Premise:
My friend once told some pretty shitty lies (and of course, I had allowed him to continue spouting his nonsense) about how he once played an alpha of StarCraft 2 WAY before it was announced (like, 1999-2001 time was when he claimed he had played it). It was either that, or he was just telling me ideas about what I could do for a StarCraft mod. I think it was the former...

Neither really matters.

What's important was that he talked about air units being able to shift elevations. For example, a Wraith had an "Ascend" and "Descend" button in its button set. And he said there would be 3 elevations or something. He went on to talk about how these different elevations affected combat and speed and otherwise.
So, for the time until now, I've always been rolling around this idea in my head, trying to find ways I could implement this.

Here are the methods I've come up with to simulate elevations.

-From the Starport (or whatever unit builder), you have menus for a unit-type, which when clicked on, is replaced by a button set that presents options for different elevations that unit can fly at.
Starport -> Unit type -> Unit's elevation

-Morphing. Simple. Perhaps an elevation button menu that when clicked on, presents options for which elevation you want. Click an elevation, and your unit morphs to that (it actually doesn't morph of course; it would only look like it's rising into the air).
Wraith -> Elevation menu -> Unit's elevation

-Siege mode. Probably impossible, except for one pair of unit IDs, plus Edmund Duke's IDs. Should be obvious how this would run its course.

So, there. I believe that the first and second methods shall work best. Third will be retarded. Second might be impossible except for a sole few units, unless it's possible to make any unit morph.

As an afternote, I have considered Terran structures for their Lift Off and Land features, but I hardly thought it was worth mentioning considering how hard it would be to implement. Or not. I dunno, that's something to think about though.

But morphing fully heals the unit. That would be kind of gay.

I don't think this is easily doable. Although it's probably POSSIBLE, just hard.

EDIT: What exactly do you want changing elevations to do? Depending on what you want, you MIGHT be able to do it with extreme iscript wizardry.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 3 2009, 2:56 am by James Buchanan.

to change speed and damage and all that you would have to have different units (unless there is some magic that i am unaware of) but you might beable to do something like change the position of the shadow or vertpos in iscript, but thats kind of lame...

That is a cool idea for sure.

@Rory: There is an opcode that changes speed.

But there is not one that changes damage dealt.

It does?

@OP, this would be very easy and quite possibly fun to do in an all air mod.

@Aofst: Sorry, I didn't mean to post that...

I wonder if it would be possible to create another Siege Mode button? Or maybe it would be possible to somehow stop the morph buttons from fully healing the unit? Would it be possible to somehow read the currently selected unit's HP with EUDs?

EDIT: @above: Play melee, go Z, make a muta and a hydra, have the hydra attack the muta, then morph the muta to a Guardian.

I have had a thought that if there were an all-air mod, it would be possible to instead split Small/Medium/Large unit sizes into Low/High/Orbital flying classes and do stuff that way. And then you can train different units of all different classes, but that would be the same as unit sizes, so whatever.

Indeed, you have made me recall that morphing recovers HP. So yes, unless you had plug-ins or EUDs[?] or something else, the unit would be fully healed.
If there is no way to remove the above problem, then all I can think of that would work easily is the 3-altitude unit clones. The problem with that is massive unit ID loss, so there would only be 1 or 2 races, unless you managed to cannibalize all of the dead IDs and otherwise. Which is still possible.

I might implement a 2-elevation version for my upcoming mod. Probably later though, after I've finished the first race.

Wath's a opcode? is it the instructtions in the iscript? wath is the opcode that modify the speed?

An opcode is an iscript instruction. setflspeed (or is it setflingyspeed? I can't remember) sets the speed of a unit. Note that it will crash if used on a weapon.

Also, it's spelled "what", not "wath".

Also, now that this topic has been necroed: According to Hercanic, if you unflag a unit as organic, it won't be healed when morphing.

Sure there is. You can stack useweapon with an invisible weapon to add the appropriate amount of damage. The tooltip display wouldn't reflect this, but you could make note of how it works in the weapon's TBL name entry.

Can you explain further this, mister?

While I've not, myself, used iscript in shamefully long, I believe what he refers to is:
If you create a sprite overlay, and this overlay's attack animation includes actual attacking, then it will indeed attack. So, the "elevation change" spell animation creates an overlay (and changes flingy speed). The overlay destroys itself on running the elevation change animation.
If you have multiple elevation levels, then you need an animation for each, for difference speed values and different numbers of overlays - however, being rather inexperienced with Firegraft, I don't know how animations are chosen in the first place, and thus if multiple can be used.

I don't know where you got overlays from Hercanics post, and I don't think thats what he meant at all. What he meant was use the useweapon opcode in combination with a weapon that has no projectile and/or hit graphic to stack the damage:

Where X is the weapon ID. The damage for the attacks will be added up. In this way you could make the attack do different damages depending on different things, for example:

In the code above the unit has a 50/50 chance (supposing randcondjmp is truely random) to do 2x damage.

Hm. Must have jumped somewhere ahead in my head... I honestly don't know why.
I thought someone posted something about having a unit not morph, but instead just use an animation (avoiding the "morph heals unit", and "requires several unit IDs for each unit" problems, though of course costing an extra sprite ID each).

If that's not the case, then what is the relevance of being able to change flingy speed and do extra damage in animation?
If one is using several units, then I don't see why there'd be need for artificially increasing a weapon's damage (with invisible attacks), or for changing its speed. Using the extra useweapon opcodes can only be conditional on random jumps, target distance, and angle to target, possibly a couple of other things which are similarly irrelevant, that I recall off-hand.
Or am I just off on some bizarre tangent entirely?

I was only correcting A_of_S_T's statement that there wasn't a way to change damage, not the larger issue itself.

You could do this: Spawn an overlay in the Unused1 animation that has an end in the Unused2 animation (or some other unused animation) and attacks in the attack animation. Then, whenever Unused1 is called, the unit will get extra firepower until Unused2 is called. You could use spells to call the animations, by setting some spell you aren't using to call Unused1 (in orders.dat) and setting some other spell you aren't using to use Unused2. There will be a targeting reticule, which could be annoying, so you might want to use a plugin: Detect when a unit stims and give it an order which calls Unused1, and call Unused2 when its button set changes. (This is just an example, there are other ways to do it.) Then, give the unit stim and button-set-changing buttons, and you're done.