For those of you who don't know, this is a system that detects the HP of a ground unit by measuring the damage needed to kill it. The damage is dealt with the Direct Damage system. In this particular map, you can switch weapons (represented by a ghost and a marine) and the HP of your previous unit will be transferred to the new one.
There are two little examples in the test map.
On the left, you will see an arena with one marine standing between two options: 'deal 1 damage per loop' and 'deal 2 damage epr loop'. Pick one and your marine will get damage with the according speed until he is left with 1 HP. If that is not the case, something went wrong and you should report it to me.
On the right of the first test zone, you see a long box where the fighting takes place. Beneath that box is a small, 2x1 box with one unit in it. Move that unit in the small box to change your weapon. Use your SHOTGUN against Kerrigans and your ASSAULT RIFLE against Ultralisks. Kill all the enemies in the arena to feel good. I was too lazy to make health packs heal only a set amount of HP like 2 or 3, so I made them heal you to 5/5 in all cases... if you feel like, edit it yourself to heal 'realistically'; it's basically the same thing as changing the weapons.
Not only is this map a HP detection system, it is also the most effective scarab storage system (*). The amount of minerals is the amount of scarabs in the storage. You will see 8 reavers constantly being created/removed - they are the ones making the scarabs. On average, 4 such reavers produce about 0.9-0.95 scarabs per second, so the 8 reavers I have produce about 1.8-1.9 scarabs. Dealing 2 damage per loop to the marine is slightly more than the reavers can handle production-wise (each scarab deals 1 damage), but fortunately the storage will be fully depleted only after around 4000 trigger loops of such scarab use. I haven't tried dealing 2 dmg/loop and making a lot of weapon changes to see if such demand will deplete the system... but whatever. It's great that you can always add one or two reavers and you'll be in the safe zone for sure.
(*) Besides its applications, a system must not eat too much of the map's resources. This system in the layout you see uses 4+2*N locations (where N is the number of reavers you have) and requires two players (preferrably). There are ways to speed up the current speed of production by about 10% and the lifetime of scarabs by about 5%, but those eat up more locations and cause more lag (twice as many units are being created/removed). The two main ways of increasing the systems effectiveness are:
1. Creating/removing the reaver targets with the reavers. This creates twice as much lag but increases the reavers' average speed of shooting by about 10%
2. Not stack the scarabs, increasing the their 'useful' life time by 1 trigger loop of time. This requires a separate 'path' for every reaver's scarabs (to avoid scarabs blocking eachother on their way), thus increasing the amount of locations you use.
...so in short, perhaps there are situations when these tricks are useful, but in general they're not worth it.
OK, back to the main topic - HP detection. This system is far from perfect and as almost every system, is a compromise between two or more things. In this case, the smaller the error, the more time it requires. The map I displayed works with error=1/5, since the minimal detectable damage a unit can take is 1 and the maximum HP is 5. This means it will take a maximum of 5 loops to detect the damage. If I had, say a 100 HP unit with all the enemies having damages that are all multiples of 5 (i.e. 5, 10, 25, 50, 95, etc), then the preferred error would be 5/100 = 1/20, thus it would take 20 trigger loops to detect the damage. Of course, you could always increase the error to 1/10, thus lowering the time it takes to detect the HP and lowering the accuracy of the process. The error and time are all things you must choose wisely for your map.
A huge thanks to SelfPosessed for helping me out with this and for brainstorming it with me a few months back.
If you have any questions, me and SP will answer them to the best of our abilities.
Discuss.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Apr 7 2009, 4:24 pm by JaFF.
None.