Back when I used a Mac and the regular Staredit app (couldn't find any better editor), I did some pretty makeshift things to get past staredit's restrictions. One example would have been using an existing map that has rectangular terrain and using the iso tool to spread that rectangular terrain around (since scmdraft only has iso).. And to turn off lights for a player I had to open up a map that already had the turn off lights action in it and use "copy.."

Anyways, I just remembered that back when I was using a mac for mapping, I was able to get an extra player (kind of like P12). The way I did it was by selecting two (or more) units with at least two of them being owned by different players, entering their properties, and pressing OK (without changing the player color, anything else you could change if you wanted but you could just press OK if you wanted without changing anything). At first this was just an annoying symptom that meant I had to select and change properties of units without selecting more than one player's units. Then I realized I could use it to make cool looking black beacons, as well as have an extra player for selection areas, etc. They behaved just like P12 units except they were black in color, and under some special circumstances, they would attack you (I can't remember what it was. I think it was when you attacked them, which meant you needed to make them invincible). Of course I didn't know how, or couldn't, create them with triggers. I think they were affected by the "all players bring" condition but I can't remember.

I have a theory that I had found a way to make a player 9 (or p10 or p11) unit. I'm not sure though since I have never experimented with P9-11 units.. I know from reading that they are like P12 units but they will attack you on occasion. But the only problem is that P9-11 units aren't jet black by default (and I couldn't possibly have changed their color in staredit..).

So i was wondering if anyone had had this occur to them before. Also, is this a P9 unit or had I found some special "P13" unit by accident? Is there any player with a default jet black color? Is this really cool or is this old news?

Edit I just remembered they have the same color as addons preplaced in Staredit. Here's the color (but to clarify I could make any unit this color with the old mac):


Edit2: I was also wondering how this could happen?

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 6 2009, 6:56 am by Madroc.

You can place players past 12. It's nothing really new, they're just useless and have to be preplaced, rather than created.

Oh, that makes sense.
So this really is not interesting at all. Darn.

Haha, well, it actually can be somewhat interesting, since they actually cause buffer overflows, it just takes too long to test each unit for each player.

Also, with the new discovery that the player number isn't just a byte, does that mean that you can place players past 256, or is that still the limit?

+0x4C - BYTE bPlayerID
+0x4D - BYTE bMainOrderID
+0x4E - BYTE bMainOrderState
+0x4F - BYTE bOrderSignal


Well, the in-game doesn't allow for a 4 byte player number. Farty knows more about extended units, I think.

However, what does a pre-placed unit actually do to the game? If we can answer that, we can predict the results pretty easily. About all I can tell is it modifies the Unitnode structure and the supply used.

The score, upgrade, tech, resource, and alliance modifications are easiest to predict.
Unit and sprite structs get raped.