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For months, I've been trying to break the 4th level. To go where no map has gone before. I wanted a 4th level of cliffs. Why? Good question. I had no map concept that required it. But I had a driving need to discover how to do this. In my subconscious, I somehow new that this was the key to breaking everything open.
Today, one of my associates, Mr. funcmode, was conversing with me. And in the midst of a completely innocent conversation, a key phrase began to unlock the pathway in my mind.
I joined forces with him, and within a matter of hours unraveled the mystery, broke the map ceiling, and revolutionized mapping forever.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/R14Ka.jpg) That's funcmode on the left, me on the right.
What we've discovered allows for a 4th, 5th, 6th, and on ramp level. But its more than that. What we've discovered will allow for non-45° degree ramps. This means that 3p symmetry is much easier. Also, non-45° cliffs.
CAUTION: THIS GUIDE IS FOR EXPERTS OF THE MAP EDITOR
You know what, just watch the video. You need a lot of images and weird text to show you how to do this.
I tried to create a highlight, but Jtv is being slow (thanks NASL :p). Check out http://www.justin.tv/tligrok/b/283705673, and skip to 4 minutes in.
50% of the credit goes to funcmode!
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ANNOUNCING A FUCKING ANNOUNCEMENT?
I'VE BEEN WAITING ALL NIGHT.
God damnit, jack. God damnit.
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This would be amazing if its possible. Hopefully not a toll :p
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Here comes the giant rick roll? A live stream of a rick roll playing in the background perhaps!
If you have figured it out it might be nice though, as long as they are TRUE cliffs and not just varying levels of terrain.
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I was looking around the editor and found out about this.
You can use the data editor to make custom footprints that represent cliffs.
(I THINK that thats what it is for.)
I infact made a map with a "super low-ground" but did'nt bother finishing it.
(Mostly because you can get hellions out before a 6-pool hits o.O)
But does this method involve what i mentioned? 
I am book marking this. o.O
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On April 15 2011 10:35 NickMP wrote:
(Mostly because you can get hellions out before a 6-pool hits o.O)
And what exactly does that have to do with cliffs?
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wait what is this? the only way i could see is using the height tool and sorta making your own ramps/losblockers to fake a new cliff height... but then you couldnt see over the cliff? blah interested to see what you guys come up with.
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On April 15 2011 11:05 WniO wrote:
wait what is this? the only way i could see is using the height tool and sorta making your own ramps/losblockers to fake a new cliff height... but then you couldnt see over the cliff? blah interested to see what you guys come up with.
I linked the vid in the OP
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ah thats clever with the towers^
edit: wont this be really really laggy on bigger maps ?
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an announcement within an announcement, whoa...
shit, u indeed did go derper!
Wow didn't even realize that point about 3 player maps (symmetry)
hurrah, and props to you! :D
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Had a look at the video, interesting concept. Would be interesting to see if it is laggy online or not, it probably should be okay if used in moderation.
It's not the sort of thing you would use everywhere on a map, but could come in handy.
Out of interest, do the towers uncover cloaked units? It's been a while since I've played standard sc2
Also what happens if units from multiple teams/alliances are on top of the cliffs, do they both get ownership of the towers or does this cause problems?
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On April 15 2011 12:19 StarkMods wrote:Had a look at the video, interesting concept. Would be interesting to see if it is laggy online or not, it probably should be okay if used in moderation. It's not the sort of thing you would use everywhere on a map, but could come in handy. Out of interest, do the towers uncover cloaked units? It's been a while since I've played standard sc2 Also what happens if units from multiple teams/alliances are on top of the cliffs, do they both get ownership of the towers or does this cause problems?
Re: cloak: No
Re: Allies: allies share vision anyways :p
This causes some minor problems, but there're enough "towers" up there that you can share, right? ^^
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Is there a small published test map using this technique yet? That way we could see if a bunch of watchtower units lag the map in a test environment first
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that's cool can you build on top of those towers though
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Okay, your Inception hype kicks ass. I was ready to start shouting about infinite cliffs and arbitrary ramps.
The actual tech is pretty cool too. The thing is, if you wanted to make angled ramps, you'd have to construct the entire cliff level manually like this. I suppose it's fine if it's not laggy... but it seems pretty messy.
However.
I can imagine a future where we have a community-built library of doodad models for cliff edges to dress up the use of the elevation tool. So you make a cliff level with ramps and whatnot, and at the cliff edges you build nice-looking cliffs by hand. Perhaps clever use of the data editor or the consent of the community for the use of appropriate triggers within melee maps will accomplish the vision aspect more elegantly than spam custom towers. (Though the ingenuity of that solution should not be downplayed, kudos.) Samely, you could simulate the pathing aspect for reapers and colossus.
In this world, any mapper with the dedication could manifest imagination. See Buzz Lightyear for catchphrase.
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On April 15 2011 13:29 iGrok wrote:
[
This causes some minor problems, but there're enough "towers" up there that you can share, right? ^^
Sorry I meant for enemies. So if you have your team 1 army up their already owning the towers and team 2 moves up, I think they will still remain in team 1's ownership and team 2 wont be able to see over the cliff.
This could be the case particularly when you have lots of units and it could result in some strange behaviour.
How does the tower work anyway? You could possibly use another method with hidden units along the cliff that periodically gave nearby units a buff allowing them to see over the cliff. Not sure if it would work but if it did it would allow ally and enemy to see over the cliff.
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On April 15 2011 15:27 EatThePath wrote:
Okay, your Inception hype kicks ass. I was ready to start shouting about infinite cliffs and arbitrary ramps.
Thanks ^^
The actual tech is pretty cool too. The thing is, if you wanted to make angled ramps, you'd have to construct the entire cliff level manually like this. I suppose it's fine if it's not laggy... but it seems pretty messy. Haven't tested this in a real map yet. Thats an issue I was worried about as well.
However.
I can imagine a future where we have a community-built library of doodad models for cliff edges to dress up the use of the elevation tool. So you make a cliff level with ramps and whatnot, and at the cliff edges you build nice-looking cliffs by hand. Perhaps clever use of the data editor or the consent of the community for the use of appropriate triggers within melee maps will accomplish the vision aspect more elegantly than spam custom towers. (Though the ingenuity of that solution should not be downplayed, kudos.) Samely, you could simulate the pathing aspect for reapers and colossus.
This was the only way I could think of without using triggers. You can already build nicer looking cliffs buy adding in Rock doodads, I just didn't do that in the map in the video ^^
In this world, any mapper with the dedication could manifest imagination. See Buzz Lightyear for catchphrase.
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If anyone is wondering the reason you *can't* do more than 4 (real) cliff levels, or have non-45 ramps;
The way the editor works is there is a specific cliff model for every single possible level-level interaction. They're named something like Cliff AAAA - Cliff ADDD, rather than having reusable cliff models that work for every interaction. It has the benefit of looking more realistic, and the gigantic drawback of meaning they need roughly 200 different cliff models for every cliff set. To make 5 levels they'd need about 1000, so only 4 levels were included. The same reasoning goes for the ramps.
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Can you remove all the white dots on the minimap?
Ingame, are you able to click on these invisible Xel'Naga towers?
Will you have vision when you have only buildings next to a custom cliff?
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You could fix the towers to have a different minimap icon, remove their footprint to allow buildings, set them to be activated by buildings
The problems I see are:
-air units
-cliff walking units
Its a nice a approach and not a bad idea. However I think blizzard should just implement 30° and 60° ramps.
Wich bring me to the idea.. could the community dive very deep into the data editor and find these models described by Syphon8 and replace them with our own?
Actually, the most awesome thing would be if they just gave pathing tint for clifflevel 0-3 (or more) and for cliffwalking units. Perhaps the ability to add custom pathing tint?
cheers,
madsquare.
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Can you remove all the white dots on the minimap? Yes, and once I remember how I'll post it. It was working 5 minutes before I started streaming >.>
Ingame, are you able to click on these invisible Xel'Naga towers?No
Will you have vision when you have only buildings next to a custom cliff?No
I believe that there might be a way to allow cliffwalkers, but I'm not sure.... i'll get back to you.
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On April 15 2011 21:32 Madsquare wrote:
The problems I see are:
-air units
-cliff walking units
It's possible to put 1x1 units with a cliff footprint instead of the standard "no pathing" footprint.
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On April 15 2011 22:25 Superouman wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2011 21:32 Madsquare wrote:
The problems I see are:
-air units
-cliff walking units
It's possible to put 1x1 units with a cliff footprint instead of the standard "no pathing" footprint.
Yeah thats what I was looking at. Well, that solves that problem then ^^
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(EDIT: When i made this post i didnt notice the second page of posts)
On April 15 2011 12:19 StarkMods wrote:Had a look at the video, interesting concept. Would be interesting to see if it is laggy online or not, it probably should be okay if used in moderation. It's not the sort of thing you would use everywhere on a map, but could come in handy. Out of interest, do the towers uncover cloaked units? It's been a while since I've played standard sc2 Also what happens if units from multiple teams/alliances are on top of the cliffs, do they both get ownership of the towers or does this cause problems?
I think you can set XWT to shared ownership (there is def an option to share it). I havent tested it yet, but that might mean both teams can be using it at once
On April 15 2011 15:44 iGrok wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2011 15:27 EatThePath wrote:
Okay, your Inception hype kicks ass. I was ready to start shouting about infinite cliffs and arbitrary ramps.
Thanks ^^
The actual tech is pretty cool too. The thing is, if you wanted to make angled ramps, you'd have to construct the entire cliff level manually like this. I suppose it's fine if it's not laggy... but it seems pretty messy. Haven't tested this in a real map yet. Thats an issue I was worried about as well.
.
About lag, I dont really think it will. At least not much. I've used extreme amounts of thos LOS/path blockers before and not had much issue. the XWT I'm not sure, maybe if a wider activation range is set then less of them can be used?
On April 15 2011 19:17 Superouman wrote:
Can you remove all the white dots on the minimap?
Ingame, are you able to click on these invisible Xel'Naga towers?
Will you have vision when you have only buildings next to a custom cliff?
1. I was wondering that too. I think you can, I think there is an option to tell a "unit"/"doodad" to not show on the minimap. (maybe in unit flags?)
2. Well that can be turned off too actually. make them non-clickible, non-highlightable etc. You would never know there were there.
3. Thats an interesting question, I'd like to know the answer to that one too actually.
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Great vid.
This was something i came across before when I was messing around with heights on my more extreme maps, but i abandoned it for 3 reasons.
1. was ground unit vision - I never considered using the XWT's, at least not in that way, that was a stroke of genius btw.
2. The visual effect of flyer looking like they on a lower cliff lvl but actually being on the same lvl and so seemingly seeing up cliffs.
3. Cliff walk/jump. If I used the blockers Colossus and reapers could not do they funky things with cliffs. Now i made it work, completely by accident back when i made mountain ridge, but then i screwed it up again when i was making final adjustments on it and i was back to the same issue. I have no idea how i got it to work, then how i stopped it working. And I've not been able to repeat it since.
I was wondering if you have an idea on how to deal with the last 2 things i mentioned.
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We fixed the white dots on the minimap before iGrok even made this thread, here's a screenshot;
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/EtAsY.jpg)
No idea what iGrok did to bork up all my hard work ^_^
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On April 15 2011 21:32 Madsquare wrote:
Wich bring me to the idea.. could the community dive very deep into the data editor and find these models described by Syphon8 and replace them with our own?
It's not very deep. assets/models/cliffs/cliffmade#/cliff NNNN.m3 or something. Each model is 4x4 tiles, but they'd need custom footprints. And the footprint editor is a steaming pile of shit.
On April 15 2011 22:04 iGrok wrote:
Can you remove all the white dots on the minimap? Yes, and once I remember how I'll post it. It was working 5 minutes before I started streaming >.>
Ingame, are you able to click on these invisible Xel'Naga towers?No
Will you have vision when you have only buildings next to a custom cliff?No
I believe that there might be a way to allow cliffwalkers, but I'm not sure.... i'll get back to you.
Again, in the footprint editor you can use cliff instead of unpathable.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DGFrc.jpg)
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I'm more interested in wether it's possible or not to create 1way LOS blocker.
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On April 16 2011 00:44 FlopTurnReaver wrote:
I'm more interested in wether it's possible or not to create 1way LOS blocker.
This would of course make everything much easier ^^
But I highly doubt it without using Regions and triggers, which really does make it no longer melee
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On April 16 2011 00:34 Syphon8 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2011 21:32 Madsquare wrote:
Wich bring me to the idea.. could the community dive very deep into the data editor and find these models described by Syphon8 and replace them with our own? It's not very deep. assets/models/cliffs/cliffmade#/cliff NNNN.m3 or something. Each model is 4x4 tiles, but they'd need custom footprints. And the footprint editor is a steaming pile of shit. Show nested quote +On April 15 2011 22:04 iGrok wrote:
Can you remove all the white dots on the minimap? Yes, and once I remember how I'll post it. It was working 5 minutes before I started streaming >.>
Ingame, are you able to click on these invisible Xel'Naga towers?No
Will you have vision when you have only buildings next to a custom cliff?No
I believe that there might be a way to allow cliffwalkers, but I'm not sure.... i'll get back to you. Again, in the footprint editor you can use cliff instead of unpathable.
OMG!! thats the thing I was messing around with when i made it cliff walk. LOL, I havent seen it since that day.
I think i have been inspired once again :D
speaking of terrain, messing with cliffs allows for some fun things to try with terran/toss.
But what about zerg? is there anyway zerg can abuse terrain? or is it just space for surround?
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I might install max again and see what I can do. Where are the ramps located? I would need these for reference.
Im thinking about replacing the orginal ramp models with something invisble and no footprint. And then modify the original ramps to proper angels (and footprints).
But I need to check if I can actually make 30°/60° footprints.. because a 30° ramp with a 45° is really useless..
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On April 16 2011 02:51 Madsquare wrote:
I might install max again and see what I can do. Where are the ramps located? I would need these for reference.
Im thinking about replacing the orginal ramp models with something invisble and no footprint. And then modify the original ramps to proper angels (and footprints).
But I need to check if I can actually make 30°/60° footprints.. because a 30° ramp with a 45° is really useless..
The ramp models are in the same spot as the cliff models, they have Rs and Qs in the name.
On April 16 2011 01:11 iGrok wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2011 00:44 FlopTurnReaver wrote:
I'm more interested in wether it's possible or not to create 1way LOS blocker. This would of course make everything much easier ^^ But I highly doubt it without using Regions and triggers, which really does make it no longer melee
You could use site operations to attach units that grant vision past a LOS blocker to one side of it, and use them both as a single unit.
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While we're dreaming up wishes...
I've always wanted to have a one-way ramp. Like a cliff you can walk down (with any unit) but not up (unless it was a normal cliffwalker). You could make some really interesting stuff with that. I don't there's anyway to do this without teleport triggers though.
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On April 16 2011 04:58 EatThePath wrote:
While we're dreaming up wishes...
I've always wanted to have a one-way ramp. Like a cliff you can walk down (with any unit) but not up (unless it was a normal cliffwalker). You could make some really interesting stuff with that. I don't there's anyway to do this without teleport triggers though.
lol Time to insert the obligatory Chutes & Ladders SC2 Mod. Because everything must be remade in the image of SC2!!!
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On April 25 2011 14:44 Shindo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2011 04:58 EatThePath wrote:
While we're dreaming up wishes...
I've always wanted to have a one-way ramp. Like a cliff you can walk down (with any unit) but not up (unless it was a normal cliffwalker). You could make some really interesting stuff with that. I don't there's anyway to do this without teleport triggers though. lol Time to insert the obligatory Chutes & Ladders SC2 Mod. Because everything must be remade in the image of SC2!!!
That's brilliant
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On April 16 2011 04:50 Syphon8 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2011 02:51 Madsquare wrote:
I might install max again and see what I can do. Where are the ramps located? I would need these for reference.
Im thinking about replacing the orginal ramp models with something invisble and no footprint. And then modify the original ramps to proper angels (and footprints).
But I need to check if I can actually make 30°/60° footprints.. because a 30° ramp with a 45° is really useless.. The ramp models are in the same spot as the cliff models, they have Rs and Qs in the name. Show nested quote +On April 16 2011 01:11 iGrok wrote:On April 16 2011 00:44 FlopTurnReaver wrote:
I'm more interested in wether it's possible or not to create 1way LOS blocker. This would of course make everything much easier ^^ But I highly doubt it without using Regions and triggers, which really does make it no longer melee You could use site operations to attach units that grant vision past a LOS blocker to one side of it, and use them both as a single unit.
I just realised you can edit the height at which LOS blockers occlude vision, no need for Xel'Naga Towers.
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On April 26 2011 02:30 Syphon8 wrote:
I just realised you can edit the height at which LOS blockers occlude vision, no need for Xel'Naga Towers.
Wha? That's awesome, there's probably a bunch of things you can do with that besides this project.
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edit: my comment became obsolete
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Hi,
I'm sorry to revive this old thread but I really would like to know more about creating higher cliffs. Unfortunately the video provided at the start of the thread does not work anymore.
Is there anyone that could give me some insight in this matter?
Cheers
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Essentially you use LosB to obscure vision and mini XNT duplicates to provide vision to units on the "high ground". And you use the 3D terrain tools to make the ground look higher elevation. So it's a hacky method of emulating the cliff/vision behavior the normal 3 cliff levels provide, but without actually using cliff levels.
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Yep, that's pretty much it. This was made a long time ago, before anyone (that I knew of at least) had a great understanding of the editor's deeper functions.
Create a new LosB with an invisible model, and a new XNT with shorter range with an invisible model. Create new cliffs with the 3D tools, then use the pathing tool to be a cliff. Then ring the perimeter of your new cliffs with the invisible LosBs, then inside that make another ring of XNTs. This gives units "on the cliff" vision while those "below" don't. Ramps are made by making them unbuildable and careful placement of the LosB/XNT ring across them.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v607/sheneedstherapy/WE-NEED-TO-GO-DEEPER.jpg)
