Harm Detection [VHP]

I was looking through a bunch of my old concept maps and stumbled on 'Harm Detection. Since there seems to be very little written about it, and it isn't widely used (in fact, I have yet to see a map utilizing it) I thought I would draw attention to it, despite that it is by no means new.

Harm Detection is simply detecting when a biological unit is damaged by detecting when a medic tries to heal it. Because computer Medics try to heal their units no matter how far they are from it, the medic does not need to be placed locally and can be inconspicuous and hidden far across the map. Because Harm Detection detects when a unit is hit, we can use it as a form of vHP.

Disadvantages of Harm Detection:

• You cannot tell which unit hurt the unit being detected; because of this, it can only be used practically in singleplayer maps (unless you want all players to do the same damage to enemies and you don't care who got the hit/kill).
  
• The enemy computer players can only have one enemy unit at a time to be detected. With a map being singleplayer, this gives you up to 7 enemies at a time, which, depending on the type of map playing style is plently. At the same time this gives a lot of freedom to the map-maker, since every enemy unit is unique.
  
• Only works on ground biological units (fortunately this covers all the most common enemies)
  
• There is a very slight delay between the damage dealt and the medic responding to it.
  
• Only viable for computers, since human medics will not try to heal from across the map.
  
• Enemies can't have splash attacks or they could damage other enemies
  
• Health can't be displayed on the unit, since the health must be set back to 100% after getting hit
  

Advantages of Harm Detection

• Has all the advantages of being a form of vHP (Map maker has complete dynamic control over damage, health, armor, spells doing damage virtually rather than a unit manually attacking, etc)
  
• The unit can be selected to attack directly; with traditional burrowed unit vHP the player is attacking a burrowed unit, making selecting who to attack difficult and awkward.
  
• Easy to trigger and implement (compared to traditional vHP)
  

With some luck someone will find some use for this.
Here is my old concept map, modified a little to be a bit more friendly:

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Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jan 17 2010, 1:49 am by Kaias.

That is a very interesting approach to vHP. I had never though of it and yet it is so simple >.<
The only possible application of this would be in an arena map, though I'm not even sure about it

Not at all, arena would be one of the worst maps to try to make with this.
It's most useful for singleplayer RPGs; payne, try the map.

Imagine an arena map with only 1 fighting unit provided for each player.
One of the ability of a unit would be to cast scouts whenever it is harm... I guess you understood what I was thinking of ;o

Read the first post.

Only Computer medics try to heal from across the map, therefore unless you intend to have a medic follow the player around..

Yes, you'd have to keep a medic close at all times (player owned medics automatically try to heal from a distance of ~4 tiles). Plus, you wouldn't know which player hit you so the only way it could be at all beneficial is if you want all players to do the same amount of attacking damage and if you don't care about who killed who. Essentially, the only derivable benefit for all the trouble would be the use of spells that subtract or add health virtually.

I tryd this and im amazed, it works with death counters wasnt this fixed with latests patchs? Plus i edited it so observer is a human slot, tryd it with friend and he droped each time a shot was made, dont think til work mulitiplayer

That is because I used local EUDs for Key detection, not because of the actual system. If you never change the weapon type by pressing 'W' then it won't drop your friend.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 21 2009, 12:05 am by Kaias. Reason: typo

This would be awesome for a single player rpg with rooms of 20x12 xD There will be a maximum of 6 enemy units a room, each having their own vhp

Precisely

The reason you can't just do medics locally is because they tend to stay with a target and stick to it until it is healed despite proximity. I suppose it is possible to do direction detection on the medic, but as a ground unit it can only move in 8 directions, limiting accuracy. The units would still need to be largely separated anyway, making the only advantage that it allows multiple areas on the map that fighting could take place at the same time but still only with 6 to 7 enemies per region.

I figured out a way to make a four player pvp arena map using this system. It might be kind of annoying to use though. If each player is an invincible ranged unit, and they each have a designated computer player assigned to them who has one organic unit that constantly follows the player's hero around (it can't heal though, so don't use a zerg unit). Each player will have a varying number of upgrades: player 1 has a unit that odes 1 damage and 0 upgrades, player 2 has a unit that does 2 damage with 1 upgrade, player 3, etc. Then, simply attack the computer owned unit to target that player. A medic owned by the computer player will move to try to heal the unit, which you will detect. Temporarily keep the medic still or remove the medic while you detect the amount of hp the dummy unit has using scarabs that do 1 damage via random suicide mission so that you know how much hp the unit had left. For example, if the unit has 5hp max and player 2 attacked it, then it now has 3 hp, and you know which player attacked it and who got damaged. The problem is that there will be a a couple seconds where the player is untargetable while the hp is being detected.

While that would work it isn't the greatest application of it, as you may as well just have the players kill the unit.

But then you would only know that someone attacked a scourge but you wouldn't necesesarily know who was targeted.

If each trailing unit is unique for each player and has a unique kill score then you can tell who killed it, instantly.

Fractions of a second, actually, but I get your point.

vHP systems are always so complicated...

at first i thought, this is dumb. THEN i saw the cryo rounds. sick bro sick.

There was one disadvantage I forgot to list:
Health can't be displayed on the unit, since the health must be set back to 100% after getting hit

Just thinking about this.

Mad props on the system though, it is a creative way to do VHP utilizing real attacks. Ahh Blizzard, why couldn't you just have included a condition to detect how much hp a unit has?

Wasn't necessary for their campaign. Therefore it didn't go in the editor. It's useless to complain about now, really... SC2 happened and Blizz has mostly left behind BW.

This is from two years ago...