Hero Contest #4 - Item Interaction
 

HERO CREATION CONTEST #4

ITEM INTERACTION

We've had enough hero contests at this point that I don't have to link to them all when creating a new contest. If you remember from those, the main point was to replicate the design of a melee hero. In this fourth hero contest, we're loosening the grip of the melee stronghold and kicking it up a notch. All heroes are required to interact with an item of the team's creation.

This contest, like the last few, require a coder to team up with an artist and create a hero from the ground up. This time around, though, you're going to have to also create an item that interacts somehow with the hero you've developed. How much of an interaction, what that interaction entails, and so forth are really up to you! Be creative with it and you may yet win this contest!

Reward:

Contest Rules:

• Two people per team, one artist, one coder.
• No entrant can be a member of multiple teams.
• Everybody is allowed and encouraged to enter, as long as they follow the rules.
• If you are both a skilled artist and coder in one, you cannot perform both tasks and be your own team. Choose to team up with another individual who needs a partner and do that part of the tasks.
• One entry per team.

Hero Requirements:

• The hero must have only 4 hero spells.
• The hero must have 3 level 1 abilities and 1 ultimate in mind.
• The hero must have a single complementary item that is acquired by some (obvious) means.
• The hero may have an innate ability or a 5th hero ability only if it is intended as part of the hero's interaction with the item. Outside of the item interaction, the first two rules apply.
• The hero must have a distinct theme. This theme is an important part of hero design, your artwork and spells must fit into its theme. There is no defined theme for the contest, but your team must create your own theme.
• The hero should be balanced qualitatively and quantitatively as if it were a melee hero in standard WC3 melee games as a member of any of the races.
• Your hero must be designed with a max level of 10 in mind.
• At least two of the hero's skills must be trigger enhanced, but you may trigger more than two of them.
• You are not allowed to make purely cinematic spells. This means you cannot pause the hero, use cinematic mode for any spell, or anything of the sort.
• You are not allowed to use the spellbook ability as any of your hero spells.

Restrictions:

Artist Rules:

• There are no limits in terms of number of custom models, animations, textures, special effects, and/or icons for submitted heroes. (All imports together must still conform to the max import size for a submission)
• You are allowed to import an attachable hero glow effect model for your hero.
• If you choose to texture or model a hero that is already present in the melee game, you may reimport the model with different texture paths to prevent model and texture collisions.
• If you make a texture, it has to be at least 90% freehand.
• You must post at least one WIP shot of your artistic contribution to the contest before deadline.
• All artistic work used in this competition must be made exclusively for this competition, no previous work will be accepted.

Programming Rules:

• You can use any type of coding method you'd like (JASS / GUI / vJass / ZINC/ etc) in designing your spells.
• You are allowed to import and use dummy unit models. The models allowed by this rule are the standard attachment dummy with an "origin" attachment point, the pitch angle dummy, and the SetUnitLookAt dummy.
• You may only use scripts or systems from the WC3C database for your hero. (No libraries or code from other websites are permitted)
• All spells for the hero must be designed specifically for this contest, there will be no previously made spells allowed.

Submission Rules:

• When the hero is complete, submit it to the pastebin in its own thread with the prefix [HERO4] and send me a private message with a link to the submission thread.
• The map you submit your hero in must be set up as a melee map so the hero can be tested in a standard melee game.
• Triggers must be provided to allow a single player to test the hero individually with ease and without having to build an altar and gain experience.
• All submitted entries must use Attachment 46378 as the test map. (Modified as necessary, but not with any drastic changes)
• Remember that your hero doesn't have to be a melee hero, we just impose these restrictions to simplify the testing of the hero for the voters.
• All submitted entries must have a filename in the format:
  <MyHeroName>.w3x
  Example: OgreClanShaman.w3x
• All submitted entries must have an in-game map name in the format:
  <MyHeroName>
  Example: Ogre Clan Shaman
• All imported content may be no larger than 500kb.
• Submitted maps may be no larger than 750kb.

Voting Criteria:

• If more than 3 entrants submit completed heroes to the contest, the contest moves on to the public poll.
• In the poll, users will have to rank the heroes from best to worst, ignoring any of the entries that they want to. Clear instructions on how to vote will be posted the day the poll opens.
• The votes will then be processed using the Schulze method.
• For your vote to count in the poll, you must review every hero submitted to the competition and must comment on each in some fashion.
• You are urged in voting to consider the aesthetics of the hero, the coding of the hero, as well as the design of the hero.
• There will be no judging in this contest to expedite its completion. This is why you must comment on each hero for your vote to count. Your comments must also be greater than 3 sentences and have content showing that you actually tried the hero and are trying to judge it. I reserve the right to delete any vote I find that does not satisfy these qualifications at my discretion.
• The top 3 places will be decided by the top 3 scoring teams in the public poll after a 2-week voting period.

Deadline:

The session ends on December 10, 2009 December 17, 2009 December 31, 2009 (23:59 GMT-5). No extensions are going to be possible this time around. I've already built in an extra 10 days of time for this purpose. No more extensions are happening. If we still don't have >=3 entries at that point, I will declare the contest a total failure.

And here's to hoping this is as successful as all of the rest!

<3

lol wat !? in such case add cJass otherwise it's a dirty shit. and you are monopolic assholes.

1) outclude ZINC
2) include cJass

otherwise i am not in O_O

ZINC is supported, cJass not. We can not support programing languages we do not use / know at all.

Also, imho, ZINC is better.

So just to be clear, one of the abilities would need to produce the item?

Not necessarily. I just said some obvious means, what those means are is up to you. It could be created by an ability, sure, whatever floats your boat.
Because the contest isn't judged, I've no qualms with letting you use cJASS. I, however, am not going to "outclude ZINC" for any reason whatsoever. As far as I am concerned, you could invent your own preprocessor for this contest; the only thing that matters to me is that it compiles to JASS code, works as listed, and is available to all entrants.

so i may use cJass ? =O (or whatever) in such case it's ok...

lol. xDDDD

Yes, you can obviously use cJASS.

allowing just whatever coding method people would like was always the intention originally (I mean for god's sake, we are even allowing GUI). Fixed "programming rules" section.


You sound as if it was really important for us that you joined...

Must the interaction be with a single item? or can there be more then one item?

example: the item is made of a number of parts and all parts must be collected to get the full effect of it.

sure. all your odd heroes need a contrast. I am not here to "win" just to make interesting (for me) stuff.

and if all will be ok we will be in.

Sounds very interesting. I even have an idea in mind. Although, 500kb sounds as though as the contest is built mainly for those artists who use in-game textures. I say so because I know that people like Jigrael, who texture their own models and give them like 20 animations and a lot of bones usually get models with about ~400 KB, if not more... But, meh, I suppose I shouldn't even care about that.

Model squishing and texture paletting can do wonders for your filesize.

Au contraire, it is built mainly for people to make models intelligently. Furthermore, Ani hit my next point dead on - model squishing and texture paletting will seriously crunch even the largest of models to a more manageable size.
I won the 3rd contest with Jigrael as a partner and we never had problems with the filesize. Heck, I think our map was barely half of the limit..

Thanks for the quick response. I never really tried squishing my models(How is it done? Is there a program for it, or you just have to know how to model?), but if it's really that great, I might actually try it. I, for one, don't really care much for the filesize of my models, unless it's something ridiculously huge like ~200 KB for an all in-game textures model. Which is quite rare, at least for me.