Mazz VI: Wisdom of the Mancers

[GodzFire]

Pfft forget that, check out this eBay Auction. An IDE ATA SATA to USB 2.0 HDD 2.5 3.5 Cable Adapter.

Only 10 bucks, and free shipping. I actually bought this exact one from the seller a short while back, and couldn't be more happier with it.

[vinylrake]

godz, there's always cheaper options. last month a local place had usb HD enclosure for < $10, I was just using MC as an example - to show that getting stuff off an old HD is neither expensive or very complicated. Not like in the old days when HDs were carved out of granite.

[ducky]

Well ChrisP, looks like it might be time to make that v.3...


...because we just beat secret level legendary with 4 people and 4 units :O!!!!!!!


Hmp - Mazz
Cyc - FG
Dac - Pally
Myself - Mort


Film later, with review mb!

[hmp]

I submitted the film to the tain, so you can get it there once its approved.



V3? bring it on

[Baron LeDant]

you have to win SL with 100% first

[ChrisP]

Thanks, Guys. Connecting the HHD isn’t as much a problem as finding the time, but I do feel the desire to at least open up the plugin and see where it’s at – just not sure how soon or how long it will take to complete. When and if things progress, I’ll keep everyone posted, maybe get a testing team together.

Pyro, if I understand correctly, the ‘Can not be healed’ flag prevents a unit from regaining health from negative damage? Or does it prevent negative damage completely. That’s an important distinction as there’s many attacks that use negative damage. Far as you know, only the Ur-Vile is flagged this way?

As for the Marilith sound, that’s something that needs to be fixed in Amber (or whatever the latest app for editing collections is nowadays) right?

Jon, that’s a super cool feature. I’d love to make Thrall suffering only a soft death reanimate after a few seconds to attack again. That seems like it’d be easy to do, but even cooler would be if blown up Thrall body parts slowly slithered back togeather to reform and reanimate! To permanently kill Thrall you’d have to blow up the parts to smithereens or burn them or something. Not sure how possible all that’d be, especially the slithering, but someone like Jagman might be able to find a way to make it work. However, something like that would surely wreak havoc on Mazz VI as it’s built now, overruning limits and who knows what else, so, no I can’t see rewriting most of the plugin to make it happen.

Ducky and HMP… damn. Yeah, it sounds like we need to throw down another gauntlet for you guys.

By the way, the additions to v3 require certain other things be subtracted. No more Secret Level and no more auto-detach.

Also, have there been any updates to Loathing I should know about? Maybe the scripting limits have been raised? On that same hard drive I should still have a custom Loathing build that was used to make Mazz VI. Just wondering if that’s what I should still be using... and if it works ok with Vista.

[GodzFire]

Oh god Vista. Mazz should not be subjected to such torture.

As for the Marilith sound, that’s something that needs to be fixed in Amber (or whatever the latest app for editing collections is nowadays) right?

Actually, Melekor has created a brand new application built from the ground up as a replacement for Amber called Oak. It's pretty close to being final, and really blows Amber out of the water. You will love it.

By the way, the additions to v3 require certain other things be subtracted. No more Secret Level and no more auto-detach.

No qualms about removing the Auto-Detach option, since it's really not used at all. I would be opposed to losing the Secret Level option, simply because it offers a whole new challenge in the same map. Losing that would be a big blow.

Also, have there been any updates to Loathing I should know about?

Actually quite a bit from what I know. I even got Myrd to add the option to choose what sound to play after a game, depending on if it's a win or loss, like Myth 3. Myrd could give you more specifics.

Maybe the scripting limits have been raised?

If not I will try to work my magic on Myrd again to get something going.

On that same hard drive I should still have a custom Loathing build that was used to make Mazz VI.

I do know that Loathing and Fear have both gotten a few version updates in this 1.7 cycle. I'm sure Myrd could build you a custom one if the need arises.

[ChrisP]

I do know that Loathing and Fear have both gotten a few version updates in this 1.7 cycle. I'm sure Myrd could build you a custom one if the need arises.

Yeah, I figured if I'm going to stop being lazy about this I should start by reading about what's changed.

There's some pretty cool features, as is to be expected from Project Magma, but what really caught my eye was:

10. Map action flag "Deleted on Deactivation"
A new map action flag has been added, "Deleted on Deactivation". When the flag is set, the map action will be deleted when it becomes deactivated. With this flag, you can avoid using extra MUNG actions to delete actions that are no longer needed.

Frankly, I'm upset I wasn't notified about this immediately by courier. I'm very disappointed with you, Godz!

Seriously though, what allows Mazz VI to be so script heavy are MUNG actions deleting sections of the script as soon as they're used. Iron taught me a trick to do this very efficiently, but I'm thinking it might be even more efficient if the actions just deleted themselves. Essentially, this could mean I could add more cool stuff to the script. However, I doubt this new version of Loathing will even open Mazz VI. Hmm... once I succesfully recover the files I think I may need to beg Myrd for another favor.

[Pyro]

Pyro, if I understand correctly, the ‘Can not be healed’ flag prevents a unit from regaining health from negative damage? Or does it prevent negative damage completely. That’s an important distinction as there’s many attacks that use negative damage. Far as you know, only the Ur-Vile is flagged this way?

When first implemented during the 1.7 betas the Cannot Be Healed monster flag made it so no healing was possible. However, it appeared to break part of Mazz. People were no longer able to heal Ur-Viles to free stunned/trapped units. So it was altered so that negative damage based attacks could not increase a unit's health. You can still use negative dmg based attacks to hurt them, just not heal them. Before 1.7 that flag did nothing. I have not checked if other units in mazz are flagged this way, it just seemed Ur-Viles were the only obvious ones to players.

As for the Marilith sound, that’s something that needs to be fixed in Amber (or whatever the latest app for editing collections is nowadays) right?

No, Amber and Oak do not mess with sound. They can link sound tags with collection tags so they are played but does not alter the actual sounds. In 1.7, there was a change to how sounds were played. Many mapmakers did not know that certain sounds would play different between Mac and PC users. For example, those Marilith sounds have always played like that for PC. After 1.7's alteration Mac and PC have their sounds play the same for both.

This chart should help. Killswitch's SoundBlighter program can extract sounds from Myth sound tags. So you can either export the sounds, convert them properly, and re-import. Or you could alter the sound tags' pitch values.

... even cooler would be if blown up Thrall body parts slowly slithered back togeather to reform and reanimate! To permanently kill Thrall you’d have to blow up the parts to smithereens or burn them or something. Not sure how possible all that’d be, especially the slithering, but someone like Jagman might be able to find a way to make it work.

Sounds possible only if you used lots of scripting, which Mazz can't spare I would imagine. The way proj to unit promotion works is that a proj turns to a unit. So you can't easily specify remains to gather up and then promote. Unless you make a sequence like that where it just looks like the remains of the thrall that are gathering. This would make it easily doable. If the sequence runs its course it would promote to a Thrall. If a unit blows it up before it does, it dies for good.

Also, have there been any updates to Loathing I should know about? Maybe the scripting limits have been raised?

Yes there have been updates to Loathing, but not to raising scripting limits.

Actually quite a bit from what I know. I even got Myrd to add the option to choose what sound to play after a game, depending on if it's a win or loss, like Myth 3. Myrd could give you more specifics.

No, ChrisP asked about updates to Loathing... you are talking about Fear.

[ChrisP]

Sounds possible only if you used lots of scripting, which Mazz can't spare I would imagine. The way proj to unit promotion works is that a proj turns to a unit. So you can't easily specify remains to gather up and then promote. Unless you make a sequence like that where it just looks like the remains of the thrall that are gathering. This would make it easily doable. If the sequence runs its course it would promote to a Thrall. If a unit blows it up before it does, it dies for good.

Actually, after giving it a little thought, it shouldn’t be that hard to do. I’m very rusty, to say the least, but here’s how I’d start on it using just a few basic map actions.

The Thrall would have a hard death projectile group of, say, a head, torso, two arms and two legs. Once these body parts came to rest they would promote to monsters… a head monster, leg monsters, etc…, each with their own trimmed down collections. The torso could remain a projectile, as instead of moving, it would set the scripted waypoint for the other parts to travel to.

Rolling heads and crawling arms would have a very slow movement rate, naturally, so it’d take a while for all the body parts to reach the torso if the parts were initially blown far enough apart. A small radius GEOM would test for when the body parts reached the torso. At that point, the body part monsters would be deleted and a soft death thrall body placed that subsequently promoted to a live one.

To make it more fun, the body part monsters would be susceptible to explosive damage, and their hard death projectile groups would create a projectile of the monster, which in turn would promote back to a monster once at rest. This would allow, say, dwarves to go around blasting the body parts away from each other to slow down the reanimation.

Of course, these things never end up being as simple as one first thinks, but that’d be the basics of it and the script would be fairly compact if done right. If Jagman or Iron read this they’d probably laugh and tell me they could do it with two tags, three map actions and a piece of scoth tape. Anyway, while it might work for one Thrall, or even a small squad, there’s no way the Myth engine could handle Mazz VI’s thousands of Thrall. Someone should do something like this for another map though.

[GodzFire]

I see you online Chris, you must come on uDogs hotline.

[GodzFire]

Also, why do all the thrall need to do this? I think it would be perfect for a small elite group of Thrall which come out when The Watcher is low on health.

They could be called, "Undying Thrall" of course!

[Pyro]

I never implied it would be a hard thing to script, just that it would be hard to do it for mazz without having to make room for it. But Godz's suggestion is a good one. Perhaps have the script do it for some units... or even just random undead. So it doesn't have to be for a certain type of Thrall. It can be for all and just have it happen rarely.

[Graydon]

...or skip the whole 'reanimation' thing and just have projectiles, like the torsos, that if left long enough to biodegrade, they promote back into a thrall.

[Deqlyn]

ChrisP just download Dream Duel at Tyr and finish the script that pyro broke! 240 units coming at you at once, I do feel this map might be impossible on Leg.

Of course its Mazzesque - Decevier vs. Watcher

Needs to be balanced a bit more and the script fixed see techincal page under problem fixer.