Alright. I tried my luck at making madness maps. Since there was some issues with balance between different tiers of characters, I decided to put a spawn rate timer on the units. (eg, 1 sec per unit for a tier 1 unit, 2 sec per unit for a tier 2 unit etc.)

Then, I made the trigger for a Tier 1 unit like this:


it would continually spawn level 1 units at a decent rate (about 1 per second, yes?) So technically, if I added a wait trigger to about the lines of 1000 milliseconds, which is 1 second, it should spawn a level 2 unit every 2 seconds. Except this wasn't the case.

I ended up getting a huge gap of time between the spawn times of a tier 1 unit and a tier 2 unit, even though I only put in a 1000 millisecond wait time. Can anyone explain what is up with this? I even tried moving the 'wait 1000 milliseconds' trigger AFTER the Preserve trigger, and still got the same result.

Any clarification or suggestions would be helpful, thanks!

Well, I'm not really sure because I haven't done a whole lot of work with non-hypered triggers, but if you made hyper triggers* you could make the first one wait 1000 ms and the second one wait 2000 ms and I believe it would fix your problem.

*Just create some triggers for a player that are along the lines of conditions: Always, Actions: Wait '0' milliseconds (repeat 62 times) and throw in a preserve trigger and a comment to make it clean.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Apr 20 2008, 10:44 pm by NerdyTerdy.

You are experiencing wait blocks, just move your hyper triggers to another player that doesn't have waits and that should fix the problem.

1) Are you using Hyper Triggers? If so you are experiencing wait blocks. If you use Hyper triggers you cannot use waits anywhere else in your map without running into problems. The only viable solution is to use death counter timers, which requires a bit more explanation...

2) Preserve Trigger means the trigger will be executed again, but only after it is finished. So it really doesn't matter where you place it inside the trigger.

He is clearly not using hypertriggers, or the first trigger would not create units in the way he describes.

Starcraft by default checks the triggers, executing those true, every 2000 milliseconds (game time). Also, any time a wait executes, the triggers are checked.

In an ideal world, your second trigger would make the second-tier units spawn every 3000 milliseconds (game time), but it won't, because when two trigger actions execute simultaneously for the same player, and both contain waits, the triggers stack multiplicatively, resulting in "wait blocks" where the real delay until the completion of a wait is vastly increased.

Make sure only one of those spawn triggers is executing at any given time per player, and that no other triggers with waits are running for the same player. Check through your triggers to avoid these 'wait blocks'.

Heh, correct. I knew there was some way I should have known that but I could not put my figure on it. Perhaps I should not offer map making advice while inebriated.

Do you have any other waits running for that player at the same time as the spawning wait runs?

Thanks guys for your help and explanations.

From what I'm interpreting, I'm supposed to only have 1 wait trigger running at a time for a player, or else I get these so called 'wait blocks'?

I just deleted a trigger that effected all the players and had a wait action. I'm going to go test it and see if the problem persists.

Yes, a blocking action (as Blizzard calls them), prevents other blocking actions from running until that blocking action is complete. In order to use wait times efficiently you'll have to make sure that there are no other running for that player at one time. Generally, you want to make wait times player specific so they are contained in a smaller area to watch out for, thus making your job a hell of a lot easier.

In general, it's bad form to structure your triggers like that. Hopefully removing the waits will fix the map; it certainly will help.

At least never put a wait into a force, or for All players, since that's just asking for wait blocks.

I don't know why your way doesn't work. it should.

Use death counters