I've been working on this map off and on for a long while. I'm not sure if it's due to a recent update in Starcraft, or changes in the map, but it seems that people are now dropping from it frequently. I'm often one of those people, and it's fairly frustrating. By "frequently" I mean about one or two people per game get dropped.

One thing that I've noticed is that about half the time, it occurs right after someone uses the mass attack platform in the center. There were also some issues with everyone dropping when the nexus trigger failed, but I've fixed it and hopefully it won't happen anymore. I've only tested this latest update with other people once, though.

Attached is the map file if you want to look at it.

Any advice is welcome.

Attachments:

Flags with extended colors can crash/drop. Watch out for flag beacons too.
Make sure all build times are > 0.
Check the crashlist in the wiki for more potential problems.

You probably have a unit outside the boundaries of the map.

Thanks for the responses.

Hmm... I checked the list, but I'm not too sure my problem is on it. There are only two sets of triggers I used that weren't made in the original Starcraft campaign editor. Both of them have to do with Player 12, the neutral player. I'll try disabling them and see what happens.

How would I get units off the map? Do you mean like placing something off the edge with the map editor, or is it something that can happen with triggers in-game?

I have some more plans to test it, and hopefully I'll figure out what the heck is going on. I'm worried, though, that it has to do with too many units being on the map. Completely filled up you could get about 2150 pylons/photon cannons, plus each player can have up to 100 scouts. Usually it doesn't fill up quite that much. I'm guessing in a big game it'd be about 1/2 to 2/3 full.

But that's not all... there's also the photon cannons firing and the scouts firing missiles. Those count as units too, don't they? (the missiles and photons, I mean)

I think the bug I thought I had fixed may have actually been the nexus trigger breaking because of too many units.

Do certain triggers cause people to drop when the unit max has been reached?

If you would if you could tell us whether this is a drop or a crash. Crashes lag out, drops are just an instant disconnection. And do they drop all at once? One after the other? Sporadically? Also, when does it happen? After a certain trigger (other than the Nexus one that you mentioned)? A certain time? Randomly?

So we don't have to filter through all those triggers, could you tell us where the Nexus trigger is? Just out of curiosity; I've never heard of a standard action dropping/crashing people, other than perhaps Set Doodad State.

Missiles count as weapon sprites. I believe the map is limited to 100 of these, but it wouldn't cause a crash; rather, it causes units to "miss" or not shoot at all.

The unit max wouldn't cause people to drop. The map will simply state "Unit limit has been reached" or "Building exit is blocked" or whatever the message is when you max it...

It seems like there's too many cannons for the map to be practical, because of the weapon sprite limit.

Lol @ below post. Yeah, that too...

Not to mention it caps at 1650.

They drop. It's just an instant disconnection.

On a few occasions I would see it say that a photon cannon was unplaceable, followed by everyone disconnecting at once. Most of the time, though, just one person disconnects. Often it happens after someone uses the mass attack platform in the center -- beyond that, I do not know what causes there are. The mass attack triggers are at the bottom of player 1, 2, 3, etc. The main nexus trigger is the long one right above that. The supporting nexus triggers, which do things to make sure it works right, are above it. There's about 30 of them.

When someone uses a mass attack and someone drops (not necessarily the same person), the gap between the two is usually about a second or two. I can't remember terribly well because I'm often not the person that does it.

I made a version removing the triggers for player 12, and it still does it. WA-Defence told me that it was due to the unit max, and that I could fix it with a change in scmdraft. I opened the map, went into profile settings and changed the unit max to 50,000 and the sprite max to 3,000. Then I saved it as a new file and tried it, but it didn't make any difference. I tried the same process with another map, and that method doesn't seem to bypass the unit limit in-game.

I also tried changing the mass attack trigger so that there was a 50ms delay before the scouts were ordered to move, but it also made no difference.

I'm stumped.

Changing the unit/sprite limits in ScmDraft does nothing to bypass the limits set by StarCraft.
Also hitting either limits usually doesn't drop players. SC can should be able to handle that state just fine. Actually that happens in quite many maps.
But it seems to potentiall cause trouble if the players are using very different OSes.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 1 2009, 11:36 am by NudeRaider. Reason: edited in new information

Vista could be an issue?

i have vista, there are a couple glitches that i cannot do without crashing.

one of them being unit carrying with gatherer units

Well, I've done some more testing, and although I'm not sure how to fix it yet, it appears to be due to synchronization issues, mainly when nearing the unit and sprite max.

For example, sometimes when everyone was dropped from a game my friend Valrik would tell me that right before we dropped he saw the nexus trigger mess up, but I didn't. I tested it out methodically and was able to verify that different things were happening on each of our computers.

http://www.disillusionary.com/files/nexus_fail1.png

I'm still waiting for him to send me his screenshot, but basically, he saw the nexus trigger create only 3 photon cannons before stopping. Then we disconnected from each other.

What the nexus trigger does is once a nexus is finished being built, it is replaced with a pylon surrounded by 8 photon cannons in a 3x3 square. The thing that places the pylon and 8 cannons is all in a single trigger. I first place a pylon where the nexus was, then I create psi emitters and flags on top, which go in the exact same pattern around it every time. I center a second location on one of these psi emitters or a flag, remove these extra units, and place the cannon.

Here, the trigger fails because it can't create enough psi emitters to center the location correctly where the next photon cannon goes. I've gotten it to the point where this is pretty much the only time it fails -- at the unit max.

In another instance, during an earlier game I decided to get rid of my extra scouts so I could build some more stuff (at the unit max, once again). So I set him to ally and mass attacked his area. His photon cannons started fired at my scouts, killing them, and then he dropped. But when I talked to him about it, he said that his photon cannons weren't able to fire. Once again, I believe this was a synchronization error due to our computers having different unit or sprite maxes set.

Midget man may be onto something with the operating system stuff. I'm using Windows 2000, whereas he is using XP. I'll have to have him test it with someone else alone who's using XP to see if it still happens.

That's all I have to report for now. I will try to add his screenshot once he sends it to me.

Well I think you pretty much solved your riddle.

A map like yours that exceeds virtually every limit of StarCraft is a fail design-wise anyway. So you should rethink your concept how to stay within StarCraft's limits.
A great start would be to make cannons 4x as strong, but also 4x as expensive. Same for scouts of course.
Another mandatory change should be to employ a triggered build limit once you close on to the unit limit. This also helps to prevent unit lag, so you should cut off at around 1200-1500 units from my experience. This depends on intensity of triggers and fights.
Also reducing map size could help.