The Eradicator and Mothership super unit will receive some pretty interesting updates with this patch.
Eradicator
Since version 1.36 the Eradicator is capable of burrowed movement and Spawn Burstlings while burrowed. Now it reaches the next level of viciousness! The Eradicator can now cast while burrowed. You are invited to share the malicious joy. (see video below)
In addition to that various base attributes have been raised to be able to compete with the new Mothership capabilities.
Eradicator changes in detail:
- Eradicator can cast Contaminate while burrowed now
- Eradicator can cast Corrosive Venom while burrowed now
- increased Corrosive Venom radius: 3 -> 4
- increased Eradicator life: 800 -> 1000
- increased Eradicator armor: 5 -> 6
- increased Eradicator ground weapon damage: 60(+6) -> 80(+8)
- increased Eradicator air weapon damage: 40(+4) -> 60(+6)
- increased Chitinous Shell armor bonus: 4 -> 6
- increased health regeneration of Cannibalize: 100 -> 200
- increased Burstling ground weapon damage: 200(+20) -> 250(+25)
- increased Burstling ground weapon splash radius
Mothership
The weapon concept of the Mothership will undergo a fundamental change. The 16 Interceptors (that were a core feature of the Mothership) will be removed. This change is done to differentiate the Mothership more from the Carrier, that should be become a viable build option again. Furthermore building 16 Interceptors for each Mothership was quite annoying.
As a compensation it will receive completely new weapon systems. The air weapons will have quite the same characteristics as the Interceptors before: high range, many hits, low damage. Actually this is still the weakest of all Super Unit weapons, but the Mothership is still primarily designed as a support unit.
The ground weapon on the other hand will change the way the Mothership can be used a lot. It will receive a beam weapon with low range, but very high splash damage.
But wait... a BEAM WEAPON ?!? ...
Yeah! For all of you who thought the game engine does not allow beam weapons... well... SC SUM will prove you wrong.
Have fun! (see video below)
Mothership changes in detail:
- removed Interceptors from Mothership
- added new Mothership air weapon: Plasma Torpedos
- added new Mothership ground weapon: Plasma Disruptor Array
- increased Mothership costs: 1000/1200 -> 1200/1200
- decreased Mothership hitpoints: 600 -> 500
- decreased Mothership shields: 600 -> 500
- Mothership is immobile now while using Warp
- casting Warp now triggers Recall sound instead of Scanner Sweep sound
Okay, so how did you do it? Is it a native function or a plugin?
Hi Templarfreak,
it is pure plugin functionality. The Starcraft engine does not support this kind of direct rendering.
To give you an idea of how this is achieved:
- one in-memory-GRP is created for each existing Mothership
- the GRP pointer of a Mothership underlay is redirected to this in-memory-GRP
- the actual graphic is rendered into an offscreen buffer, then transformed to the GRP memory layout and afterwards written into the in-memory-GRP
- finally a rendering update is triggered for the underlay and the new GRP content is displayed
Drawing the lines into the offscreen buffer is done with a slightly adapted anti-aliasing Bresenham algorithm.
voodoo magic is real.
As for me I just can't do that.
This is very cool, would it be economical to include more beam weapons such as the Colossus and Diamondback?
In terms of iscripts use.
Hi Raygoza,
actually there is absolutly nothing going on in the iscript here. There is an underlay image with the simplest possible animation (display one frame) and a GRP with one 255x255 frame. The trick is to render into the GRP (actually into a copy of the GRP because otherwise all units with the underlay would share the same graphic).
With this approach it would even be possible to use the same image and iscript for an arbitrary number of units. So you would even spare images/iscripts. The memory consumption of the offscreen buffers and in-memory-GRPs is neglectable as well. Actually the interesting factor is calculation time. What is going on here is CPU-rendering. That takes time. Transfering the offscreen buffer into the GRP run length encoding format costs additional time. We are talking about a few milliseconds here, but we do not have many of them until the next frame. :-)
Keeping the number of beam units low is therefore a good idea.
So... if you are asking for a pure laser based Mod... I consider that possible. But only under consideration of advanced performance optimization techniques.
So... the mothership got nerfed and the eradicator is now OP.
I dont think this is so good for balance.
Nerfed? Interesting.
I am a little concerned that the Mothership might have become too strong. The new Mothership can wipe out an entire mineral line before an Intercepter of the old one even reached the first worker. In combination with the Warp ability this is pretty evil.
Anyway I am always interested and very thankful for feedback, especially related to balancing. Can you explain your worries in more datail?
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