I know that normally in vHP there are like 20 zerglings with 1 life each, but how would u make it so there is just 1 zergling with 20 life? This would be better cuz then the enemies could do varying amounts of damage.

I'm assuming the only problem with doing this is that the zerglings will unburrow (are there any other problems with this? I'm too tired to think right now...). How do I stop them from unburrowing?

If I remember correctly having the burrowed unit(s) allied to the attacker makes them remain burrowed.

Yes, have the zerglngs allied to the enemy that is attacking the unit/units but don't have the attacker allied to the zerglings. (But still give them vision)

Sadly, the owner of the lings must be enemies with the attacker.

You could use pre-burrowed spidermines (assuming that your enemy is either out of range or not attackable).

Or you could go with your first idea--to use many 1 HP burrowed units.

Neither is true.

I think i'm gonna have to call ya on this one. I just was testing if a comp player, allied to me but not me to it, would unburrow and attack me, because I found that lurkers do not retaliate, but i found that lings do. Am i missing something?

Also, since if some vHP uses 1 HP lings, they wouldn't get any chance to retaliate, unless their armor took the first hit completely. Just might give the wrong impression, that's all.

Here, i've attached my test map. Its purpose was to create non-aggro rpg monsters, and it succeeded because of this concept.
Brown zerglings are allied to you, and have burrow researched. They quickly burrow.
White zerg are allied, but do not have burrow.
Yellow zerg are just normal aggro, not allied. I forget if i gave them burrow, but that doesn't matter.

threw in a cloaked kerrigan ghost to test hold attacking > >;

Attachments:

That's why you have the zerglings owned by a computer player and make them allied to everyone.

I have never really had the desire to put vHP in my maps as of yet, so I admit I am not all that familiar with its workings, but how does allying the zergling to all players change anything? My experiment was to show that if you attack an allied computer ling that's burrowed, it will indeed attack back, in fact, with any other units around that aren't burrowed. That's one thing I forgot to mention, the 2 brown lings won't help each other, but they will fend for themselves. On the other hand, the white lings/hydras will help.

So, what part or aspect am I missing?

Place the lings for the same player as the unit they're following, then give them to P12.

Make them players 9-12 and they'll automatically be everyone's enemies. I doubt they will unburrow since they don't even have vision and can't attack. I do know that they won't unsiege a tank being attacked a point blank.

P12 is not automatically enemy. You have to give the unit to an enemy of yours first. Alliances, like colors, are retained upon giving to P12.
Note, that this the only case where units owned by the same player can have different alliance statuses.

Whoopse, I was describing 1-hit vhp before.

For multiple hit vhp, either make the vhp player neutral or take away it's starting location.

Yes, giving them to P12 would work except I'm concerned what would happen if one person's ling stack (there will also be hydras, defilers, and heroes and all that) would go over another's. I have some triggers that count whether there is a ling/hydra/wahtever in the stack and do stuff based on that. But then again, if I have a 1x1 pixel location counting them, what are the chances of something bad happening? The other player would have to be right over him for that to happen. I could count if he died and stick that in a death count to minimize chances, too.

This will be my solution unless someone suggests a better one. Thanks guys!

I didn't know that thing about alliances being kept... that's pretty cool. In any case yeah, should I assume you meant using a different burrowed unit for each player? Yeah that'd help. pixel locations are far from perfect, though they should work on maps where only ground units are tracked, probably. Just remember, even with hyper triggers, the locations will lag behind a bit, which is where the real danger lies.

for instance, I use tiny locs in my missile command map. They follow scouts, and my hyper trigs are probably watered down a bit to prevent lag / people dropping from them (wait 0 is not the best thing). I go for anything from wait 10 to even 100. Sometimes it's hard to find ppl that drop, so being safe rather than sorry is kinda important. But yeah, that extra time may slow down the trigger cycle. I think i put mine at 30ms in that map, perhaps. I find it a bit odd that anything below trigger speed (about 82ms, calc'd from death timers) helps, but it seems to.

No, I mean using a zergling, a defiler, a drone, an infested terran, a hydra, and a hero hydra for every single player. That's where the problem lies. If two players are exactly on top of eachother and a burrowed unit dies for one of the players, then both players' triggers will happen. The chances of that happening are too slim for me to care, though, methinks.

What do you mean about location lag? What I'll probably end up doing is, every trigger cycle, move the 1x1 pixel location to the players unit and then moving all the burrowed units to that location in the same trigger. Will that cause me problems?

That will cause the main unit to slow down. Don't do the recenter more often than every 3 trigger cycles or you may experience that slowdown.

Therefore it might happen (although unlikely) that within those 3 cyles the main unit escapes the 1x1 pixel location and another unit slips in thus mixing the burrowed units with unpredictable results. For example both stacks of vHP units might be moved to the 2nd unit.

I recommend you add a failsafe. If another unit gets very near (as in enters a 1x1 blocks location for marines, or 2x2 blocks for larger units like goliaths) around the unit just always center the vHP units. You'll notice the slowdown when near an enemy, but at least its bugfree as with hypertriggers no unit can escape a 1x1 pixel location.
Also you can optimize that: Larger units like ullas probably won't even need this failsafe as the ulla will always completely cover the vHP units, even if moved every 3rd cycle. Maybe you can even recenter every 2nd cycle.
You have to test which unit speed/size combination requires which location size to activate the proximity failsafe.

Also, as you wait 3 cycles the main unit might have escaped the 1x1 pixel location, which requires you to use an extra 1x1 pixel loc that is centered on the current player's main unit as the teleport target for the vHPs. You can cycle the 1x1 pixel loc through all players, so there's no need for an extra loc for each player. Also you can do this every trigger loop. Moving locations doesn't create slowdown.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 7 2008, 11:23 pm by NudeRaider.

If you use different kinds of burrowed units (hydras, defilers, zerglings), won't the computer players attack the "more powerful" unit that is burrowed first? That is, they will attack the hydra first, then the zergling, then the defiler?

Lings have the highest priority.
As a rule of thumb units with the lowest hp and the highest damage are targeted first, then workers and lastly pure spellcasters.

So yes, units will be favored. Any problems with that?

That might be a good point, Craft. Is this system of different units necessary? Perhaps you could use random switches every time a ling dies, to randomly pick a pseudo "unit," if you don't want it to be in a particular order every time.

But yeah, what I meant by location lag is just about how the unit's position is updated much more frequently than the trigger cycle fires, and hence your location movement. Think of it as framerate. Fast units have a better chance at escaping, depending on size and hyp trig speed. But even when they don't escape, the pixel may still be significantly off-center. Just keep that in mind while testing. Nude's system should work the best I'd assume.