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Greetings to my friends playing the best game in the world!
I am currently working on the Starbow mod that you may or may not have heard of. It is a fan-made expansion to Brood War in the SC2 engine (unfortunately) and as such, we have encountered many issues when trying to recreate some of the finesses from Brood War.
One of these, seems to have very little technical information about it, although I think it is noticed and recognized by most.
In Brood War, if a ranged unit, and maybe melee as well, killed a unit or lost its target, it would spend more time than it's regular weapon cool-down (attack speed) to shoot on a new target compared to firing on an existing one.
This behavior seems to be the most noticeable with dragoons, siege tanks in siege mode and reavers.
Does anyone knows how much extra time each unit's weapon needed to switch targets compared to firing upon the same unit over and over?
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Thats a good question, i'm not sure how that would work....I would also be interested in knowing this just to know, sorry I can't really answer the question.
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related
Most Starcraft units have pre-attack animation sequences that must be played before the actual attack occurs. For the Marine, it is "holding up the gun". For the Hydralisk, it is "opening the mouth".
For most units, there is only one pre-attack sequence. All subsequent attacks do not require the unit to go through the sequence again. For the Marine, once it holds up its weapon, it does not put it down again. For the Hydralisk, once it opens its mouth, it doesn't have to open it again.
The exception is when the unit has to change targets. If a unit's attack target changes, it must go through its pre-attack sequence again. This phenomenon is most prevalent for the Photon Cannon, whose tower goes up and down constantly as it acquires new targets.
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It is so hard recreating all the little finesses in BW and the hardest part, actually noticing them.
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On April 04 2015 16:53 Probemicro wrote:relatedMost Starcraft units have pre-attack animation sequences that must be played before the actual attack occurs. For the Marine, it is "holding up the gun". For the Hydralisk, it is "opening the mouth".
For most units, there is only one pre-attack sequence. All subsequent attacks do not require the unit to go through the sequence again. For the Marine, once it holds up its weapon, it does not put it down again. For the Hydralisk, once it opens its mouth, it doesn't have to open it again.
The exception is when the unit has to change targets. If a unit's attack target changes, it must go through its pre-attack sequence again. This phenomenon is most prevalent for the Photon Cannon, whose tower goes up and down constantly as it acquires new targets.
Nice article. That was enlightening. The question remains though, how much time does it take for a unit to start the pre-attack animation?
And it seems that all units have this, even if they have no visual animation, like the reaver.
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Cannons, and also dragoons, certainly have particularly slow pre-attack animations.
The other effect you are looking out for is probably the influence of the unit command (idle/attack/hold position/attack) on the attack rate and initial attack time.
It has something to do with the order in which the BW engine runs through different unit behaviour checks over the course of multiple frames or something like that.
If I remeber correctly, units on patrol command have an immidiate first attack (minus aforementioned pre-attack animation, of course), but slightly slower attack rate afterwards, whereas units on attack command have the full attack rate, but slightly delayed initial attacks (not sure where idle and hold position lie in the spectrum, but I guess hold position has pretty fast initial attacks, because you can use it for muta and dragoon micro quite effectively).
There is an article about the finer details somewhere, I think it was at the BWAI page (whatever that is actually called) somewhere ; if not, maybe it was Staredit.net, but my best bet for detailed documentation about game mechanics would be the former.
EDIT: I think this is it:
https://code.google.com/p/bwapi/wiki/StarcraftGuide#What_are_the_differences_between_Stop_and_Hold_Position?
It's actually explaining the difference between stop and hold position, but I think patrol and attack also make a difference in how quickly the first attack is issued (patrol micro beats attack micro)...
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question: was this design intentional by the scbw devs?
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On April 04 2015 17:09 404AlphaSquad wrote:
It is so hard recreating all the little finesses in BW and the hardest part, actually noticing them.
indeed, the awesomeness and balance of this game was output of luck and few patches, and rest of it from the map designing.
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On April 04 2015 18:44 reminisce12 wrote:
question: was this design intentional by the scbw devs?
That is probably mostly a semantic question, i.e. it depends on the exact definition of the word "intentional" you go by in your question:
Deliberate decisions, made to achieve some aim (i.e. get it to work in one way or another): yes, definitely!
Carefully weighed versus all alternatives, considering all the consequences?: Well, you wish, ... like anthing in the core of the BW engine was devised this way...
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Croatia9526 Posts
On April 04 2015 20:10 Piste wrote:Show nested quote +On April 04 2015 17:09 404AlphaSquad wrote:
It is so hard recreating all the little finesses in BW and the hardest part, actually noticing them. indeed, the awesomeness and balance of this game was output of luck and few patches, and rest of it from the map designing.
"Luck" would imply that the developers had no idea what they were doing and sort of just got lucky... which I don't think is a fair assessment at all. Did developers think of all the possible scenarios and little things/bugs that makes the BW what it is? Of course not. But it's also obvious that a lot of thought and effort was put into the design, which makes this incredible depth possible in the first place.
Perfect example of this is in this very thread. They could've made this cooldown before shooting much simpler and same for all the units or even remove it completely. But they consciously added it because they thought it would add more depth to the game, even though they didn't predict every possible consequence of this (out of which one consequence was getting your goons stuck ><).
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yeah luck only augments the game, the core design of the game is what separates it from other games and makes it a legendary game. The uniqueness of the three different races, the unit design and synergies they have with one another.
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why don't you make a BW expansion in the BW engine?
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On April 05 2015 07:10 DepressedOne wrote:
why don't you make a BW expansion in the BW engine?
Please refrain from trying to answer this question.
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Good find xiphias.
On April 04 2015 17:09 404AlphaSquad wrote:
It is so hard recreating all the little finesses in BW and the hardest part, actually noticing them.
Indeed
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Does anyone knows how much extra time each unit's weapon needed to switch targets compared to firing upon the same unit over and over?
Every unit has a different pre attack animation. It's a different amount of frames. The dragoon has more than half a second. You'd have to test every unit with a stop watch, or with frame measuring software.
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On April 04 2015 17:44 Freakling wrote:Cannons, and also dragoons, certainly have particularly slow pre-attack animations. The other effect you are looking out for is probably the influence of the unit command (idle/attack/hold position/attack) on the attack rate and initial attack time. It has something to do with the order in which the BW engine runs through different unit behaviour checks over the course of multiple frames or something like that. If I remeber correctly, units on patrol command have an immidiate first attack (minus aforementioned pre-attack animation, of course), but slightly slower attack rate afterwards, whereas units on attack command have the full attack rate, but slightly delayed initial attacks (not sure where idle and hold position lie in the spectrum, but I guess hold position has pretty fast initial attacks, because you can use it for muta and dragoon micro quite effectively).There is an article about the finer details somewhere, I think it was at the BWAI page (whatever that is actually called) somewhere ; if not, maybe it was Staredit.net, but my best bet for detailed documentation about game mechanics would be the former. EDIT: I think this is it: https://code.google.com/p/bwapi/wiki/StarcraftGuide#What_are_the_differences_between_Stop_and_Hold_Position?It's actually explaining the difference between stop and hold position, but I think patrol and attack also make a difference in how quickly the first attack is issued (patrol micro beats attack micro)...
Afaik, hold position and patrol command both result in the pre-attack animation being started right away, since the unit does "remember" the target it had acquired beforehand. Stop command requires the unit to first acquire a target before starting the pre-attack animation. If I remember correctly, the same applies to the a-move. I'm also pretty sure that there is no difference in the attack rate of units after the initial attack no matter what command was used.
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On April 04 2015 18:44 reminisce12 wrote:
question: was this design intentional by the scbw devs?
Kinda like asking if they made the movement speed of vultures different from other units on purpose  Somebody had to enter those numbers, and it would have been simpler to keep them the same across the board. But whichever people came to this decision to make units act slightly different was very likely doing so because they liked giving units individual personalities. Someone made the opposite decision with SC2, and attempted to homogenize many values in order to make large armies easier to control, so players would get less frustrated. You have to remember BW was designed before there was ever a pro scene of people dedicating 10 hours a day to practice the game, so it was designed mostly with messing around in mind, low apm users (though they wouldn't have called them that), and people who are just playing for fun and want all the wackiness possible. Nowadays you have to design for people who want their games to look like pro games, and get angry when they don't, if you're making a competitive game. You also have to design a lower learning curve for young adults who buy and play all kinds of games with their no-kids incomes, so a game with a lot of frustrating idiosyncrasies that lose you games when you try to play it competitively is potentially going to scare a lot of people off.
StarBow is an interesting effort, but I think ultimately kind of confusing. It's like you wanna design a whole new game, but you're going to make your game in a custom map in another game over the course of 4 years instead. Then again I guess that's what DOTA is.
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On April 04 2015 18:44 reminisce12 wrote:
question: was this design intentional by the scbw devs?
no way
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EPT
