A friend of mine was playing around the editor and here's what he came up with regarding the Stalker range bug. It's kind of impracticalsometimes useful for a real game (edit: TL proves me wrong), and it's kind of funny.
While playing in the map editor, I ran into this blink range issue so set up a custom map to test it out. There are gaps of widths varying from 6 to 16 units. Neutral pylons show the gap widths (They're 2x2).
Stalker blink is supposed to have a range of 8, which just clears a gap of 6, as the stalkers have some width between their fronts and backs. This can be seen by blinking down the 6 unit road strip at the far left. The largest gap that stalkers successfully blink is 14 units across, an effective range of nearly 16 (double what it should be).
Stalkers only seem to exceed their normal range if there is a gap of invalid terrain between the start and end points, such as the pits in the test map or the gap to island expansions. If it's just two high ground regions separated by low ground, they seem to just end up on the low ground. They still require vision to jump these distances; observers are in place for the larger gaps.
For testing purposes, the research requirement was removed for blink. No other part of the ability was changed.
Wow. You're right about it being impractical now, yet I can see this being abused a lot in custom maps (assuming it goes un-fixed/was intended to be this way).
is this the same bug that nony used to blink over the rocks when he didnt have vision past them? i assume he blinked "onto" the rocks and the bug placed the stalkers past them because they couldnt land there.
nony dident use a bug, if you walk a unit up close to the rocks you get vision on the other side. its probably because rocks dont block vision or something
On May 03 2010 15:32 skuj wrote: is this the same bug that nony used to blink over the rocks when he didnt have vision past them? i assume he blinked "onto" the rocks and the bug placed the stalkers past them because they couldnt land there.
im pretty sure thats an issue of either A) seeing a bit of the terrain past the rocks, or B) if you bunch up like 8 stalkers and blink them against a breakable item, it will push one thru.
What this OP is about seems to be that if you have vision, you can leap a gap. So in theory, yes, island on Desert Oasis could be jumped if you had an obs there.. someone should try it.
I'm sure this isn't a bug but a design implement. It just makes stalkers become a threat to island expansions. Not letting them blink as far on normal ground is probably designed so they don't become too mobile in large land battles.
I knew something was wrong when people discovered the blinking across bases on LT.
I think this is the same problem as the mass recall on the mothership back then, where you could recall units to the closest land if your mothership was over unaccessible terrain.
I've assumed this is intentional but I have been unhappy in the inconsistency in the maps. All positions should be equal with respect to blinkability but they are not