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[H] How to make line of sight blocker for air unit

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varsovie Canada326 Posts January 12 2015 21:34 GMT #1 I'm not posting in simple question thread since the engine behavior is very weird and I've seen several similar threads on Bnet and SC2MapsterSC2Mapster, but without any working solution. I've been working on it for few hours and it would really help to have a way to do it for my special melee map idea. Doodad field: Art: CactorDoodad/(basic) Art: Occlude Height (default 0.75) The tooltip writes : When the footprints of this doodad has cells marked as Block Vision, units below the height specified here will not be able to see past this doodad. By increasing this value, it allows you to make line of sight blocking doodads that can block vision for flying units. Unit field: (basic) Stats: CUnit VisionHeight/(basic) Stats: Vision Height (default 0 land, 4 for air and colossi) Tooltop writes : Height of the unit's field of vision. UI: Occlusion height/UI: CUnit OccludeHeight/UI : Occlusion height (default 0.75 for all units) : How much the unit adjust the vision LOS for cells in his footprint that request it. (does nothing since units have no LOS blocker footprint) As I understand if "vision height" is equal or lower than "occlude height" it should block LOS, but it does some weird stuff with cliffs and air units. There's three ways* I see to achieve air LOS blocker: A: Increase the occlusion height of the footprint/doodad. Pros: Create one doodad and simply apply where needed. Cons: Doesn't work, whatever value you put in the field, vision height 4 units will see through. B: Reduce vision height of air unit Pro: Does work under certain conditions with same vision height between 1 and 3. Cons: Blocks vision up cliff in certain conditions. Under 4 vision height, air units don't see upcliff, lower the number lower the step of cliff they can see. Does not work on high grounds. Over 3 doodad doesn't block LOS whatever value the doodad has. Also have to change the field on every units, it's long and outside the field of a melee map. C: Combining the two, by experiment though I found it only conserves the cons of both previous methods. Changing doodad occlusion height over default value seems to have no effect on the maximum level of the LOS blocking effect. At low ground level, doodad height and vision height seems to work like the tooltip says, but only in values under 3. Do you think it may just be a bug in the editor or me that doesn't understand what the field values means As a bonus question is there a ways to make unpathable air area with polygons instead of just circle shapes? I can't find any "air path block" actor or propriety. This must exist somewhere since there's a "no fly zone" included. It as an actor, but seems to only contain the editor model. *I know it may be doable with bunch of triggers and zone, but it wouldn't be practical or simple to implement.

decemberscalm United States1353 Posts January 13 2015 04:35 GMT #2 I will say that with air pathing blockers, complex shapes are generally to be avoided. Air units do not path smartly around air blockers, they can very easily get stuck because they don't have pathfinding to get around complex geometry. With circles they can slide off one direction to get around it (albeit slower than if it had proper pathing to go around it); anything more complicated than that can lead to stuck or derping air units.

EatThePath United States3943 Posts January 13 2015 05:58 GMT #3 I'm not exactly an expert in the data editor, but I've played with this stuff too and come to similar conclusions, though your testing was way more extensive and methodical apparently! ^_^ I think the Occlude Height doesn't actually work the way the tooltip implies -- or at all. My personal theory is that the editor has a lot of disconnected pieces that correspond to features that didn't make it into the final version, but references to them remain, like tooltips. Are you trying to make a melee type map or just a custom game? If you need things that look like they're flying but respond to LOSB, you could just use ground units whose actors get +4 to z axis placement or something like that. Then you'd have to fiddle with who can shoot whom using some hacky method, too, but I think you could work it out. (Sorry for no real answer.)

varsovie Canada326 Posts January 14 2015 21:25 GMT #4 Thank for the "no" help. It's for a melee map (even if I used corsaires for testing :p) so I'd rather find a way to not mod too much the units so to keep the intended behavior and reduce the needed unkeep. It's sad the editor/engine is so limited. More so for no-fly zones since a basic air-pathfinding wouldn't be too bad (heck the game manages +5000 ground units pretty well) and with geometric shapes you wouldn't have to spam circles to fence off a map. It's really weird how some part of the editor are really advanced and modern while others seems even older than WC3... I wanna be able to do fun stuff with LOS and 4th level.

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