SC SUM - StarCraft Super Unit Mod - Page 8

On April 04 2012 23:05 CardinalAllin wrote:
Hi Sahasrahla, Ive just been looking through your website and Im now grinning ear to ear, it really is pretty darn cool. It would be really interesting to read some information from you, discussing anything you want to say about the mods development. Im sure there would be some very intriguing details about various problems you encountered or moments of passion when something awesome worked for the first time. When did you start working on the mod? How did you get the idea for it? Which websites do you visit for this kind of thing? etc

The most evil troubles I ran into occurred when I was trying to teach the Siege Destroyer to siege in air. On the first look everything works fine, but then I sieged it over a building... Kaboom! Instant death... It seems that some kind of space check is performed when applying siege mode. I tried everything: reducing the unit size to 0, reducing the turret sub unit size to zero, preventing siege mode over buildings (this worked but sucked a lot), preventing application of the space check. Nothing worked properly. It took me weeks and some grey hairs to find the hilarious solution:
Simply spoken, when the Siege Destroyer wants to die in this situation I tell him not to do so... Well, there is some additional mess-up in the internal state of the unit object regarding animation and status, but that was easy to solve.

On April 05 2012 03:14 Sahasrahla wrote:

Hi CardinalAllin,

well... let me give you some insight regarding motivation and development of this mod. Actually I wanted to write a post like the following one for quite some time, but missed the opportunity. Therefore: thank you for reminding me.

The initial idea for this mod was born during the time the first StarCraft II details were revealed. When I saw the SC2 Mothership for the first time I was thinking: Wow! A Super Unit! This damn thing kicks severe ass! Well... and then it turned out that Terran and Zerg will not get a counterpart and then the Mothership was weakened drastically, because it kicked to much ass.
(PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE let us not start a BW/SC2-flamewar here. This is not part of this thread.)
I questioned myself: A Super Unit that kicks to much ass? Bloody hell! Nonsense! What else shall a Super Unit do than kicking ass?!? So I decided to create my own interpretation of StarCraft with Super Units. I can´t remember when I was actually starting to work on this mod, but it must have been sometime in early 2009. There was a long time of checking the possibilities and realizing some early prototypes. And there were some month when I wasn´t working on the mod at all, especially during summer. Nevertheless I will not try to give an exact estimation of the hours I spent working on it... it must have been hundreds...

Quite early I set a bunch of primary goals for myself that I wanted to achieve with SC SUM:
Game style
The new units and skills shall look and feel like original StarCraft.
Race style
The new units and skills shall resemble existing ones of its race.
Concept
Creating an extension instead of replacing the original game concept.
Balancing
the Super Units shall kick ass like hell, but shall extend existing strategies instead of corrupting them.

Hopefully some of these objectives have been met.

To give you some ideas of what kind of trouble I ran into during development I will give you two examples:
1. Yeah! The damn Siege Destroyer is invincible... unless it encounters... a building
The most evil troubles I ran into occurred when I was trying to teach the Siege Destroyer to siege in air. On the first look everything works fine, but then I sieged it over a building... Kaboom! Instant death... It seems that some kind of space check is performed when applying siege mode. I tried everything: reducing the unit size to 0, reducing the turret sub unit size to zero, preventing siege mode over buildings (this worked but sucked a lot), preventing application of the space check. Nothing worked properly. It took me weeks and some grey hairs to find the hilarious solution:
Simply spoken, when the Siege Destroyer wants to die in this situation I tell him not to do so... Well, there is some additional mess-up in the internal state of the unit object regarding animation and status, but that was easy to solve.

Don´t stop spinning you stupid Mothership
The first animation script of the Mothership showed one major flaw. The animation was reset everytime the animation state changed. (animation states are: hold, moving, attack, cast spell, etc.) This caused realy ugly jumps in the rotation animation when starting or stopping the unit. The solution was again pathetically simple, but hard to find. The actual Mothership main sprite is a just a big red sphere. The graphic you see is a so-called "independent overlay" meaning it is not bound to the units animation cicle.
You might furthermore ask: why in the hell is the main sprite a big red sphere? Thats another story. It turned out that the actual pixels of the unit´s main sprite determine where it can be clicked with the cursor. (the color doesn´t matter btw)

Regarding your question concerning visited websites:
A good starting point is the well-known StarCraft modding community: BroodWarAI (http://www.broodwarai.com). Furthermore I got some fancy ideas on http://www.modcrafters.com , but this site seems to be quite inactive lately.

If you have any further technical or conceptual questions, please feel free to ask.

Regards,
Sahasrahla

On March 08 2016 08:31 Endymion wrote:
can i use this mod on fish ladder?