In maps like The Thing Ice you have to stay inside to warm up, this is represented by a score leaderboard which drops in number per second, but your gas resource also drops as well.
I would like a custom score which doesn't utilize gas&minerals, something I want to keep for upgrades. Is that possible?

Custom score can be manipulated in the same ways that minerals and gas can, you just need to use different conditions and actions. For example, the condition for checking minerals and gas is "Accumulate", where custom score is checked with the condition "Score". The action for changing minerals and gas is "Set Resources", where custom score is changed with the action "Set Score".

The only drawback of this would be that if you were to have an experience/level/anything-else-that-would-require-a-leaderboard-to-keep-track-of-it, it would make it so that you wont be able to constantly see your mana/whatever, which would be very annoying.

Speaking of which, I have a question for the map I'm currently working on. In RPGs, the leaderboard usually alternates between showing your level and your current experience. I'm wondering how this is accomplished, since there is only one "custom-score" (or so I believe, but this might be where I am wrong in my thinking).

Do people typically use like razings or kills scores for some variables (like exp or levels)? If so, how do they keep it from being affected by.. well, killing buildings or enemy units (and by affected I mean affected without the use of triggers - obviously with triggers you would want the exp to go up with kills, but SC has a pre-set unit-value in terms of kill-score that gets added every time you kill a unit. This is what I'm talking about when I say "without being affected by killing buildings or enemy units")?

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 24 2014, 6:13 pm by Zoan.

They probably use just standard kill score for XP and then Custom for level ... You could also use gas or something for your level and display it that way. You might even be able to use like unit score or building score ... I'm not sure entirely what will effect those scores (specifically preplaced units, giving units, and creating units with triggers ... obviously producing units will change them), but I'm sure they'd be pretty reliable.

Or if you wanted to be really tricky (and excessive ) you could store them as regular DCs use a binary system to transfer them to custom. xD

This would be my guess.
You have hundreds of dcs to store values in and need x triggers for a variable with max value of 2^x-1 to transfer between dcs and custom score. For example to transfer a variable whose values range from 0-32767 you only need 15 triggers. Double the amount of triggers and you can go over 1 billion.

Having made an RPG which used such a system, I can shed some light on the correct way to do this.

You store the value (like level or experience) in a death count, and just display the death count directly on the leaderboard.

While in Classic Triggers, create the action "Leaderboard (Kills)". For the unit, type in ID:###

However, ### is an actual number. To get it: Add 228 to the ID of the unit you're displaying the death count for.

Example: You want the leaderboard to display each player's current death count for Cantina. You quickly check a list of unit IDs, and see that Cantina's ID is 181. 181 + 228 = 409, so you use the "Leaderboard (Kills)" action to display the leaderboard, and type in ID:409 for the unit's name.

Remember that you need to be in Classic Triggers. If you compile this using Trigedit, you'll get an error, because it thinks the unit you entered is invalid.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 26 2014, 3:01 am by Azrael. Reason: Formatting.

Ohh, ok. That is actually very cool, Azrael. I'll probably use that in my rpg Just out of curiosity, where does the 228 come from?

The first unit (Terran Marine) is at ID 0, the last (Terran Vespene Gas Tank Type 2) is at ID 227. Since IDs are inclusive of zero, from 0-227 there are 228 IDs. So if you add 228 to ID 0 you'll get ID 228, which refers to Terran Marine deaths, whereas ID 455 would refer to Terran Vespene Gas Tank Type 2 deaths, and so on.

Note: I'm not entirely sure if this is true on a technical level, but I think it suffices as a reasonable explanation.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 26 2014, 1:30 pm by lil-Inferno.

That's a really nifty trick. I didn't know you could do that.