Recently I thought of something that could change the way SC players play maps, by using the environment to their advantage, this means that your knife, sword, gun or bow wouldn't be your greatest weapons, but, rather, your environment, the things around you, your ENEMIES? and your brain, of course. This doesn't mean that, if you're standing in grass, your attacks will be grass-based, but you could have a spell that depends on the terrain you're on or something of that sort. Environmental Interaction does not mean being on high ground so you aren't hit as much, seeing as that's the only interaction to the environment.



Car bomb: Well basically what this does is use surrounding cars to your advantage. The procedure is that you would gather up cars (vultures, tanks, etc.) into either a line, or a mass, and throwing a grenade at them, to cause a chain reaction explosion with a proportionate delivery of force, destruction, and death either to take out stronger, and more multiple enemies, or bust open a wall, etc. Since you gather up CARS, this would have more use, obviously, in a badlands or city map.

Hi-jacking: *Yes, this has been done before* Basically it is what it says, you run up to the side of a car, and you would use the 'hi-jack' button to enter the car, pull out the person in it, and happily drive away in what could be transportation, or use for the car bomb. The person in it would pop out as a civilian, ghost, whatever. (Ghost for a gangster or policeman since they carry around guns.) You could even implement AI that would make the person you pulled out try to take their car back.

Fire Hydrant: If you destroy a fire hydrant ( Burrowed unit? ) it'll spew out water ( Hallucination deaths ) with 0 millisecond waits so it's instant, insant halluc flying deaths cause units under it to move slower, so it's like they're slipping, making it easier to face melee guys head-on, or micro.

Exploding Barrels: Note: there is a concept map for this in the map database under experimental. Basically, the barrels would be something like gas crates and when you shoot them they explode and kill everything around them, good for zombie maps, war maps, multiplayer maps, anything 8) .

Talking Concept: You go up to a townsperson, whoever and two crystals will come up, one saying a different thing, and depending on what you say is the response you get from the person/thing. This could lead to being able to obtain multiple quests, getting information on surroundings, or anything you can think of.

Security Hacking: I got this idea from Bioshock. Basically if you are trying to infiltrate a high security facility with robots patrolling, or gun turrets on the walls, you could hack into the bots or turrets for an advantage with use of your hacking gadget (whatever you want to call it ) and it would turn your ENEMY onto your side, this fits into the category of enemy versus enemy. It would only work say 10 seconds, and the gadgets cooldown would be say 30 seconds.

Weather spell: Depending on what you're near, what TERRAIN you're near, is what this spell does. If you're on grass it's a grass-based attack, if you're on water, waterbolt, if you're near fire, a flamestrike, anything that depends on what kind of terrain you lay foot on.

Traps: Basically it could be anything from an anchor hanging to a pit. If it's something hanging, then you shoot the rope holding it, and it'll fall on an unsuspecting head. If it's like a pit of water, you would find a switch, press it, and watch anyone ontop of the pit fall into the water, they can't swim either =[.

Telekenesis: Perhaps you are a gifted person in a map or something like in Bioshock and a trap is blocking a doorway, you can use telekenesis to move the trap to another wall, and use it to your advantage on an oncoming enemy charging towards you. Maybe the trap shocks the person to stun them, maybe it burns them, who knows.

Alarm: Maybe you are in a security facility, protecting it against robbers or thieves or something and you see one of them. You could press a nearby alarm and reinforcements would come to assist you. If noone is there and you press it, the reinforcements will be mad at you and attack or something .

Water Reaction: Perhaps the floor is wet, and enemies are everywhere, you can use your lightning spell on the water and everyone on it will be electrocuted and stunned . This, I think, should definitely be used in a real map.

Flammability: Gasoline on the floor? Use it to your advantage! Use your fireball spell, drop a cigarette, use a match, or anything that'll light it up. All enemies on the flammable gasoline are burnt to death and killed, bringing MUCH satisfaction. Enemies hiding in hay? No problem! Lightthe hay on fire and roast them!

Market Stalls: Market stalls litter the streets, and guards are watching you. Suddenly you attract their attention by doing something that is socially innacurate and you're engaged in combat, use your throw ability and throw them into a market stall, and watch the wood fall on them and any bystanders.

Airlock [ Being used by Marine57 ]: You're on a space ship, and wearing a space helmet, and a nearby window to space is able to be damaged or broken and enemies are surrounding you, you break the window with your wrench, gun, etc. and everyone in the room not wearing a space helmet ( Your enemies ) will be damaged because all of the air in the room is being sucked out. They could be irradiated, hurt by lurkers, maybe even something else you want to add.



Locker: Being the bully of the school and picking on the weak, you can do it in a whole new way, by using your environment! Lockers have three uses, you can stuff a kid in one, you can hide in them to escape Prefects or students looking for a fight, or you can pick them (Locked ones) to obtain items. When you shove a kid in a locker by using your grapple move (hold onto them), you just walk them to a locker and they move on in. When you open the locker again, or someone else does (you could have AI that NPC students open lockers, etc.), the kid you shoved in falls out.

Trashcan: The trashcan works the same way a locker does, except you can't pick them, however, you can find garbage in them. After all, one man's trash is another man's treasure .

Prefect/school enforcement: Prefects can be your ally, or enemy. If you're causing trouble like hitting kids or bullying them when a prefect see's you, they'll chase you until your trouble meter goes down (by running around too long or hiding in a locker/trashcan). Prefects can be an ally if they see someone else hitting you, because they will chase whoever was hitting you and bust them.

Marbles: So you just had to hit that prefect, and now he's chasing you down. The only thing you have are your fists, and your bags of marbles. Quickly you open up the bag, and the prefect who was once behind you is busy tripping on marbles, you can now stare in laughter at him. Marbles primarily just trip people.

Water sources: Sinks, water fountains, anything that provides water. Use these to fill up your water balloons to use as a prank. Water balloons would be scourges that, when hitting another student, causes a couple of dragoon deaths (water spilling) and the student will be angry at you, and perhaps attack you.

Bathrooms: You're the bully of the school, hanging out in the bathroom, suddenly the school nerd walks in and you know what to do next. You grapple the kid and bring him close to a bathroom stall, where you give him a swirly, an instant K.O.



By Payne: If you have a sword, and you're near a rock sprite and it's night, you could start a fire and get temporary vision. ( Addition by me: Maybe you can have a 'buff' called Cozy Fire that heals you over time while near the fire, or maybe if it's like The Thing: Ice, it'll heat you up ( Recharge Heat Pack. )

By MentalPatient: Floor hatches can be used as a drain, oxygen depleter, warp, or pit of death by opening them. (Addition by me: Perhaps a scenario would be you have to drain all the water, observers, in a place and you activate a switch to turn on/off the drain, but you might want to keep some water there so you can electrocute it, roasting all nearby enemies, because they are invading to make your job tougher.)

By Oyenno:
Tree Climbing. If a player's hero is standing near a tree, the player can "climb the tree and hide in it". The player can choose whether or not to climb the tree, perhaps by using a stargate and building a specific unit out of it. If the player does this, his/her hero is moved somewhere and the player gains an invincible burrowed unit where his/her hero was standing. If the player unburrows the unit, then the unit is removed and the hero reappears. Could be fun in a PvP game for ambushing other players.

Aircraft to Submarine mode (for some sort of futuristic aircraft battle map): When an aircraft is flying over the water, the player can activate an option that replaces the aircraft with an observer(as well as some hallucination deaths near it for a neat-looking effect). The observer can only stay above water tiles, if it tries to fly onto land, it is immediatly replaced with the aircraft that had been switched for it earlier.

I figure that this would allow the player's aircraft to travel along rivers and oceans safely and parhaps spy on other players near the water. Other players would only see a blur, letting them know that a submarine is near them, but unable to do anything about it.

Fire Extinguisher: If a building is on fire, a player can have a corsair can cast disruption web on it, and the building's hp will be set to the lowest possible value that doesn't show flames on the building. Or just 100%. That would work too.

Power Plant turned on: There is a building in the middle of a city and it is labeled "Power Plant". Every building of the city is owned by a purple computer player. Any human players in the city will receive no vision from the purple player. When a human player enters the power plant and turns it on, then every building owned by the purple-colored player will gradually be given to a yellow-colored computer player that has shared vision with the human players. Gradually, The closest buildings to the power plant will change first, with the farthest changing last.

On a human player's minimap, it will look like the entire city is lighting up.

Tree Cutting: When an scv moves under a tree, a burrowed ling with 9999 hp owned by player 12(considered enemy by player) is created at the tree. The scv will automatically attack it, and after about 3 seconds, a psi emittor(wood) is created at the tree, and the scv is ordered to return to the nearest command center. When it reaches the command center, the psi emitter is was carrying will disapear, and it will be ordered to move back to the tree. When it finally returns to the tree, it will start attacking p12's ling again, repeating the process. (Addition by me: You could have a computer doing this with order triggers, like they're harvesting lumber, though a young chrysallis would look better as wood.
Tree Cutting Test Map

This will resemble an scv that is mining minerals, except with trees instead.

Water-gathering: Its basically the same as my tree cutting idea, except instead of a burrowed unit being at a tree, it is placed near some water.

Vines: On the jungle tileset, place a bunch of trees and bushes in one big compact area. If a player moves through that area, he will randomly stop(via order trigger) in mid-movement as he walks within the area. Every time the player's unit stops, there will be a kakaru death above his unit, to make it look like the player's unit stopped to cut through some vines.

Bear Trap: If a player's unit is walking through grass, there is a random chance that the player will step in a "Bear Trap". When this happens, a kakaru death happens above the player's unit. Then a mine(allied) appears below his/her unit. As long as the mine is underneath the player's unit, then his/her unit can not move away from it. This will no longer take effect when the player manages to use his/her unit to attack and kill the mine.

Terrain WAVs: Depending on the terrain your unit is walking on, you will regularly hear a specific WAV file as you walk through that terrain. For example, if your unit is walking on raised jungle, the player could regularly hear a WAV file that sounds like jungle animal noises.

Slippery Ice: When your unit is walking on ice terrain, and you order him to move a different direction, the unit will sorta "slide" and continue moving the same direction for a short moment before changing directions. This would probably involve using mobile grids to trigger this.

Blizzard: (For Snow/Ice tileset) When your character is walking through the snow, "blizzards" will randomly pass your character by.
When a blizzard happens, a swarm of invisible observers will be created somewhere nearby. Then the observers will be ordered to move past your character. When the observers are moving over your character, continiously move a burrowed unit under your character. This will slow your character down. You can also play a blizzard sounding WAV file while this is happening. This will resemble your character slowly moving against the force of a strong blizzard.
When the observers are no longer over your character, remove the burrowed unit. Once the observers are far from your character, remove the observers.

Fruit Trees: Basically, put a tree doodad somewhere. Put a computer-controlled scourge(or any other harmless air unit) above it. Have a small 1x1 location around the scourge. When the scourge is attacked by a ground unit, it will fly away. As soon as it leaves the 1x1 location, remove the scourge and put a young chrysalis (fruit) where the scourge was. Now the ground unit can eat or pick up the fruit. Additionally, you could also trigger the scourge to respawn at the tree every now and then, so players can get more fruit out of it.

More ideas:

Thick Mud: Similar to my Vines idea above, any hero that walks through mud terrain is slowed down (using the burrowed unit trick).

Hot Lava: For an Ashworld rpg. Walking on lava lowers your Hero's hp gradually. This can be done by putting mines on lava terrain, using vhp, or some other method.

Catapult Travel: For a rpg. Basically, you need a river or some other obstacle that cant be crossed by the hero (ground unit). On the hero's side of the obstacle, place a computer-owned seiged tank (named catapult). Have this computer player unallied to player 12. On the other side of the obstacle, put an invincible burrowed unit owned by player 12. Put an computer-controlled observer nearby, so the computer can see it. The burrowed unit needs to be within the tank's range. Put a location around both the burrowed unit and the tank.
Now, when a player's hero walks into the tank's location, teleport the hero to the p12 location and disable invulnerability for the p12 burrowed unit (should survive tank attack). This will look like the hero was shot over the obstacle using the catapult. About 1 second after this teleport, re-enable inviniciblity for the burrowed unit, so this can all be done again. This is basically a fancy way of teleporting a unit from 1 location to another. Sorta environment related.

By Stickynote:
Walking uphill (such as a ramp): will slow you down. That can be easily accomplished with switches and bring condition. I'm sure anyone can figure it out.

If the ground is shaking(such as an earthquake): You can have a grid around a unit, and center view on the resulting loxcations, making the screen "shake".



If you spark an idea for Environmental Interaction, please post it and I will be happy to add it to the ideas list with your name on it. Everyone is free to discuss it, or use my ideas, because chances are I won't use half of them.

Post has been edited 15 time(s), last time on Sep 8 2008, 6:39 pm by lil-Inferno.

I'll serve as a tester, since I do have an account on USEast. Username is Crossbowman, but it's voided and muted, for seemingly no reason.

I'm not the terrain-slave type, but if you need help with anything other than plain cityscape (Which bores me to death) I could give you some stuff I guess.

Regarding the weather spell, how exactly would you plan to make triggers that focus on actual terrain? Triggers can't detect anything about terrain except for elevation. I suppose you could have a location around every different type of terrain in the map, but that would probably use a lot of locations and triggers unless the map's terrain isn't particularly complex.

I had a similar idea using the enrivonment to affect gameplay. In an rpg I'm planning out, there will be trees(doodads) scattered around the map and near each tree will be a burrowed unit. Each player will have a location centering around his/her hero. When the hero moves near a tree, the burrowed unit will be detected within the location, and the hero's mp(gas) will recover quicker than usual while standing near the tree.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 13 2007, 12:23 am by Oyen.

Well if you mean the traps, I mean like, for the pit of water you could have like one of those pit circle things in installation and just spam halluc deaths, for the anchor, maybe have like. . .scourges as the rope and if you shoot the end one, it'll destroy all of the others and the anchor will fall. You can even do something simple like a spike trap, if your in the area and the trap is activated, lurkers will attack from all angles ( They'll attack burrowed zerglings). This could be awesome in PvP maps or maybe even have AI units that can activate the traps.

Well I need badlands 'Backramps' and the tileset is rorylands so ya it's gonna be a city =[. Other than that im fine except im short on one terrainist.

Just an idea like that:
Having a sword (into a medieval rpg or so...) and a rock sprite : you could interact and start a fire or even if it's the night, give you a short vision (you would be blinded and have a burrowed unit not blinded wich you get vision for a certain time...).

Actually, I was referring to the weather spell. Sorry I didn't clarify.

The reason you're probably voided is because you're using a faulty CD-Key. This happened to my friend, but he could talk in-game so thats good =D. Except I dont know how we could communicate besides making the game name like. . .Hi Crossbowman and then leaving that game. If you find your problem, post on this topic.

Oh, ok, well that would use like, 5 different burrowed types unfortunately unless its a smaller map which would be more useful.

Hmm, pretty cool idea, i'll add to the list. I like how it's part of the environment, and it gives you an advantage, of course. Maybe you could also have a buff called like. . .Cozy Fire and it would heal you over time.

Here's another terrain idea:

Tree Climbing. If a player's hero is standing near a tree, the player can "climb the tree and hide in it". The player can choose whether or not to climb the tree, perhaps by using a stargate and building a specific unit out of it. If the player does this, his/her hero is moved somewhere and the player gains an invincible burrowed unit where his/her hero was standing. If the player unburrows the unit, then the unit is removed and the hero reappears. Could be fun in a PvP game for ambushing other players.

Sounds awesome in a PvP map. In Cosmo(U)'s upcoming map, he uses spires as trees that you can hide in, but nothing really passes you for an ambush.

im other terrainer and you know it

Environmental interaction you say?
I had a map idea once where minerals represented explosive crystals that went off if close to fire (like when you carry a torch).

When you edited the first post with "ideas by other people", you gave me credit for payne's idea.

YEA BOY!!!

Oh, you never told me it was his ideas, well i'll fix it k'?

Well....He was the person who posted it. Wasn't it obvious?

*Hits self in face* DOH! I didn't even notice xD.