Introduction Good day team liquid mapping community! Today, i feel, is a good day to give something back to the community, so I have created this guide to changing certain properties of the xel'naga watchtower. This guide will give you the knowledge to change the model, size, and colour of the xel'naga watchtower using the data editor. I hope this guide will be helpful to some.
The map this guide is used on is called oZz Flamestrike, and is published on SEA, if anyone is interested in checking out the model in-game, or the map in general.
See now that cocky little bastard knows he reigns supreme.
Opening the Data Editor First off, lets open up the Data Editor. To do that, either click on the Data Editor button on the top menu, or press F7:
Using the Data Editor Once you are in the data editor scroll across to the Units Tab and use the Search Function to find Xel'Naga Tower:
When you click on Xel'Naga Tower, the data editor will bring up the properties of that unit (below the search function). These properties include: Abilities, Actors, Footprints, Models, Movers, Sounds, and Validators. The property which we want to deal with is Actors, specifically the Xel'Naga Tower (Unnamed) actor.
Clicking on this actor will bring up a menu to the right, where you will find many options. We want to use the Art Tab first. You will see the option, Model, which is the one we want to change. This will bring up a list of models that can be used, I will be using Xel'Naga Obeliskfor this guide, since that is what I will be using in my map.
So now we have done the basic model change we will make it so the model changes again when the tower has been activated. To do this we must switch over to the Events Tab (instead of the Art Tab), where a large list of events are shown.
We need to scroll down and find these ones:
So then we want to take the AnimBracketStart Work under Abil.TowerCapture.SourceStart and change the Msg Type to Model Swap. Then choose the Xel'Naga Obelisk & chose Variation 2.
Then change AnimBracketStop Work under Abil.TowerCapture.SourceStop and change the Msg Type to Model Swap. Then choose the Xel'Naga Obelisk & chose Variation 1.
So the settings would look like this:
And the result would be this:
That's it for the guide for now, I'll update it tomorrow, showing everyone how to use the Events Tab to alter the size and colour of the new tower, to achieve this: + Show Spoiler +
I'll also make this guide a lot easier to read over the course of this week.
Fuck yeah! I have waited for this so long. Today I was thinking about figuring it out by myself and then create a bunch of custom models for the community, but I guess everyone can do it by himself now , so thx so much <3
Thanks everyone. If anyone has any feedback, or advice to make it easier to read. I'll update it with scaling and coloring at some point I just need to get my adobe products working again - what i payed for it *shifty eyes*
Wow!! nice guide, I will certainly try it on my new maps, was getting tired of the same old tower that looks a lot out of place. This guide should be certainly be put in the [Reference] Mapmaking Links Compilation > Great post Holiver.
Hey, I tried this out and I'm fairly certain I did everything as instructed. The tower looks fine initially (in the closed position) and once I go near it with a unit, it opens up like you showed. However, when I retreat from it, and the tower is meant to deactivate, it does not close completely and return to its original closed form.
From then on, it does change when it gets activated, but it changes between different variations of "open". Is this working as intended?
Another thing I was wondering about is whether there's a way to make it so that flying units pass over the tower, instead of through it. The obelisk model is very tall, and as a result, it looks like flying units go through it, which is not an issue with the original xel'naga tower.
Another thing I was wondering about is whether there's a way to make it so that flying units pass over the tower, instead of through it. The obelisk model is very tall, and as a result, it looks like flying units go through it, which is not an issue with the original xel'naga tower.
I've encountered this as well ( on my current map project theres a tower that only accepts air units to control it ).
My solution was just to put a no fly zone right on it.
As far as the open-close animations. I've had this issue myself, and I think its a bug. It sometimes it works on my map, sometimes it does not. Will let ya know if I find a permanent fix
Same problem as Jackbo. Model doesn´t return! With regards to flying units, I figured out how to scale the model down to 60% size, which eliminates that issue.
I wanna use that obelisk in my new map, I hope u figure it out soon.
If people are interested about how you can do this I'll try and give a brief explanation (bit short on time right now).
Basically, most doodads lack enough animations to be used effectively as watchtowers, and animations simply don't exist when using your method (model swapping). I'm fairly sure the problem people are encountering (the model not swapping back) is fixable but in my opinion model swapping still isn't ideal.
If you use a doodad with enough animations, the process is quite easy. Just changing the model in the data editor should work straight away. Try swapping the watchtower to the zhakul'das library I used on TPW Artifice. It should activate and deactivate and animate accordingly. The problem I encountered there however was that the animations were the opposite of what I wanted, so I had to rewrite the animation events in the unit data to get it to work how I wanted.
The real problem here however, is there are literally only about 3 doodads in the multiplayer dependencies with enough animations to work properly as a watchtower (the library I mentioned earlier, the protoss obelisk used in GSL's Xel'Naga Fortress and another I can't remember right now). So, the whole custom watchtower thing might get quite stale quite quick if you want animations et cetera. Even raiding the campaign dependencies turned out to be less fruitful than I'd hoped.
I'll keep investigating to see if I can come up with something further.
You could probably change the watchtower model to something else and then add a trigger that a light doodad or fire doodad appears/is made visible when it's activated. Don't know how "smooth" the activation will look but it's a possibility I guess.
My custom watchtower on the map im making activates a fire on top of a pillar (which is realy a fire on top of a small area of high ground, which is concealed by a column)
Btw I just tested the fire/light thing and just a short explanation how it works (with fire as example):
Open data editor -> go to Unit: Xel'Naga Tower -> under Actors open "XelNagaTower(Unnamend)" and then change "Art - Model", "Art - Model(Build)" , "Art - Model(Editor)" and "Art - Model(Placement)" to Fire Medium
Go to Events - Events + and then take the AnimBracketStart Work under Abil.TowerCapture.SourceStart and change the Msg Type to Set Scale and change values on x,y and z to 1.0
Then go to AnimBracketStop Work under Abil.TowerCapture.SourceStop and change the Msg Type to Set Scale again and change the values of x,y and z to a small number like 0.0001 so it's not visible after deactivation.
In both cases change the "Blend in Duration" to something more appropriate. With the default 0 it will simply change the scale instantly which looks unnatural, changing it to 1 makes it so it grows/shrinks over the course of 1 second which looks much better.
Now go to the unit XelNaga Tower and change UI - Height to the Height you want your Fire to be, cos you can't change its height after placing it like you can with a doodad. I wanted the fire on top of a Temple Column so I chose a height of 3.3 for example.
Now it's time to place your fire cos you have the appropriate height.
After placing it go to the Unit XelNaga Tower and its Actor XelNagaTower(Unnamed) again and change x, y and z values in Art - Scale to a very small number like 0.0001 so it's not visible (this is the last step cause now you won't be able to see the unit when placing it anymore).
Congrats, you just made a custom watchtower in probably something like 2 minutes! :D
Ah thanks ragoo, when i made mine i did it by switching the models between a rock (small and unnoticable) and fire. Then i changed the fire's model to fit what i wanted the xel'naga tower fire to look like... then changed all the other fire doodad's back to scale.
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