REALLY custom items

[MrJoeS]

I have some inordinate demands on my item customization. I want an item with several charges that each restore a certain amaount of mana, and I want each use of a charge to take a certain amount of time for a hero to use.

I know item uses are not instantaneous, because I've had my heroes die from not taking the potion quick enough. Can I modify how long they take to use?

I'm relatively sure that with some .mpq trick I can set the specific amount of mana restored by an item. Maybe I can do it with triggers.

Just to make things a little worse, I want to use an interface icon from a building usually placed as a doodad.

 

[Darg]

Actually, contrary to what you might believe, item uses ARE instantaneous. It's not possible to click on a potion and NOT have it take effect straight away. What you've seen happen in games doesn't have to do with the potion taking time to take effect, it has to do with the hero dying before you have had a chance to properly click the item.

The only way to do cooldowns on items is via some tricky triggering techniques, there is no easy way to do it.

To change the amount of mana restored by an item is the easy bit. You need to extract 'Abilitydata.slk' from the war3.mpq file. I guess you can open up mpq files using TechMPQ, but if not, then WinMPQ is a good program to use.

The item abilities are all clumped into one section, so it shouldn't be too hard to find the ability for mana restore. In fact, I just found it in about 10 seconds, it's called 'Item mana restore (Lesser/Greater)'. Just find the value in that row which sets how much mana gets restored and change it to whatever you want.

 

[MrJoeS]

Hmm. I realized after I posted that that maybe the item was instant, but the order-issue to order exectution lag was what got me.

Well. If I can't set a time for taking a potion, maybe I can do it with a hero ability. Could I easily write an ability trigger that would remove an item or an item-use from my invetory when the corresponding ability was used?