Note - requires some knowledge of vHP and death counts.

Have you ever wanted to use vHP but been frustrated because an ultralisk will deal you the same amount of damage as a zergling? No longer!!

With Madroc's solutions to greater awesomeness with vHP that i thought of a couple weeks ago, you can have different computer units deal different amounts of damage to protagonists.

Idea 1.
Description: Instead of having just one vHP unit burrowed underneath each protagonist, use one owned by the player of the protagonist and one owned by a computer player, say player 8 (He must be allied to the players; he can be a computer specifically used just for the vHP system or you can be an efficient mapper and he can be a computer who also owns towns or whatever). So each protagonist will have 2 vHP's underneath him, each owned by a different player.

Now the ultralisks or whatever can be owned by a computer player who is allied to the players of the protagonists but unallied to player 8 (let's say, player 6). And the zerglings or whatever can be owned by a different computer player who is unallied to the players of the protagonists but allied to player 8 (say player 7). You might also give the vultures to player 6 and the marines to player 7. When the player 8 vHP is killed, you know that it was killed by player 6; thus a vulture or ultralisk killed it, and as such, you might subtract 10 hit points (using death counts Edit or scarab damaging thank you viet). If the protagonist's vHP was killed, you know player 7 killed it; thus a zergling or marine killed it, and as such you might subtract 5 hit points.

So you can effectively have two different tiers of damage. This system requires 3 different computer players. You can have three tiers of damage having 5 different computer players (simply have vHPs owned by 3 different players underneath you, and 3 different antagonist computers), but that would only leave room for 3 human players gasp!

The one limitation is that this requires kind of a lot of computer players (2x-1 computer players where x is the number of tiers of damage you want) (but if you want only 2 tiers of damage, well most maps have three computer players anyways).

tl;dr Idea 1: Use vHPs owned by several different players along with an equal amount of different enemy computer players with different alliance configurations to simulate different amounts of damage from those enemy computer players' units

Idea 2:
Description: This one only applies to RPG's. Have two choke point locations between each area in the map like this:

When the player enters the bottom location, then enters the top location, then leaves the bottom location, then leaves the top location just like that, you know that they entered area 2 from area 1 (you can also do this in reverse). When the player enters area 2, set a death count for that player. As long as the death count is set, you can change the amount of damage a player takes when his vHP(s) die; thus you can make one area harder than another etc. When the player enters area 1, make it easier again or whatever.

tl;dr Idea 2: just read it, it's not long.

Questions/comments appreciated.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 3 2009, 4:37 pm by Madroc.

But Scarab Damaging is so much more efficient. The only draw back is that the they have to stay constant in damage.

Why would you even bring that up?

OK, scarab damaging could be used instead of death counts, but I don't see how it's more efficient than death counts by any means, it's just different.

I'll add it into the OP anyways.

it may not be more efficient but you can also have monsters do spells that way amoung other things.

If you have more than one unit under the hero, wouldn't splash damage attack both of the virtual hp units.

yes it would which is why when using scarabs you don't neccessairly wana do virtual hp. You can just have one burrowed or invisible unit for which the spawn attacks and do the dmg with the scarabs instead.

Because there is little need for vHP anymore, now that the scarab system has been discovered.

So you are effectively just condemning him for thinking of a new vHP. Don't you have better things to do? The point is not which is better, it's just another mapping trick to add to the list.

Wrong. DDS allows to easily deal damage, but healing a unit via DDS is quite clumsy and not as rigorous.

how is it clumsy? you can just keep track of it with any kind of counter. everytime you move a scarab to do dmg you can set a death counter of a certain units and keep track of hp depending on how high the death counter is and adjust accordingly be setting hitpoints to a % just like vitrual hp more or less.

You're right. I was thinking in the wrong direction for some reason; as if DDS is used only for spell damage, but not usual damage.

Ah yes it would. Unfortunately there's no reasonable way to bypass this except making the splash units be "the powerful units" that kill both vHP units (dealing 15 damage per attack in the case of the OP), thus having an extra tier of damage for splash units.
Well this works for the scarab damaging system too, just make the vHP invincible before moving the scarab (is this right? I admit I'm a bit confused as to how scarab damaging is being used these days, but I think this is right).

You realize that if you're keeping track of a units virtual health like that there's no need for Direct Damage in the first place? You can just set the health; the primary use of Direct Damage is bypassing the need to keep track of unit health since you can just subtract it; the only reason (that I can think of) that you'd use virtual health and Direct Damage on a unit is if setting percentages isn't accurate enough for the amount of health the unit has. Even then, there's no real reason to have the scale that high.

Lethal_Illusion already had that kind of idea and I did a test-map to make sure I could apply it correctly on my RPG.

Here's my result (see attachment).

How it works: you only need 1 burrowed unit under the hero and a CPU player for each amount of damage per area (let's say 3 CPUs, like in my map). The area must be separated physically or in any way that would prevent the enemy units from passing from an area to an other. Each time the player changes of area, a new switch is set and based on which switch is set, you can vary the number of damage dealt by the same unit only by making it appearing in a different area.
I find that much better than your actual solution

P.S. Find the way of seeing the movie including in my test map ;P (it's buggy because of wait blocks... if anyone isn't as lazy as me and could fix that, I'd love to see the result of my first movie ever )

Attachments:

The map is a bit too complicated to comprehend in a reasonable amount of time. How do you make it so that you only need 1 vHP under your unit in contrast to my idea which requires you to use one vHP for each different amount of damage you want to do in a specific area?

And so yeah my Idea 2 has already been done then
And possibly my Idea 1 has been done, except better
that would be discouraging

Easy way to avoid splash damage: have all vHP units invincible except for one. When the uninvincible unit dies, make another unit uninvincible.

Okay, first, you'll have to use a # of switches that's depending of the number of area you'll have (which should depend on the amount of damage dealt by monsters in each "progression" of the heroes through your map). You can also use DCs (Death Counters) if you prefer.
Let's say we have 2 areas (just like in my test-map), you could use 1 switch:

When you detect that there is no more vHP under your hero, you try to see which CPU out of the 3 (keeping my test-map as an example! 3 is subjective!) has killed it (by checking their kill score). Once you've found which one has over 0, you set his points back to 0 and set an other switch (or an other DC) to something that would mean that it's is THAT CPU that should be damaging the hero.
Once you've done that, you must have a trigger that should look like this:

Condition:
Switch 1 is Cleared
Player 8 has suffered of exactly 1 deaths of Terran Marine
Player 4 brings 0 vHP at Hero
Action:
Subtract 1 custom score to player 1
Create 1 vHP at Hero (burrowed)
Preserve Trigger

Here, the switch 1 is saying that the player is still in the 1st area because it is still cleared. When the player would have passed to the next area, you would SET that switch, meaning he's in the second area which would also imply that if it's the same CPU (this is determined by the 2nd condition of the trigger right over), the number of custom score subtracted would increase.
Also, make sure that you have a different switch of area for each player because 2 players can be in 2 different areas (but not in my test-map).

This is a vague resume of the system, but you should get it now

I thought that might have been how you did it. I must admit, I didn't think of it until you posted in this thread. This has the potential to save a computer or two compared to my idea. If you do it right, the only disadvantage compared to my system is that if two different computer players kill two players' vHPs at the exact same time, there is a 50/50 chance that it will mix up the amounts of damage those players take. Big woop!

So both my ideas were though of first by Lethal Illusion, almost ad nauseam. Dang it..

I'm trying to state that there are more efficient methods that can be used. Besides, you could theoretically use the two methods together.