Comments - Sahasrahla

Hey Ray,

thanks for the feedback. I added the part of the mod summary that is related to this version. Sadly... no new stuff. Only maintenance.

Hi.
Thanks for your interest in this mod.

Since two days the official battle.net version is Starcraft 1.18 which is not compatible with this mod. You would have to downgrade to 1.16.1 somehow. There is a tool (bwai downgrader), that is able to change the versions with a single click. Sadly this tool does not support 1.18, yet. I don´t know if there is another comfortable way to change the versions. Sorry, I know that is no pleasant answer...

The current impact of the new patch 1.18 on the whole Starcraft modding scene is quite unclear. Starcraft modding relies on very specific interactions with the game memory at runtime. Therefore all mods are bound to a specific patch version of the game.
All we SC modders will have to see where this is going. It depends on how much has changed in 1.18 and even more on how the open servers (e.g.: IcCup, Fish) will react to the version change. As most community tools (launchers, etc.) will not work as well, I suppose they will stay with 1.16.1 for a while.

That will definitively not work. Sorry!

From a technical perspective the Remastered version is a completely different piece of software. It would be like applying the Mod to e.g. Microsoft Word.

Hi again.

You are asking for an option to apply the mod persistently? Hmmm... I have some ideas how that might be possible, but there are good reasons for not doing so.
First of all:
It is one thing to apply some changes at runtime to the game (actually this is already a legal gray area tolerated by Blizzard), but publishing a modified Starcraft executable is a clear copyright violation I am not willing to risk.

Hi.
Sorry that won´t work the mods are not compatible.

Hey there.

Thanks for your feedback. I really like that idea.
There are two main problems that do not correspond well with the fact, that I barely find time to work on the mod lately:
1.)
There is no existing animation for a Lurker morphing into an egg
2.)
This would require some assembler research as morphing from something else then a Hydralisk or Mutalisk is blocked code-wise. Furthermore the wireframe and morph cancel handling would become quite tricky.

I do consider 2.) the smaller problem. Should be no big deal to find and patch the corresponding memory segments. The animation on the other hand might be a show stopper. If just rewinding the hatch animation looks ok, I will consider this change.
Thanks again.

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.45 that is almost identical the previous version just with all server related features removed. The SC SUM server and the official SC SUM homepage will be going down soon. As I do not use the server on my own anymore and it is barely used at all, I cannot justify the ten bugs per month in the future.
The mod will still be available for download on this ModDB site, of course!

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.44 that contains weapon and graphic updates for the Siege Destroyer, reworked abilities Overcharge Shields and Corrosive Venom and some minor bug fixes. See official homepage for details.
Please update your SC SUM before playing.

Insane!
Thats pretty useful stuff.
Nice work guys.

This is... holy ****!
Outstanding work. Congrats guys.

RavenWolf!
I am very glad to see one of our finest back in action.
Where have you been all the time?

btw:
Thanks again for your hint regarding burrowed movement. That was a pretty nice advancement for my Eradicator.

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.43 which enables LAN latency for online games.

No, the two approaches are quite contrary. This line drawing stuff works on the very end of the graphics pipeline and allows only to draw overlays on top of the screen. My beam weapon code manipulates the input (grp files) of the graphics pipeline and therefore benefits from some of its features. The layer management allows to draw between units (in this case below the Mothership and above ground units) and the alpha blending is used to have a partially transparent beam. The color remapping furthermore guarantees a consistant look with the blueish engine/explosion overlays of the Protoss.

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.42 which contains new features for Siege Destroyer and Mothership.

Yup. Energy Drain can target any unit with energy. Using the skill against enemy units might be risky as the range is quite low and the Mothership is slow. You might end up in a Lockdown, EMP, Stasis Field or control group of Scourges.

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.41 which contains a nice convenience upgrade. It is now possible to play SC SUM in windowed mode. Please update your SC SUM before playing.

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.40.2 which is another hotfix related to Mothership beam weapons and game saving. Please update your SC SUM before playing.

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?

Oh man...

This is just a unit preview and its already epic!

I have just released the new version SC SUM 1.40.1 which is a hotfix for a crash that was introduced with 1.40. Please update your SC SUM before playing.

Thanks for the info.

I always liked your explosion effects a lot.
Are they taken from another game or handcrafted with a particle editor?

Sounds like a short server overload. Does the problem persist?

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.

Jup, plugin. There is no way to achive this via iscript.

If I actually managed to make you believe in voodoo, that makes me really proud. :-)

Hi KYSXD,

that is a very interesting idea! Nice plugin. I have some other features in the pipeline, but I will seriously consider that proposal for 1.41 or 1.42.
One question:
Is the damage to the second and third target applied by just modifying the hitpoints or is an original function called?
(The current implementation needs a bullet object to calculate the beam impact location.)

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.

Aaaah... "Campain Unit"... got it. :-)

Nice stuff!

But... are you planning to introduce more than three factions? I think that was never done before.

And by the way:
Nice unit name! ;-)