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I was working on this back when I was doing A&O, but pulled the plug on it when I had thought no one would want to play it if it required a mod. Anyway, for no particular reason I decided to play around with it some more, and got it to where it is now (see attachment... you'll need to play it with the map I'm afraid).

The way it is now relies heavily on some unhappy triggers to make it work, but it at least does its job to some degree of accuracy. With the current system, you could control (with triggers) ammo, firing range, accuracy, or even rate (up to the limit of the interceptor firing rate itself). There is a minor bug with premature hits and misses (which happens if the target is really close to the gunner unit), which I can't seem to resolve on the trigger end of things.


Anyway, I'm looking for a better way to do this. Here's a few questions I thought up:

• Big one: Is there any kind of unit that can be placed with triggers to not be obstructed by ground or air obstacles (like how a burrowed unit can be placed under other ground units, except also including solid terrain as well)?
• Is there any way to set the attack of any unit to produce another unit at its target (like a dark swarm or disruption web spell, except not a P12 unit)? In other words, could I make a marine place like powerups or scourges or something where its attacks hit?
• How do I make the interceptor die with/after its attack (and not glitch the carrier or anything like that)?
• Is there a way to make interceptors 'morph' into another unit for their attack, or else produce some other unit that can be recognized by triggers (to identify when the interceptor 'bullet' hits its target)?
• Is there a way to give a hangar to other units (with buildable hanger units, obviously)?
• Why does the gunner unit in the mod move over solid units/terrain like its old air unit self, but functions like a ground unit in every other way (can't seem to figure this one out)?
• Is there any way to add new hanger unit types besides just interceptors and scarabs?
• Can you customize, say, a marine or ghost to have buttons that produce other units like a factory?

I appreciate any help anyone can give.

Yes, Replace the Intercep.grp with the unit you want to have the carrier use.



Because it still thinks its a ground unit, So it moves around the buildings. To fix this, Open Arsenal III, Open the unit you want to move over buildings, Go to advanced, And select Flyer.

Then save it as Units.dat and insert it into your MPQ.

I mean it the other way around: why ISN'T it acting like a normal ground unit, after I've set it to be like one in almost every way I can think of? The original unit was a Gantrithor Carrier, btw.

Since it is a original Air unit, You have to go into Arsenal III, And Un-Select Flyer in the unit editor, In the Advanced tab of it. Doing this will make the Air unit act as a ground unit.

See the mod for yourself. I've done all of that. It defies all explanation I tells you!

Anyway, more importantly, is there any way to mod an attack to make units at its target? If I could just do that, I'd have all I need for a perfect gunner system (and I'm not talking about P12 spell units).

Nice job with this mod so far! I was hoping to start making something like this for myself once I learned enough about modding. I'll try and see if I can figure anything out for you, but we'll see how that goes.

//added
to make it act like a regular ground unit you must open units.dat in aresnalIII, select gantrithor, go to the miscellaneous tab, and change the anim level box to 4. You also need to change the unit size, but I'm not sure how to do that right now.

I think it might also be possible to somehow have an attack make a spider mine, I'm experimenting with that right now.

heh, SuperToast got it before me. There are like three things you need to set to concord with each other to make a pure ground or air unit. Those are the flyer, animation level and those movement type checkboxes. Animation level is the most important one, it (almost) entirely determines how high up a unit is. Flyer just makes a unit targettable by air weapons or ground weapons, it doesn't change the terrain the unit can walk on.

Is there any kind of unit that can be placed with triggers to not be obstructed by ground or air obstacles (like how a burrowed unit can be placed under other ground units, except also including solid terrain as well)?
Maybe there is, you could try playing around with movement types and seeing what happens, but I don't really know. If you really can't find a way, modify a burrowed unit so it can move and attack like a normal ground unit, and doesn't even look burrowed.

Can you create a unit when it attacks?
Thought about this for a while, and I think the answer is yes, but it's a bit limited. The only way to do it would be to make a weapon's explosion into dark swarm or disruption web, and replace one of those units with the one you want. I know that's not the most fun way to do it, but it's the only way I can think of.

How do I make the interceptor die with/after its attack (and not glitch the carrier or anything like that)?
Really simple. Either, change its weapon behaviour type to suicide, or in the iscript give it a useweapon command to use a suicide weapon. This enables you to use a normal weapon as well.

Is there a way to make interceptors 'morph' into another unit for their attack, or else produce some other unit that can be recognized by triggers
Not that I know of...

Is there a way to give a hangar to other units (with buildable hanger units, obviously)?
Is there any way to add new hanger unit types besides just interceptors and scarabs?
This has been researched extensively, because everyone wants to do this. And the answer is no, it's not possible with our current modding tools.

Can you customize, say, a marine or ghost to have buttons that produce other units like a factory?
I'm sure you can, but you'll have to try it out. Moving units don't always produce units right next to them. You might have to turn the units into flying buildings if you really can't get it to work.

I was unable to make spider mines work. I am now attempting to use mind control to make it work. With mind control I've been getting a weird error message
Cbullet:Damage

I'm assuming it has something to do with the attack have the spell mind control, but I'm not sure.

I wish I could help, but I've never got mind control to work as a standard attack. In fact, once or twice I remember going in and changing the ranges of the weapons labelled mind control, optical flare and possibly a few other things, and I remember for some of those StarCraft just ignored the range change. It leads me to believe that some of those weapons aren't actually implemented as weapons, but I'm not sure.

Me neither. That's why I wasn't so worried about people using Mind Control for an attack in the contest.

Ok I'm glad I know now how to fix the walk over terrain bug, and I think now that you described that I just inadvertently found a way to make absolute placable units (units that when created always place where they're told to regardless of obstructions... like burrowed units, except without terrain).



As for the create unit with attack, I find this to be absolutely critical to making an ideal gunner system. The interceptor method has flaws, which I might be able to work around, but it'll never match the level of control of simply being able to place a unit at the target location.

What about flag beacons? Nydus canals? Comsats? Or even Nukes? Any way to work with those to 'create a unit' at a target point? What about setting Dark Swarms or Disruption Webs to be placed belonging to their owning player instead of P12?

I'm experimenting some more with various things, but I was also unable to make mind control work. Maybe we could make a complelty custom attack that can create units? I'm going to be looking into this possibility today. Maybe somehow turning an attack into launching a vulture that goes to the target then lays a spider mine for it's attack... I'll play with a few things today.

Well it seems you've figured out a way to place a unit anywhere without obstructions, but i had an idea which wouldn't be useful though. I would say a map revealer.

What about broodlings? If you made broodlings air units and modded everything to be suseptible to the attack, you could do a spawn broodling on anything and units would be created at your target.

I got a starport to be able to train Wraiths in the air, but it wouldn't start "training" the unit, it would just add it to the queue. If you figured out a way to do this, please tell me as I'm looking to do that in my mod as well.

SPAWN BROODLINGS WORKS!

You can use spawn broodlings to make an attack spawn units at a location.

//added
after playing with it for a few minutes... you can kill buildings and units by setting the attack to affect only air and ground, none of the 0xXXX boxes. It does work, but it is inefficent in that it creates two units at the attack. It is also innefficent in that the unit you attack dies no matter what.
With some more editing we may be able to make a good system out of this, the main limitation though is that to attack a unit you automatically kill it. If we can find a way around this, we could make a perfect system.

hurray!

Go toast =)

Hmmm... I don't think that the two-unit thing is a problem, you can just make the triggers register for 2 broodlings instead of one.

But then everything dies in a 1 hit kill.

Yeah, I was just thinking about that, one-hit kills are usually not what you want. There's no way to avoid that if you're using spawn broodling.

It's at least a start I guess. There may be some other things we can change to make spawn broodlings work the way we want to, I'm not exactly sure though, so I'll play around with it some more and see what I make.

Well broodling wouldn't work, unless there was some way to make the broodlings without killing the unit...


What about scanner sweep? Any way to make the actual sweep a corporeal unit? And if so, any way to set scanner sweep as a unit's attack?

Can nuke dots be set as corporeal units?

And is there any way to have a unit's subunit 'detatch' when it goes to attack something and move to its target independantly? And if so, any way to make that subunit work with a 'brings unit' condition or 'center location' action?


I'll try to research these myself, but I'm just asking in case someone knows already.
(I know I'm not supposed to be here until I finish Rush, but it's only because I'm trying to get this to work that I'm popping in for now)