A couple of months ago I released a map called Oblivion RPG. This was my biggest ever project which allowed the player to custom create his hero completely, choosing among 54 spells and 5 base stats. The map was fun, but had a few downfalls. It had a few imbalances and you could only select one unit, giving it little re-playability factor. It was also not very challenging because I didn't test it enough. But overall the feedback was good and people enjoyed the battle system.

So I'm thinking of creating a new map, the follow-on from Oblivion, Skyrim. The new map will offer 1 of 4 units with set spell paths, however you'd still get to choose your passive skills. For those of you who played Oblivion, feel free to make suggestions on how I can turn this map into the beast of all RPGs on Starcraft.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 5 2013, 9:11 pm by MetalGear.

My idea is for helping you get more ideas.

Your thread would receive more traffic if you made the title more specific. Mentioning Skyrim in it would help.

make an accompanying mod to go with it! that way you could possibly have buttons for spells instead of having to use the starport

Unfortunately I have no experience with mods. Good idea though.

You can have buttons for spells without modding (so long as they're numbers) by using selection detection EUDs. The trick is to have the player hotkey each EUD control unit and their hero together, then automatically deselect only the control unit when the press of the hotkey is detected (via selection)...so the player is left with just the hero selected, and thus does not have to reselect the hero manually.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 6 2013, 3:26 am by FoxWolf1.

Or you could ignore that ridiculous workaround and simply use a mod, which you won't need complicated testing and troubleshooting of EUDs to accomplish.

Also, I don't play Elder Scrolls-themed projects because Bethesda is a pretty disgusting developer, so I certainly won't play a Skyrim-themed project. I'm just one guy, though, so go for whatever you want.

It's not complicated, nor does it need testing to make work; EUDGen2 can generate those triggers easily in a few seconds. It's much easier than modding it, never mind also learning how to mod. It's more convenient as well, since people don't need anything other than the map, which can be downloaded via Bnet, in order to play.

"Learning to mod" is as simple as reading less than you need to learn how to use EUDs or applying the proper inputs to EUDGen2. That programme doesn't make EUDs more accessible, it just makes them easier for people who already know how to write them to generate them on the fly. Also, with one minute of work, you can make the mod the only thing you need to download, too - and this is a single player map, yes? Battle.net is irrelevant even if it isn't, because running the same mod lets you play the same games. Your phobia of utility and efficiency is pretty ridiculous at this point.

I've been dabbling in modding maybe if i get the experience i need by the time you get enough done to implement it i can work on it?? no promises tho




Azrael makes a valid point, without modding the map can be distributed solely through b.net and public games are possible. i think fox's suggestion isn't viable for a few reasons: the main reason i would prefer a mod is to avoid the necessity of having to hotkey everything before hand and then having to remember which hotkey belongs to which spell etcetc. also i'm assuming you intend to have more than 10 spells (the maximum number of hotkeys). on the other hand, with a mod you would have to either play solo (which imo is keeping in the spirit of TES) or go through the tedious process of scheduling games with people on SEN or other communities, so the visibility of the map would be much lower. but when it comes to spells you could have far more; you could separate spells by type (or schools like in TES) and have as many as 9 spells under each 'school' button. considering there are only 4 unused button slots on generic combat units, you could have as many as 36 spells (or 45 if you have a spellcaster class with an exclusive school of magic)

Include randomized shouts. Like, have the player unlock random words of power and then make the spells go along with what the powers are. I think Ahli did that in his Diablo map on BW; he'd randomize the prefixes and suffixes of the items so that they would have random stats, allowing there to be thousands of combinations. Not sure how hard it would be for your to make visually appealing spells (all of Ahli's armor/weapons were just described through stats), but if you could pull that off, that'd be pretty awesome.

Create your own dragon AI. Bethesda prided itself on making the dragons do completely random things and never having them follow the same AI, so you could try that. It got pretty boring sometimes, though, as the dragons would just fly in a circle, land, shoot some fire, and then lift off and fly around in another circle. If you could make their AI really dynamic, that would add a lot of depth to the dragon fights, which got pretty boring in the actual game once you got good weapons.

I haven't played your Oblivion map, so I don't know if you included music, but I think that's one of the most vital things for an RPG. One of the reasons why I love Skyrim so much is because of the epic music that plays during dragon fights, and the atmosphere that it creates with the softer music that plays when you're just roaming around at night. I'm assuming that this is going to be a single player map, so please, go crazy with the wavs and make the immersion incredible.

Add random encounters that trigger random quests. Again, I haven't played your Oblivion map, and I haven't really played much of the actual game, so I don't know if random people ever came up to you and asked for your help, but I know that it happened in Skyrim. Of course, these small side quests weren't all that complicated; they were mostly just stuff like, "save me from some bandits who are chasing me," or, "go kill that person holed up in a fort." I think those would be pretty easy to make, and it would make roaming around the world more fun instead of being incredibly tedious because you would be able to get quests and potential rewards out of it.

I don't know how closely to the main storyline you're going to follow when making your main quests, but if you are planning to make all the quests the same as the actual game, include one or two more story lines to go along with that. I think the civil war and the Dark Brotherhood would be easy enough to implement, and it would add a lot more to the game, especially if the player doesn't feel like going straight through the main quest.

Make it necessary to upgrade all skills. I remember seeing in your Oblivion thread how people said they just skipped most stats and only focused on one, and once they got the best items, they just rolled through the game. If you add in quests that focus on specific skills, the player will be forced to upgrade multiple skills, instead of just focusing on one, and that will make it harder for them to just run right through the game. Also, if you wanted to add random items (like what Ahli did), it make it so that there really wouldn't be a "best" weapon/armor, so players couldn't just focus on getting those items.

Skyrim's enemies leveled with the player so that the player wouldn't be able to just go through everything without any trouble. Of course, early-game enemies like wolves or skeletons were still pretty easy, but mages and vampires still proved a bit difficult near the end of the game. If you scale the enemies with the player's level, it would make it harder for the player to just run through the game. You could use vhp so that you wouldn't have to somehow actually increase the enemies' attack damage.

Lol guys forget modding and EUDs, it's not happening. Just clear any confusion, it's a 3-player map.


That's a pretty good idea, but the spells are already set and designed from the character's class. What I'm thinking though is to have just one action button for a shout. Different shouts can then be learned but only one used at a time. As for the items, I think that would be too tricky, I remember how long the item system took me in Oblivion. Partly the reason is that the items can be sold and bought for various discounts depending on the player's chosen skills. The items in this RPG can also be traded between players.


I'm still not sure how I'm going to do this. In Oblivion, I made the bosses just have a variety of spells that cast randomly. Also, another tricky thing is that I can't have air units, since most of the player units are melee. So I was thinking of using an Ultralisk for a dragon. Not much else I can do.


Yes well in Oblivion I used about 100 custom sounds, including footsteps, menu clicks, and weather/ambient loops in each area to create atmosphere. I may even include voices this time. Music was the one thing I didn't include, but in Skyrim, I'll either play a main track on repeat (about 2-3 minutes long) or I'll have lots of small music tracks for seperate areas. Not sure which is better.


I remember I was going to do this in Oblivion, but I ran out of strings. It's possible though, I'll definitely put thought into it.


In Oblivion I made the mistake of adding an uprgade called "Luck", which allowed the player to get mega rich. Therefore, they could buy the best items quite early. I've taken this feature out, and I've also added a timer which gives limited time to complete the map, so players will have to play more strategically and spend their time wisely. Random item placement is a good idea, I think I'll do that. As for the items, I've made it so that the better items get more value heavy for each included stat. So for example, a Tabard, which gives +3 armor costs $330 ($110 per stat), opposed to a Ringmail, giving +10 armor costs $1450 ($145 per stat). So you get more for your money buying cheaper items. Hopefully this will be enough to encourage consideration of all items. Also, in Skyrim, I'll make the items specific to certain stats. So the most expensive item isn't necessarily the best for the player's chosen style. (An intelligence item would be better suited for a mage, rather than armor.)


This won't be easy because it's real-time combat. What I am going to include though is implement 3 different game modes, which changes the difficulty of the bosses. The intensity and regularity of their spells will be the factor at play here. Also, the enemies gradually get stronger as the player proceeds through the game. The only other thing I could do is give spells to standard enemies as well as the bosses.

Pls don't Do that. It would be in gross contrast to skyrim gameplay where taking your time and exploring the land is part of the game.
Also forcing arbitrary limits upon players is a bad way to control gameplay. It's will feel much more natural if you give incentive to go on instead. This could be stronger enemies level you much faster / lower enemies level you painfully slow, easy enemies stop spawning after a while, or even better, give no rewards anymore.

Or at least integrate the forced rush into the story: E.G. Town is under attack and if you don't help quick enough shops will get destroyed or people will hate you and refuse to offer quests.

Is there a reason for that? Since Roy made a program that does 100% of the work for you. It couldn't be easier.


I agree, it seems unnecessary.

Sorry I should have mentioned, players can choose from 1 of 3 game modes, Easy, Normal, and Hard. The timer is only set for the Hard difficulty, therefore granting re-playability factor, so if a player wins on Normal, he can then try to win the game under more pressure on Hard.


Basically because I'm not experienced with EUDs at all. I have very little knowledge about what they can do. And as far as I know, they don't work well in multiplayer maps, but I could be wrong. Is there a link where I can DL Roy's EUD program, and also maybe a good guide on how to use EUDs? I have a question. Let's say you want to detect a unit's HP, and then add 100 HP. Is this possible for a multiplayer map?

I think you can detect HP in multiplayer maps, but the problem is that you have to know the indices of the units, so if you're creating new units, that will be problematic because you won't know their indices. I don't think stuff like key detection works in multiplayer, though.

Here's Roy's EUDGen, and here's a guide on EUDs.

Yeah, you'll want to preplace the units. It is possible to find a unit's index after it's been created, but that's a little more complicated.

A unit index is basically just a unique number between 0 and 1699 that every unit on the map gets. After a unit dies, its index can be reused on a future unit. You know how the game says "Cannot create more units" if there's 1700 units on the map already? It's because it ran out of unit indexes to assign to new units.

Opening EUDGen2 will show you the stuff you can detect. Every condition there can be used in multiplayer, except for the stuff in the "Local" tab.

The two most important things to note (you may want to open SCMDraft2 to look at these features):

1) EUDs regarding a unit (like checking its HP) requires the unit's index. In EUDGen2, it'll ask for the index. You can see the unit indexes in SCMDraft2, just double-click any unit to open the Properties window. One of the columns there shows unit indexes.

2) The unit indexes shown in SCMDraft2 can be made inaccurate. You'll notice you can't change which range of indexes the units use, you can only swap them within that range; if you have 50 units on the map, SCMDraft2 forces you to use the indexes 0 to 49. That's because StarCraft uses the 0 index first, then 1, then 2, etc.

That being that case, let's say that you make a map with 10 units. They have indexes 0 to 9. Now let's say Unit 0 and Unit 1 are owned by Player 1. If you play this map in multiplayer, but there is no Player 1, what happens? It doesn't create Player 1's units, like usual, so Unit 0 and Unit 1 don't exist. Now it will create Unit 2, except it has to start at index 0, so Unit 2 in SCMDraft2 will now become Unit 0 in-game.

This only happens when the units are being created, of course. Once it's created, a unit's index will never change.

Easy solution to this: In SCMDraft2, put the preplaced units you want to check in the lowest indexes, starting at 0. Make these units owned by Player 12 (or a computer player), who will always be in the game (so the units will always be created). When the game starts, give the units to the players that are supposed to have them.

If there's 3 heroes, because it's a 3-player map, you can give them indexes 0, 1, and 2. That should make life fairly easy for you.

Special note: Unlike basically everything else (including Map Revealers), Start Locations never actually exist in-game, and therefore never get a unit index. Every index higher than a Start Location is actually one lower because of this, so it's generally least confusing to just move Start Locations to the highest indexes in SCMDraft2 (which is easy to do, since you can select them all at the same time and move them).


This program is what really makes EUDs accessible to anyone, they used to be needlessly complicated. It took all the math out of the equation. The guide is also pretty good, I'm sure everything I mentioned here is explained there as well

If it seems complicated, it's because you're still unfamiliar with the implementation (like trying to understand Conditions and Actions before opening the Trigger Editor). I'd suggest opening EUDGen2 and looking through it, it's styled similarly to normal StarCraft triggering. Once you've created your first EUD, the process should be pretty intuitive for you.


Absolutely.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 12 2013, 8:12 am by Azrael.

Not as easily as this 1-word answer may suggest.

The condition is doable easily enough, but (without modding) you can't create EUD actions so you'll have to rely on classic actions to add hitpoints to a unit. And as you know you can only set hitpoints, not add to them so you'll have to
- rely on medic heals and scv repairs (which come with their own drawbacks),
- systems like vHP (which defeats the purpose of EUDs) or
- (probably the best alternative) brute force to cover all possible hp levels and set the hp accordingly (may introduce trigger lag).

Not as hard as that answer suggests, either.

This has been done before. You simply set a death count at the beginning of the trigger cycle based on current health, perform any health modifications by adjusting the death count, and then set the health at the end of the cycle based on that death count. You only run these triggers when you're doing a health adjustment. You can even preface the conditions with a switch that only allows the other conditions to be checked when the health adjustment is being made. It's simple and runs for a single cycle; there is no lag.

And while it is fairly easy, my answer didn't suggest that. He asked if it was possible, not if it was easy.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 12 2013, 11:12 am by Azrael.

Using only Death conditions wont cause any lag either. It's barely more complicated than switches, as long as you are only using specific players and units.

I actually found out accidentally that player 11 siege tanks do not take up indexes properly. I'm not really sure if there are any other player 11 units that cause this, as most seem to work fine. Attached is a map with seven siege tanks indexed before a ghost on index 7. The map has one condition to spam text when the index 7 ghost is selected. Replace the p11 tanks with p11 observers, and it works fine.

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