'm loosing some data like behaviors on the units with that or swapped models atm, but I can save some extra data to recreate that stuff to some degree.

In the end I always could just pause all units and serialize only the dungeon walls and doodads. That would already save a ton of units, too. But atm I try to serialize everything.

A data table is excellent to save huge amount of dynamically created data. I really would like it if I could serialize a whole unit with behaviors and all changes instead of only reading out the most important data manually.
Starcraft can create save games, so it is very likely that the data is already completely serializeable in the game engine already.

If I just could change map textures and minimap data (explored area, drawn units, etc...), it would be possible to create a HUGE amount of bigger dungeons on the map.

edit:
news:
- fixed a bug that cave walls hadn't been counted as sight blocking units in triggers (ai archers tried to shot through it, you could leap over it, etc...)
- I'm able to serialize complete dungeons. So I can unload whole levels now. This will create lags or give you a bigger delay before I let you enter a new dungeon level, if it hasn't been loaded yet. I need to experiment with it, but this will raise the overall FPS and allow me to add more content to the map without permanent performance costs.

If you see that an item is behind other items in the inventory. Tell me how you think you did that. I've experienced that myself 2 times today, but I can't find the reason for that. (Problem is that the item is inside the inventory, but it didn't register inside the array or becomes overwritten. So some actions or a combination of actions seem to cause this).

edit:
The system seems to work.
For singleplayer I will load the dungeon immediately instead of loading it slower to lower the lag amount for other players. Loading time is around 15 seconds now. Everything with model variations will morph because I didn't see a way to get the used model variation from a unit. I could stop it if I assign every model a unit and create a random one instead.
I still need to add a canceling system for the serialization because the loading time will be much longer, if you try to enter a level that is currently being saved (atm you wait till it finished saving and then you load it).

edit:
- added that area loading/saving system.
- made sounds of gharbad and snotspill for non present players more quiet I hope (goal: guy in other level doesn't here it).
- added quest notifications with gharbad's quests instead of sneaking all the stuff into the quest log
- I hope the save/loading dungeon level system is now stable.
- buffed charged bolt spell from: "1 to (2 + mag/4 + clvl/4) * (slvl+5)/10" to "1 to (12 + mag/3.5 + clvl/4) * (slvl+5)/10" and made its calculations arithmetic (real), so small changes can already effect the damage output in the end (end value is always an integer).
- How about some new textures for higher armor?


--- updated on EU ---

Post has been edited 16 time(s), last time on Nov 14 2011, 12:34 am by Ahli.

Ahli hurry up and finish this so you can work on my super cool amazing top secret awesome map.

Give me a catacombs dungeon generation algorithm and I will make progress faster.

I'd personally generate the entire terrain full of your 'wall' unit.
Then I'd generate a unit at the stairs, and order it to move in a random cardinal direction (N,E,W, or South), for a random distance count - periodically removing 'wall' units it encounters.
Once it reaches it's distance count, it expires, triggering a search area effect which will create your room (by removing 'walls' in a radius).
The expiry effect can also spawn new 'creation units', up to 3 (the remaining cardinal directions, excepting the one that the currently expiring unit used).

This way you get corridors and rooms . You could also make the expiry effect create a unit which shoots 'creation units' with a very long cool down, that would stop rooms being created inside of rooms since approaching 'creation units' would be shot.

Who needs maths

i love this map found it 2-3 days ago but only started yesterday sucha amazing map gj tho one of the necklesses i cant sell for some reason. its one of the rare ones that arent worth anything i think it was ???? of misfortian. ill get back with the correct name when i get it i cant sell it or move it i can even place stuff over it XD

I think it is cursed, and it is intended to be un-removable.; The question is if Ahli has implemented a way to uncurse said items :3

No.
I've no item crafting or whatever done. But eliminating curses on items is an interesting idea for rare useable items...

Also, the name of rare items won't tell anything about the magic. I've used D2's system and names and it's just a random combination out of sets for the item's type (sword, axe, ...).

The Lightning Bolt spell doesn't create the animation when it is used on an enemy attacking you in a melee range, and it only hits a single enemy.
Also, you have an alert text message that says "Dropping Item - You Have No Room". Shouldn't it be "Drop An Item - ..." ?
And do you plan on implementing a corpse system? As it is right now, we do not lose our items when we die.
And is there going to be a chest?
Oh, and I believe the current "Shift" mode should be automatically engaged when running into monsters, and pressing "Shift" should actually let you run away... but there matter to debate I guess.
If you could find a way to make players buy potions faster, it'd be great as well.
And I saw a corpse (one of those you can interact with in order to obtain hidden items) hidden under a carpet.
Finally, you should tell people their character is automatically saved (I am assuming so).

The slow buying is an error which has been fixed on Europe already. You buy 1 item with 1 click and it will be placed in your inventory/belt automatically.
Atm I've tested the dungeon level loading/saving system on Europe, but it seems fine now, so I should send Raitaki the next version (I guess you are still on your trip) which contains all changes I wrote here since my US update/release message.

I think I will implement a chest with shared storage between your heroes someday.

Yes, the Lightning bolt actor isn't created fast enough by sc2 (or the projectile attacks and suicides before the actor is created).

I won't change shift stuff.

I didn't think about a corpse system, yet. It might be to punishing. I would rather raise death penalty than adding a corpse hunt.

I am back from my trip and I am staying home for the winter, then I'm returning.

Yaaaay payne
Also Ahli I'm very sorry to say you've lost yourself a tester, at least until my dad fixes whatever is wrong with his comp that makes it shutdown after 10 mins of playing mid-end game

news:
- made left mouse button only fire its special stuff, if SHIFT is used or you got an enemy below next to your mouse position. This basically allows you to do use anything different than the default attack on that mouse button.
Updated on EU and US (soon) to version 0.254

also: 10k hits

sorry late replay didnt get the name of the item but it let me sell it the next time i loaded the map one thing i cant figure out lol the abiltys that say you can put them on the belt how do you do that? i cant seem to get them thier lol. like heal for example. on a side note killing the butcher was depressing since i had a mage and all the spells i got for the longest time did no damage to him melle combat was out of the question (makes sense magic user) and until i got lucky and picked up a flash spell staff i was helpless b4 his wrath!!! the random book spawns also depress me as i keep getting book of charged bolt and i cant lvl up fast enough anymore to use them sell for 250 a pop

Updated.