Oh dude…
Yes, they once created those abilities and added them to the editor for the fans’ easier usage, but unless you want them to reuse the already existing effects this means nothing, since they had to create those as well and they create new and unique ones for every Hero.
Didn’t you see the panel talking about DW? They created new effects for all his abilities.
What I suggest to you that try the same thing from “scratch” because everything Hero/unit specific can’t be implemented to their “editor”, since those things aren’t meant to be reused with a new Hero.
But this besides the point. My main point is that they probably release as many Heroes/year as they can.
Product also goes into multiple changes and concepts before they were finally decided, at a certain point devs would probably find an even better way to draw and create the character or give them a better ability.
Its not snap finger first model and abilities they create and its done, it goes through multiple iterations, a lot of iterations.
The model of the hero holds all of its animations. You don’t code the animations ingame. You only call the animations.
When you create a new ability, it has a field where you can write the string used for the animation used in that ability. So when you write there “spell 1”, whenever you cast this ability, your hero will play animation “spell 1”.
There is another field that creates special effects on the caster, another one that creates special effects on affected by the ability units, and another field that represents’ the missile’s model.
If the ability doesn’t have a model, such as Deathwing’s Q… well, I suppose that the editor that the devs are using have another field, where they add the effect of a channeled ability, such as this. But even if they don’t, they just need to add the model of the fire, attached to a special bone, at his mouth, and they just need to remove this effect when the ability is over.
You make it sound either as if it’s a big deal, either as if you are talking about the modeling itself, and not the actual programming.
Hell, the way I made my version of flamestrike, I saved the models of the effects used in a variable, so if I want to change the model, I just need to change the value of this variable. So even if right now I get new assets to work with, I can change it within seconds.
I don’t take that at face value. I seriously doubt they wanted to only release four heroes this year. The amount from 2018 felt like a reasonable slowdown. 2019 felt more like a shutdown.
You made a thread about how programming is so easy, so they should release more Heroes.
I just pointed out that imo it’s a bit harder and more timeconsuming than you think but more importantly, they release few Heroes because they can’t do more.
Who’s not?! But demanding faster rate is meaningless.
I’m fairly certain that they CAN increase the release rate
There are no actual evidence for either of the claims that they can’t release more heroes than they currently are, or that they can. However, It SEEMS like they can, but woudn’t.
If they can safely release more Heroes without hurting moneymaking, balance and not running out of the Heroes in line for polishing… why they don’t do it in your opinion?
Tell me what is their benefit from doing less than what you think they could?
Because releasing heroes too fast “doesn’t let the players cherish new heroes”. They get the next one before they have even learned the previous.
When you are getting a lot of heroes at a fast rate, you take them for granted and you don’t appreciate them. But when you are getting a handful of them, you take them for something special.
At least that’s the kind of vibe I get when listening to the devs in that interview.
So seriously the only thing you could came up with is “4 Heroes/year makes ppl appreciate new releases”?
You think that outweights the money and hype they could’ve been making with the faster rates?
Are you implying that the devs are lying, and they are just sugar-coating the ugly truth?
It’s not impossible… But I still think that we can be getting a normal amount of heroes per year if they sacrifice few alternative skins/mounts for it.
No, but yes. I’d say it more like diplomatic phrasing.
I think the situation HotS as a game is in is not good and the devs trying everything they can to make things as good as possible.
Not just the Hero release rate is slower. You might didn’t notice but we got less skins and mounts than a year ago.
HotS is far from dying, but we can’t deny the sad truth: dev numbers were cut with supports to this game. HotS is in the shadow of other Blizz games, projects and its former self (not balance- or gameplay-wise, those are great imo).
So currently I’m just glad that I saw honest passion from the devs during Blizzcon and that we’ll get DW soon.
Just like level design in hammer for counter strike maps. There are multiple degrees of quality. And usualy for even basic things you can optimize a lot. The quick and dirty way is generaly easy to build, but that same way could also have issues regarding the processing speed.
And this optimized way often requires more testing to be sure if its optimized.
And knowing MvM mapping in tf2. Testing time is usualy 5x as long as making the map.
Not to mention trying to balance all the existing heroes currently in the game and taking the time to make sure the previous hero is settled in before moving on to the next one.
Yes, I’m a Were of that. Usually at 1-st I just try to get a working version, and I start optimizing after that. But even so, I’m still applying what I know about optimization during the initial build, by not leaving leaks and such. Or by using functions, that are more optimized than the native ones.
With that being said, the abilities the way I made them can only work if there is only 1 KT on the map. If a 2-nd one appears, they wouldn’t work. I’m aware of this fact, but coding it this way is faster processing-wise, and I didn’t feel the need to make them MPI (Multiple Player Instances, or something like that) for my purposes. However, before people start saying “so what you did is a rip-off of the spell, and not anything like it”, I must say that I’m fully aware how to make the spells work properly with multiple KTs on the map at once, or a KT, who doesn’t have cooldowns. It doesn’t take that much longer, I just save the variables in a hashtable, which is using the timer’s Id as parent, and when the timer expires, I load them from there. In my version I am just using global variables instead. The way it works is the same, but using globals is faster
One diffirence is that for a larger company, there usualy are a few things tested aswel that a community content creator rarely does:
Conflict testing: what if multiple abilities do overlap? What about teammates affecting the output (buffing, blocking)
Unit tests: All known situations that are known to cause issues in history should be automaticly tested as much as possible, and also be made in a way that supports this (so you can also test it to newer heroes)
Visuals: Unit animations, polygon counts, potential graphical glitches.
And then there is the general flow of development with gaps in which no progress is made. Just because you have diffirent teams
