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Alright, so I am pretty much still in my swaddlers when it comes to modding, however, that won't stop me from trying to learn. One mod I would absolutely love to work on deals with water based and amphibious units. I know that there was a mod being worked on way back when called Aqueous rift that never quite came into fruition but were there others and if so, has anyone who posts here ever worked on such a thing?

If anyone does have a mod that has working water based units please pass it on because I would love to see it in action. If not then I guess I had better get cracking on learning all I need to know about making such a thing possible.

Also, while I am at it, can anyone tell me the best place to begin learning as I have never made a mod (or sadly enough, ever did anything complex involving triggers).

thanks.

I don't know whether there is a mod that already does that, but someone's working on one in this forum

as for learning how to mod, I sugguest you start out by reading this, then maybe the tutorial section if you need to

I'm putzing with some concepts for water units, check back latter when I'm further in develoupment.

Well, there were attempts at water-based units but none of them that I know of made it to something really working.There is just too much of a hassle that you need to do to achieve this (mucho EXE stuffo) and noone's willing to do it.

Aqueous Rift used lots of little clever tricks to simulate a kind of water terrain that only water units could walk on. It relied on changes to the tileset, changes to the unit movement flags, and some specific location-based triggers (so maps had to be played in UMS to work) for places where there were ramps going from water to land. It wasn't perfect, but it was functional. I'm going to attempt to recreate a small prototype/example of the technique Aqueous Rift used sometime in the neer future... I'll post more about it once (and if) I'm able to get this working.

Getting REAL water terrain and REAL water-based units would require 'mucho EXE stuffo' and memory restructuring to be done, as BroodKiller said.

What surprised me once was that the water-type terrain doesn't have pretty much any explicit (read:mod-able) properties in SC, making it extremely hard to work with.

Yeah, same here. It's very disappointing. It'd be great, too, if there were some unused terrain or movement flags similar to the creep flag, or more such flags to restrict movement and buildability. But I've done a bit of testing, and after a bunch of trials, eventually I gave up on trying to find such flags or terrain types. There still might be some useful unused flags or terrain types, but I haven't found them, and have stopped looking.

Modding doesn't involve triggers? Not sure what you meant by that comment...

If Starcraft was still based as heavily on Warcraft II as it used to be, this might have been possable.. warcraft II had this. (Yay! Another point for War2!)

I was merely stating that I have never built a map that involved a series of triggers. the only maps I have constructed (up until about a week ago) were pretty much just melee maps.

Thanks everyone for you input and I will definately begin the process of learning how to mod tonight. If anyone has any updates to add for modding the water based units feel free to post them here, if not, I will keep on checking toasts threads to see how that pet project is going.

You can change default melee, greed, etc. triggers as long as you don't use locations. My mod required me to either edit default triggers or do some EXE editing... I chose triggers.

Haha, good choice. What is it you needed to change? I'm curious.

Well, I wanted to have a sort of tech level, using gas. You've probably seem it in some UMS maps. Anyways, it involved using timers and death counters to set your vespene to your current level if you had a refinery ("Tech Center"). You got a freebee tech level the first time you built one. SCVs were tech level 0, marines 1, comsat 2, etc. I simply set it to five minutes for each tech level and was planning on balancing it later on.

:: Edit
And in fact, I'd need to still do some EXE editing to remove mining from geysers. I got as far as depleting them and changing the depleted message to blank. A quick finger can mine some gas and, just before it resets your gas, build something you shouldn't be building yet.

Try using hyper triggers.