Great. I was not questioning your mapping/storyline skills, I was just trying to point out that most hack N slash game in SC1 were boring because of lack of purpose.

Right, totally agree. Aside from an intro, most of the cutscenes will be relatively short. There will be transmissions and such now that I can take full advantage of an awesome transmission system, though.

Looks like a fun map. Is it going well?

Sort of. I have 10/36 abilities done for the heroes. I hit a snag with one of the Psionic's abilities doing damage to the caster even though the flags prevented that, so I'll have to go back and start that one over. I also had to change the Assault's Flamethrower ability simply because the included beams aren't wide enough, and the one flame attack that is wide enough wont show up because it isn't a beam. Most of the other abilities have been written out as to how I plan on doing them, and nothing seems overly complicated which is nice. I'm still contemplating how I will do the Mech's Flight ability, but I assume I can just make the unit morph through Events.

The flamethrower can have multiple beams, which is sprayed out meaning that it can be upgraded with weapons... if not then i suppose you can design your custom model from the old flame model.

What do you mean upgraded with weapons? The issue I had is that I needed the Flamethrower to span a 55 degree area, and unfortunately I can't widen one end of the beam. I could have shot a ton of beams, but that looks ridiculous and may make people lag. On top of that, the animation I originally wanted to use for the flames wouldn't work because it isn't a beam. I could make the actor show up when the ability is used, but I can't manipulate its size to shoot like a beam. Instead, I just changed the ability and moved on.

hmm... fair enough but if the ability was to work within your perimeters then the flamethrower could spray for left to right then repeat for x amount of time?

Thanks to the release of 1.2, my map now takes 2 minutes to load in the editor, 3 and a half minutes to load in StarCraft 2, and of course now some of my abilities don't work. I'm going to have to fix 5 of them so far, though the biggest pain in the ass will be the Assault Commander's leap attack as it now looks like he teleports to his target location, and just jumps in the air from there. Also, I know Ahli has been talking about the possibility of memory leaks in 1.2 and I'm just now noticing basic lag spikes with certain abilities.

This is going to be awesome!

Why so many people have data problems after the patch?
Are you using the multi dependency?

LibertyMulti was on my dependency list by default when I started this, but I have read that that seems to be causing a lot of problems. I still can't figure out the lag thing, though.

Quote from DevliN

Sort of. I have 10/36 abilities done for the heroes. I hit a snag with one of the Psionic's abilities doing damage to the caster even though the flags prevented that, so I'll have to go back and start that one over. I also had to change the Assault's Flamethrower ability simply because the included beams aren't wide enough, and the one flame attack that is wide enough wont show up because it isn't a beam. Most of the other abilities have been written out as to how I plan on doing them, and nothing seems overly complicated which is nice. I'm still contemplating how I will do the Mech's Flight ability, but I assume I can just make the unit morph through Events.

You could've modified the scale on the beam model, or in the actor for it. It's easily done. Or was there something preventing that?

Oops, nevermind... just saw your other post.

Aye, 1.2 screwed up a lot of things.

Bout time this thing got a bump...

Anywho how's your map coming along?

It isn't coming along nearly as fast as I'd like. Started a new job that demands 12-hour days, 5 days a week (and sometimes weekends), so I've had very little time to sit still and work on this. I will say that I've already put so much effort into it that it definitely will be finished, I just have to find a long period of time to get it done. I started to look at the abilities that became broken in 1.2 and just didn't have the patience to fix anything. I've always been bad with prioritizing my free time, and unfortunately this is one of the projects that suffers because of it. I have no doubt that in the near future I will get on this and power through it, I just have to find the time.

Sucks for you... I also really hoping to get a job. But i know that this will eventually get finished... probably within a year or two more then you expected XD... anywho i think it would be best if you'd only focus on project at a time so that you would can atleast finish one map for sc2

This really is my main focus. SEN Arena is a community thing, so it depends on what others send me. OMG TEH ZOMBIES is just a small dumb map I want to eventually finish, but don't plan to until this is done.

And I doubt it will take that long to finish this map. The job I'm working on now is a TV show, and the job ends in a couple months. After that I'll have much more free time, supposing I don't work on it sooner. Right now my biggest inhibitor is lack of motivation.

So, it's been a few months - are you working on this again?

I mentioned in the shoutbox about fixing maps that were broken after a new patch. Do you still have those broken abilities?

As for the leap-ability, were you creating it using force effects? A much simpler method is to create a missile that looks like the jumping unit, and have the ability launch missile in a parabola arc with a blink-teleport effect on impact.

Moar updates please.

I created it as a missile effect (and it used to work perfectly). The issue I'm having now is that my missile (the unit) doesn't actually fire to the location. It moves in an arc to a space right next to the caster, but my teleport to the target location still works. It is an easy fix, it just seemed overwhelming when bunched with all the other broken things on my map. The lag thing is still an issue, too, but I'm not sure why.

I opened this up the other night to see what state it was in after the latest patch, and all my decal doodads are invisible, some of my environment doodads are invisible, and the terrain textures seem different all of a sudden. Aside from the doodad issues, everything that is broken is probably easy to fix. The issue for me is finding time to sit down and find the time to work on it.

This map will be completed when I have time to work on it, I can promise you that. I've put too much work and effort into this to let it die.

EDIT:
APRIL FOOLS! I just threw my map in the Recycle Bin.

EDIT2:
So somehow all my doodads and decals came back. I reupdated SC2 and all was well. No idea what happened there.

EDIT3:
Alright just played a bit of it now that everything seems to be normal. Here are the errors (thankfully they are pretty minor for the most part):

• Sometimes the "hero" icons appear as blue squares rather than the actual icons, seems random as this occurs at startup.
  
• Custom "Armor" item models are gone and give an error at the start, replaced with the default white sphere. I'll have to either relink them or reimport, but I'm not sure why I would need to in the first place.
  
• PSIONIC TACTICIAN's "Energy Bomb" seems to have a much slower projectile now. Seems like it is moving twice as slow.
  
• PSIONIC TACTICIAN's "Void Discs" create a model link error, and the behavior doesn't seem to get removed from the target anymore.
  
• ASSAULT COMMANDER's "Rocket Leap" teleports the caster to the target, then fires the projectile from the unit (after already teleporting) at the location where the unit is already standing.
  
• ASSAULT COMMANDER's "Speed Burst" doesn't seem to do any AoE damage anymore.
  
• MEDICAL TACTICIAN's attacks no longer case the unit to animate the attack (as in projectile fire from the unit as it stand still, idling).
  
• MECH OPERATIVE's "Laser Cannon" channel effect goes on for twice as long as it used to, and seems to linger.
  
• MECH OPERATIVE's "Shockwave" deals no damage to nearby units, and it seems like the knockback is much smaller now.

I already know how to fix a majority of these, and I'm sure it will be easy to fix the rest once I sit down and look at all of it. At that point I can resume work.

Changed the name to "Invasion: Ares" for now. Apparently someone took the name Invasion but didn't publish a public map using the name (unless the search function on BNet is lying to me).

Lol, Devlin why didn't you take the name on bnet?

It was taken before I even started this map. I've been using a different name to test it this whole time.

My hope was that I could coerce the person who has "Invasion" to let me have it, but I figure that will never happen (and since I can't seem to find the map that is using that name, I wouldn't even know who to contact).