Borders Outlining Unit Footprints?

[lonekos]

Hi, I'm trying to make a tower defense map, and I've set the Marine's Pathing Footprint - Placement to Footprint 2x2 (Placement Only) so that the placed Marines are set on a grid and they are built equally spaced apart. I've removed their ability to move so that they act like towers for the tower defense. What I was wondering is if there's a way to create some type of outline around the border of, or fill that fills up the entirety of the footprints for units so that it can be more easily seen what space exactly each unit is taking up? I've seen this implemented in Nexus Squadron Strike for example where they appear to be using custom textures. I don't need anything fancy but something easy to see like a glowing blue line around the edge or something would probably make the map look sharper and more professional if anyone has any advice on how to go about setting that up. Thank you for any help you can offer.

 

[X-maul]

Well, you could give the unit a hidden buff behavior, and then make an actor that creates a model at the origin of the unit. You could use the unbuildable rocks/plates for that.

 

[Dave312]

What you could do is turn on the Display Build Grid which shows up when a player chooses the placement of a building. You can force this option to be turned on for players by using the trigger action Override Player Option and setting the Option parameter to Display Build Grid.

Otherwise I would be adding a Splat to each building (or a model like X-Maul suggested).

 

[lonekos]

Hi, thanks for the suggestions. The building grid didn't seem to do anything as the grid was already showing up on unit placement because of the footprint being set. I've added a splat to the unit by duplicating the Barracks splat and setting it to TerranTarmac_01 which has a square appearance which seems to work. The problem I run into now is that the splat is too big and it also moves in direction as the units change direction. Do you have any advice on how I can change that or a better solution?

 

[Dave312]

On your duplicated splat actor, edit the Properties: Accepted Property Transfers + and uncheck Model Scale and Scale (this will stop the splat from automatically being scaled). Now you can change the size of the splat by editing the Art: Scale property. Then edit the Properties: Accepted Transfers + and uncheck Rotation (this will stop the splat from rotating to face the direction of the tower.)

 

[lonekos]

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately the splats were still rotating with the units with that setting. I've been trying a bunch of different settings and I was able to get them to stop rotating by setting on the duplicated splat actor Hosting: Host Site Operations+ Hold Position and Hold Rotation to Enabled, then Hosting: Host + Actor to Creation.

The problem then is that the units are placed at random angles and the splats are stuck facing the angles at which they are placed. I've set the (Basic) Stats: Facing on the unit to 90 so that they're facing where the enemy units are coming from, and this causes them to only face that way in the placement outline then change to a random angle when placed. I found that when I removed the turnable flag from the unit they would all face the correct direction and the splat would be positioned correctly, but then they would have problems attacking anything that wasn't directly in front of them. I then changed their weapon arc, but that's not quite giving the desired effect as I would prefer them to turn so that it doesn't look so strange with the units standing still.

I then thought that the solution would be to setup a trigger that would change the units state from not turnable to turnable after creation. After trying many different variations of triggers I'm still unable to find one that will actually change their state back to turnable. So I guess my question now is, do you know how I can setup that trigger to make them turnable since it seems the only solution to uniformly place the splats is to make them unturnable on creation?