HOW TO MODIFY THE "RANK" LINE
This is the rank line:


It is the second line beneath the Unit Name. We can modify it to display information to the player. First things first, if your unit is not Terran you will have to make it Terran in order for this to work. Go to Datedit > Unit > Basic and change it here:



Next move from the Basic tab to the Staredit tab. Here you will find the list of ranks, which you can modify to say whatever you want. I've changed the rank of Admiral to say "Stunned!"



Now in order to apply this rank in game with triggers, you have to use an EUD action in TriggerEditor called SetDatfile, which looks like this:



This one action has a LOT of uses, but for my purposes I'm going to choose the following options:



Datfile = units.dat
Object = the unit you want to give the "rank" to.
OffsetName = Rank/Sublabel
DValue = this is a dropdown menu of all the ranks, which you will have modified to the string of your choice in the steps above.

Now, save your settings, boot up the game, and behold:



My Terran Zerg Defiler High Templar abomination can be Stunned! This can be turned off and on with triggers via Death Counters! For extra effect, you can modify two ranks to identical strings with different colours, then use death counter timers to toggle between the two strings, to create a flashing text effect! This will be handy to let the player know they've been stunned, or frozen, or poisoned, or whatever!

DAY & NIGHT SYSTEMS, BLINDING EFFECTS, ETC.
Say goodbye to using Medics blinds and burrowed units to modify vision radius, we have some handy new tools we can use which make them completely redundant.

In TriggerEditor use the SetDatfile EUD action, which looks like this:


Now select units.dat, the unit whose vision radius you want to modify, and select SightRange, and then choose an integer, with 1 being the smallest SightRange (comparable to a burrowed unit). For me, it now looks like this:



Now, when I open my map, you can see my new vision radius:


Now, there is another EUD action we can use, called SetLight:


We can use this to increase or decrease the in-game brightness (it doesn't affect the UI, thankfully). This is perfect for creating a moody night-time atmosphere, or a dark cave, especially when combined with the above technique.

You can also use this action to create cinematic scene changes: fading to black, centering location to your next scene, then unfading. And of course, if the player gets blinded by some spell, you can decrease their vision radius or brightness.

Here is a GIF which demonstrates SetLight in action:
https://i.imgur.com/Y2JMQxC.mp4

Good luck, mappers!

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Sep 29 2020, 6:16 pm by Oh_Man.

I am trying to figure out EUDs and I think it's useful to look at some "books" from the korean naver site.
https://cafe.naver.com/edac/book1678930
https://cafe.naver.com/edac/book2573592

Those(and others) can be found if you go to the main "edac" cafe and look on the left ... there's a "book" section .. then you choose which book and you can look at a list of contents and read stuff ... some things are explained well there, so I thought I'd add those links as an idea. They can be browsed with chrome + auto translate option(might need to switch it off-on each time you view a new page)

Ah, a little bump in the road is that you need to create a free naver account to access that content. I managed to do it and I can say, it's totally worth it

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 10 2020, 12:09 am by martosss. Reason: note on acc required

Hey Oh_Man, thanks for your tutorial contribution. Would you be able to elaborate (and maybe add to your post) on how the SetLight function works? I'm specifically wondering what are the min and max values equal to? I assume SetLight 0 = complete darkness. At what value is complete light achieved?

I don't know what the value is for maximum light.

If it just uses the regular vision radius then the max should be 11? Anything higher will cause SC to crash.

I just assumed light level and vision radius were different things since from Oh_Man's description it appears light level affects the entire screen regardless of unit selected.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 16 2021, 8:59 am by Ultraviolet.

My mistake. If it's the brightness you can just change the settings to min/max to see what it'd look like.

I'd even just be interested in the values you used for the purposes of making your gif.

I just had a preserved trigger changing the value by one increment every trigger cycle with turbo-hyper triggers.

So what's that, like 24 increments per second? So the max value is probably around the 30 mark, I'd guess.

Cool, that's a good starting place, thanks



Something I found that I believe is hardcoded and may be worth adding to the list: Certain units cannot be selected in groups, even if converted to function as units that normally would be selectable in groups. I encountered this issue when turning a bengalaas into a zergling. I expected to be able to grab up the zergling in a group with the rest of my units, but unless I'm missing something, I think critters are hardcoded to only be individually selectable. I tried messing with different flags to make the benga-ling group selectable, but never was successful. If I am missing something, please let me know! I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this rule might also apply to buildings converted into units via EUDs.

The 'Single Entity' flag under datedit>unit>advanced is responsible for allowing only single unit selection. The other cause would be the building flag. A good practice is to simply copy/paste the settings of one unit onto another and edit them afterwards.