I haven't quit on the map, basically I used Nude's first system and got it working perfectly but he pointed out the flaws with it and provided a more simple system, and I want to do things right. Though the system is simpler it forces you to have a marker in the direct middle of each zone.

He originally suggested an observer but players will get detectors and I think the sight of an observer in the center would be annoying. I tried using a floor gun but somewhere along the line I messed something up and don't want a floor gun going all out Scarface style all game either. Also, Nude suggested a truly invisible way but for now, I've decided to revert back to the old (working) system and work on the essentials first.

Not really a fan of dwebs and dark swarms as they do have an active effect on the map and seem quite intrusive. I want something unobtrusive as possible.


Maybe I should start a development thread, but I've attached the single player version if anyone wants to take a look or try it out. I don't really have a name for it yet. Some Notes:

1. For testing purposes, I'm using computer allies which are quite stupid
2. The number of players dictates the amount of random troops they get at the start of each round. Here I just set a DC:
6 Players = 4, 5 Players = 5, 4 Players = 6, 3 Players = 8, 2 Players = 12, 1 Player = 24
3. After round 5 and 10, I add one to this DC to give everyone an extra unit
4. To accommodate for #1 during balancing, I've added an extra DC to give everyone an extra unit
5. Each player gets one random unit in the center which they can send to their base or use to help other players from the edge
6. You can sell unneeded troops at the beacon to get random bonuses of minerals, gas, cash, or selectors.
7. Cash is stored in a DC and displayed in a mineral patch at the bottom

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 15 2022, 3:01 am by Prankenstein.

Also just realized my map is 420 Kb which seems large, no? I'm using 4 compressed wavs but apparently they're still pretty big. I'll probably remove one.

Was also thinking about naming the critters after you guys for all the help, but you might not want to be associated with this map lol.

I haven't looked at the map (and thus the sounds), so I don't know if 420Kb is normal for the length of your sounds. If you want to cut down on the filesize of your wavs, you can do any or all of the following:

• Reduce the sample rate, especially if it's higher than 32,000Hz.
  
• Make it mono, especially if both channels are identical. You might still want to make it mono if the sample rate is higher than 22,050Hz to avoid the issue of the end of your sound repeating (a bug with how Starcraft plays map sounds) and don't want to pad your sounds with 2 seconds of silence.
  
• Reduce the bit depth to 16-bit if it happens to be higher. Although it won't benefit from the map's compression, you can also convert your sounds to 8-bit depth for extreme size reduction, but the sound quality will be very bad.
  
• Use the "Low Quality" compression type in SCMDraft2 for the highest level of compression (not very intuitive, I know).

You can use the .ogg audio format to reduce the sound file size considerably.

Did all of the above in order and got the total size down from 281KB to 54KB, with only slight loss of quality

So I took this hyper trigger from your sample map and have been using it on mine. Question: Does it run faster than a traditional hyper trigger (62 Waits)?

From this page: http://www.staredit.net/wiki/index.php/Hyper_Triggers, it says the triggers are cycled 12 times a second, but seems even faster than that.

Yes, it's twice as fast; when set to 0, it makes triggers cycle every frame, while the traditional ones do so every 2nd frame. You can set it to other values than 0 to control how often you want triggers to run. 1 would be the same as traditional hypers, and 30 for the normal rate without hypers.

Beautiful, thanks

Related fun fact: With waits you can time things with 1 frame accuracy while with death counters the best you get is a 2 frame accuracy. However the minimum wait time is 2 frames (84ms on fastest) - which is why hyper triggers only cause trigger loops every other frame, which in turn defines the accuracy of death counters.

So you can wait 84 or 126ms with waits, but not 42ms.

If you ever need exact timing (e.g. for music) keep in mind that 12 triggers / sec is just an approximation. The exact trigger rate is 1/84ms with classic hyper triggers.