Hi all, sorry its been a while since the last update.

I have been playing around recently with all the different options from the editor and I decided to borrow a few concepts from other maps into my own.

I borrowed WASD movement and the basic jump from a map called WoSTeaser on Scmapster, and I borrowed the concept of shooting missiles from a map called topdownshooter, also on scmapster.  Thanks guys!

I then decided to take that concept further and come up with a way for a ground unit to jump up cliffs.  This is harder than it seems, as simply changing the units height doesn’t automatically allow it to scale over a cliff.  You also can’t just set the unit to collosus ground mover, because it will scale the cliff like there is an invisible ramp underneath it.  It just doesn’t look right.  Thanks to advice from a fellow named Zoator on the beta map forums I was able to come up with a formula that works.  Here is a video with it in action:

So how did I do this? Using Zoator’s advice, I decided to create two upgrades. These upgrades are used to keep track of whether or not a unit is allowed to cross over a cliff.  Within the unit itself there is a property called “mover”.  This tells a unit where it can and can’t go.  There are two special movers that we will toggle back and forth between.  One called “ground” and the other called “colossus”.  (Yep, the same mover the colossus unit uses)

Upgrades themselves are pretty simple compared to other data editor objects, as they only contain a small amount of data. To make it even easier, I copied the upgrade that gives battle cruisers 25 starting energy.

1) In the data editor, right click on Battlecruiser – Starting Energy (or something to that affect) and click duplicate object.

2) With the duplicate selected, double click on it to rename it.  I simply call the first one marinejump off.

3) When finished, navigate to the right and double click on where it says Effects +.  Make it look like this, where marine is your unit that you want to allow to jump over cliffs.

4) Repeat steps 1 through 3, calling it marinejump on and setting the mover to colossus.  It should look like this:

Cool.  We now have two upgrades for the marine unit that will allow it to toggle between walking over cliffs and not being able to walk over them.  So how do we do this?

Using the jump trigger from WoSTeaser, we will add a few new lines.  The end result will look something like this:

gMovementUnit is assigned to marine, so it has the same effect as if you just set it to the unit itself.

If you haven’t already, check out:

http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/smooth-3rd-person-movement/

for smooth WASD and jump triggers.
In case any of you are having any problems with the triggers, here is my source map.  Sorry if it is a little messy, I have been doing a lot of experimenting in it.  This map also has, what I think, is a really cool camera view.

Jumping Map Download

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/long-awaited-starcraft-ii-in-stores-july-27/1398084

Be sure to leave your proper email in the info section where it asks for your email so it is kept private. (Don’t worry, I won’t spam you, etc.)

Congratulations to Mike and Turrent on their new beta keys! See you guys in sc2.

If I have any more in the future I will be posting them so keep checking back!

If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend you check out “basic triggers overview” here: Basic Triggers Overview

1) With your trigger editor open, right click on the left pane, go to new and select trigger.

The first thing you are able to do is give your trigger a name.  In the future it is important to name them something meaningful so you can distinguish it from others.  You may have dozens if not hundreds of triggers when your map is complete.

2) For now I will simply name “Test Trigger” by typing when it is blinking, click off of it when finished.  You can right click on the trigger and rename if you want to change the name.

Creating an Event

The first thing you will want to do is add a new event.  As I said in the triggers overview, an event is used to tell a trigger when to fire.  We will set our first trigger to Any Unit Dies.

1) To do this, right click on Events on the right side pane.

The new event dialog box will appear.  There is a lot of stuff to choose from, and thankfully the map editor is well organized.  As you can see the events are organized in a meaningful way.  You can either navigate with the “Find” box in the top right, or you can select a category in the left, or even combine the two.  Just be careful you don’t accidently enter stuff in the text box as it will make some triggers not appear.

2) For now go to the unit category on the left:

3) On the right, select Unit Dies.

4) Press ok when you have it selected.
Now you can see that it takes you back to the previous screen and a new event appears under event.  Here you are given the option to further customize the event on the bottom pane, for example, if you click the green link you are able to select a specific unit or unit variable.  Right now the default is any unit.  We will leave it at that.

Creating a Condition

Now we are ready to set up a condition.  Much like you added an event, right click on the condition, go to new and select new condition.  The condition dialog box will show up.  Conditions are a little more complex than selecting events, as they have many values that can be filled in. By default it opens with a Comparison type condition selected, which is what we want.  At the bottom part of the window is where you select the type of comparison condition that you want.  It is kind of hard to see at first, but you need to double click where it says “Value 1: Owner of Unit” if you wish to change the condition.  For now, we will use this, but we need to change the unit that allows the condition to pass.

1) Double click where it says “Unit: Triggering Unit and change this to “Killing Unit.”

2) Press OK and OK again.

Giving the Trigger an Action

We now have a trigger than fires when a unit is killed and passes if the killing unit was owned by player 1.  But it doesn’t actually do anything at this point.  To make it do something, we need to add an action.

1) Right click on the Action much like you do condition and event above, and select New > Action.

2) Narrow the category by selecting player on the right.

3) Select Modify Player property and press OK.  We can see the action has been created with default settings.  It is close to what we want.

What we want to do is add 100 minerals to the players current mineral count, not set their minerals.

4) Click on where it says Set To and change this to add.

5) Click on 1000 and change this to 100.

You are finished with your first trigger!

To Test Your Map

1) Go back to the map, place a bunch of units for player one.

2) Place a bunch for player 2.

3) Go to File > Test Document to launch your map.

Everytime you kill a unit from player 2 you should get 100 minerals!

I spent most of the day thinking of cool ways you apply other unit’s attacks to a tower, I added the ghost emp to a tower, added the yotamo cannon to a tower, laser beams, etc. For this tutorial I am going to be giving my cannon a electrocute attack. So where can I get the electrocute attack? As I was going through all the units it occurred to me, the probe has an electrocute attack, but it is only melee, could I make this ranged? So I wanted to try.

1) The first thing you do is select the unit in the data editor that you wish to have the electrocute weapon. For this example I will use my tower for a simple td.

2) Now scroll all the way to the bottom and select the weapon folder, and within it, there should be a weapon and right click on it and select modify.

3) In this box you are given the option to copy data from another weapon. Choose the Copy From radio button, and select probe.

This copies all the data from the probe weapon into the photon cannon, replacing the photon cannons attack.  There are only a few problems. First, the probe’s attack is melee.  We need to change it.

1) The first thing we need to change resides with in the weapon.  With your data still displayed below, highlight weapon.  This will bring the weapon data up in the right side.

2)  Scroll down until you see an options field.  As you can see, one of the values is melee.  Double click on this value to uncheck melee.

3)  Another value that is interesting is the Period field.  It seems to control the rate of fire for the weapon. I will put this to something ridiculously low, I will try 0.1.  This will make my weapon shoot every 0.1 second.  You need to also change the value in the range field.  It controls how far the weapon can shoot. 7 is the normal distance for a tower.  I set mine to 15.

Almost there! On the right pane under the unit selection, scroll to the particle beam damage under effects.  Change the damage to whatever you wish.

You are now ready to test it out! Here is a video showing it in action!

I was messing around with changing weapons on different units, here was the result of the first one.

A Simple TD Part 7

Feel free to test it out, but beware my there isn’t really a lot to it yet.

In the last tutorial I covered how to make the waves move, but I didn’t really cover how to spawn the units or create a countdown timer.  This sample only covers 5 waves for now, but you should be able to expand it as you wish.  I at first tried to work with creating an array to hold each wave but I ran into a few difficulties, so I decided to use an if, then, else structure.  It works but it is a little messy.
Setting up Variables

The first thing I do is define two variables in the trigger editor.  This is done by right clicking in the left pane, going to new > then variable.

Creating a new variable will take you into the following screen where you define the variables name, type and value.  For those who aren’t familiar with programming,  variables are ways to store different types of data.  This timer variable will store data of the type Timer.  It will be used to reference our timer throughout the trigger editor.  This allows us to use the same timer in multiple triggers.  If we didn’t do this we couldn’t easily refer to the timer.

The first thing you will do is enter a name for the timer.  Since we will only use 1 timer, I simply call it timer.  Under type, select Timer and set the default to a new timer by double clicking where it says “initial value” on the right.

You will also want to follow the same process to create a variable called EnemyWaveNumber.  This will keep track of which wave the player is on.  Here is what it looks like, make sure you set the default value to 1 and the type to integer.  An integer is a common variable type in programming to hold whole numbers.

These variables will assist us with keeping track of wave spawns and which number we are on.

So we have a timer variable but it really isn’t doing anything yet.  Lets get it running.  Create a new trigger that has a map initialization event.

Now create a new action for the trigger, it should look like this:

Make sure you click on the “Timer” link and go to variables, and select your timer variable.

Next you need to create another action for your Timer Window.  The timer window is used to display your timer.

After you are finished it should look like this:

Your timer is now set up, so lets start with the enemy spawns!

Setting up Enemy Spawns

You now need to set up a trigger to keep track of enemy spawning.  I assume you have a point on your map already so that you know where to make them spawn from.

1) Create a new Trigger, giving it the name of something like Wave.

2) Simply create a single action,using Unit – Create Unit.  I put the number at 5 and the unit at SCV.  I also told the action to place them at waypoint 1, which is my spawning point for my TD.  This is what it looks like at the bottom of the editor.  Make sure you set it for the player that will be the enemy.  I used player 2.

3) You can copy this trigger on the left side and paste it to duplicate it.  Now you just need to change the unit type and perhaps the number of units and you are good! I made 5 waves.  Be sure to name each trigger something useful.  You can also do Right Click >  New > Folder to create a folder to organize your triggers.

Creating the Master Spawn Trigger

1) Create a new trigger and name it something like EnemySpawn.

2) Give it a new event, timer every X seconds of game time.

The two conditions I have are optional, and you can ignore them if you wish.  The first one just tells it to make sure that .5 of a minute has passed before the trigger can be executed.  The second makes sure that the trigger will only be executed if the 5th wave hasn’t occurred.

The actions, however are important.  Add a new action, selecting if then else

You will then receive a new action that looks like this:

For those not familiar with programming, an if then else statement is used to see if a certain condition is true.  A ridiculous real world example for this would be:

If Vegetable equals Carrot; Then Eat Vegetable; Else  Do Nothing.

You can also string these together and put another If Then Else statement inside another.  So our example could be extended to:

If Vegetable equals Carrot; Then Eat Vegetable; Else If Vegetable equals Tomato; Then Give Vegetable to Friend; Else Do Nothing

This is kind of what I did for waves here.

1)  In your newly created trigger right click on the If Statement and select New > Condition,

2) Select New Comparison and press OK.

3) In the bottom of the trigger editor, double click on Value 1: Owner of Triggering Unit.

4) Select the Variable Radio Box, and select Enemy Wave Number and press OK.  It should look like this at the bottom.

5) You will now want to right click on “Then” and click New Action.

6) In the New Action menu Select Trigger – Run Trigger.

It should look like this:

7) Now you will want to right click on the Else statement and select new If Then Else statement.  You then repeat it for each of your waves.  You can copy and paste your previous if then else, it saves a lot of work.  Then you just need to change the key values. It should look like this:

It is a little messy but it gets the job done. You can minimize the main IF THEN ELSE  so it isn’t so overwhelming.

Almost there! We just need to add 2 more quick things. First, we need to increment our wave number variable so each time a wave is run, it will know where it left off.

1) In the same trigger, right click the Actions and select new > Action.

2) Select Modify Variable.

The end result should look like this:

Next, we will want to reset the timer window for another 30 seconds, add another action that looks like this:

Make sure you point to your timer variable like you did before!

You now have a timer that displays in a timer window and waves that spawn every 30 seconds!

There is a link to the map at the top of the tutorial if you would like it.

Notes:

You could probably get away with using a repeating timer instead of a one shot timer, but I decided to use these in case I decided to incorporate variable times.

You can see here I have selected “Issue Unit Command to Point instead of Issue Unit Command, simply double click on this statement to change it.

I decided to go with something simple.  I want a zoomed out view of the map, but I also want the camera to follow the unit.  It is easy enough, I just need to define a new trigger.

With the trigger editor open, create a trigger with the following events and actions.

This shows the camera triggers I selected

The event just tells it to occur when the map starts.  The first action tells the camera how far to be from the terrain.  With my experimentation I think 100 means that 100 tiles are within view of the screen.  The second action tells the camera to follow the builder than I placed on the map.  (Hint: its under value when inside the region part of the action).

Here is what it looks like in the game.  Not perfect but I guess it works.