PullMonkey Blog

Best 3v3 Warcraft III Strat Possibly ever invented in the entire universe.

Okay so in my spare time, I enjoy playing one of the coolest games ever Warcraft III. Last year sitting in my physics class pondering new better ways of pwning, I developed this strategy for a 3v3 game.

In 3v3 games I’ve played, there are three things that most players try to do. They either go for an all out rush, an all out tech (which in my opinion is a very bad idea), or one person goes all out tech to some powerful unit (chimera, frosty, tauren, something of this sort), while the other two stay on the defensive.

My strategy involves a medium speed tech that is very powerful as you can be teir 2 and still get teir 3 damage, which allows you to attack their base faster and effectivly to stop bundles of wood (fags) who all out tech.

The three races for this strategy are Human, Night Elf, and Undead.

First the human starts off building footmen . One barracks. This works well when people focus fire with dark ranger and archers. In my opinion Defend is one of the dirtiest upgrades in the game because reasearching this one technology allows you to effectively negate any teer one rush with archers or fiends so your team only needs to worry about their melee.

The Night elf starts off building either archers or huntresses depending on the amount of melee the human provides. I think hunts would be best. The NE hero MUST be Priestess of the Moon. Only one ancient of war. Her trueshot will do wonders and a half later on in the game. The night elf should creep with another teamate if he goes archers. He should probably creep with the undead player if the is near. Creeping solo with archers and preistes means she will get her tigers ass handed to her.

The undead builds crypt fiends. The primary hero probably should be Death Knight, but Crypt Lord or Lich can be okay here too. Dread Lord is good also if you decide to later frenzy your Giants. I realize creeping with crypt fiends is semi difficult, but build a tome of relics and buy rod of necromancy to take damage away from Death Knight and fiends.

Moving on. Don’t rush your upgrade. This makes you vunerable to a rush, so upgrade when you have sufficient gold to while still constantly building units.

The Human techs to mortars. Two workshops. Night Elf goes giants, and one or two Druids of the Claw. I recommend using the “Move” command instead of right clicking to patrol in order to have the DOC follow your hero because they ALWAYS die when they rush to the front, or you have to spend precious micromanaging time to keep sending them back. NE player should have two Ancients of Lore. The Undead techs to necros. Two Temples of the Damned. Later if for some reason they have heavy melee before you attack, build Banshees and possess them all. Banshees are one of the best units in the game if you know when and how to use them.

Attack their base when: NE has at least two giants and one bear. Human has 4 or more mortars. Undead has about 4 necros. (The Undead player should still make fiends if he has the gold.) The beauty of this strategy is you can have so many units attacking the front line at once. You have your giants/few leftover footies or hunts. Fiends (who, by the way, pwn air; net is one of the cheapest upgrades next to defend) attacking farther back, and mortars attacking way far in the back. This allows all units to attack and gives more manuverability within battles because you don’t have units trying to climb over each other in order to attack.

Now here is the ultimate goal of this strategy. The necros Unholy Frenzy the mortars giving +75% increased attack speed. It is incredible for mortars. Unholy frenzy increases attack speed way more than Bloodlust (eventhough a cloud above a units head is not nearly as intimidating as a bunch of units yelling weirdly). Plus it’s only a teer 2 spell. DOC should roar near the mortars which adds +25% to attack damage. In addition to this the POTM’s Trueshot Aura at level 3 adds a whopping 30% to attack damage. So your mortars have a combined 55% attack damage increase in addition to their ultra fast frenzied attack speed. The fiends allow it so even if they have air, they still will recieve the brutal mortar punishment. The giants provide great melee protection. If they try to get past the giants, taunt them. They will not get far.

You can level towns fast! If the enemy is away focus mortar fire on their hall. Ideally you will kill it before one or both of the teamates is able to TP and you will only have one or two teamates to deal with. When they TP, still try to focus mortar fire on their hall. They won’t be able to repair it fast enough. Then you can focus your attack on the globs of units that just TP’d.

If you absolutly hate Undead or feel really strongly about Orc, you can substitute shamen for the necros. Witch docs work well with this strategy too because healing wards heal 2% of HP/ sec which is incredible on Mountain Giants. (32hp/sec on every single giant + healing for all your other units = very good 🙂 He should make some sort of AA since you will be naked w/o fiends, raiders w/ ensnare, troll HH, or bats if they don’t have fiends should work fine.

How I got GTA San Andreas to Work with (a crappy OS) Vista

So I bought Vista thinking it was going to be like 10 times faster and 100 times better than XP. Soon after buying it I realized it was approximatly 1/2 times as fast and 50 times worse. .

I recently installed GTA San Andreas on Vista. Surprisingly (this is sarcasm) it didn’t work. My mouse would stop working randomly during the game, and when I would go to the in game menu. The game would freeze. This happend regualarly and made it impossible to play. I went to google groups hoping there might be some others who had the same problem. There were, unfortunatly most of the people who answered were apparently retarded telling people to reinstall graphics card drivers and mouse drivers even when the mouse worked fine outside the game.

Frustrated and irritated I went about solving the problem on my own. Thankfully I am such an incredible genius(or maybe just lucky). I figured out how to fix it. My solution is as follows.

The first thing I did to solve the problem was right click the GTA shortcut on my desktop and in the menu click Properties. A Properties window will come up. Click the Compatablity tab. Under Compatablitly mode, check the box that says Run this program in compatability mode for:
Then select Windows 98/Windows Me from the dropdown list. This is actually a solution I got from the web and I had to do this running the game under XP too.

The game should work fine now if you want to start a new game fresh. However my old game that I started before I got Vista was 95% complete and I didn’t want to start all over again. Since Vista is confused about its sexuality, it saves the GTA files running under its original compatability in a folder that is in a different location from the one GTA running under compatabilty for Windows 98/Windows Me. So if you were to start a game in Windows 98/Windows Me compatabilty all your saved games would not be there. So to combat this, go to the default directory where GTA saves your game in Vista. Mine was C:\Users\your username\Documents\GTA San Andreas User Files.

SIDE NOTE:
If you can’t find this folder, do a search for “GTASAsf1.b”. This is the file name GTA uses for your first save slot for your game. Find the directory that contains this file name. This is the directory that contains all your specific user data including defined control settings and your saved games. The folder should be called GTA San Andreas User files. I suppose you could do a search for the directory instead of the game name.

Copy all the files files in that directory.

Now get into GTA start a new game, get to a save point and save it under the first save slot. This will create a saved game in the directory that it saves Windows 98/Windows XP compatabiilty games under. Now exit the game.

Next go to the new directory where San Andreas saves it’s files under Windows 98/Windows Me compatablilty. Mine was C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\GTA San Andreas User Files, but if you cant find it, do a search for the file name listed above under SIDE NOTE. Just make sure to open the directory that contains the new save file and not the old one. I did this by checking the date the files were modified. Paste all the files from your old Vista compatability directory to this directory and write over all the files. Viola, now when you get into the game all your old saves and controller settings should be there.

PNG Transparency in IE

For the last few days I have been trying to figure out the best way to handle png transparency in IE. (my logo is a png)
Of course I checked Google and went to the following sites:

• http://alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/
• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1645331,00.asp
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294714

to pretty much learn that IE does not support png transparency and that you have to use a directx filter on your pngs to get them to show correclty in IE.

So first an example. If you have IE then you will see that this png (should be transparent) does not show correctly (note it works in firefox):

The code:

<img src="/images/pullmonkey_logo.png">

Applying the fix for IE (note that unfortunately this does not work in firefox):

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<DIV ID="oDiv" STYLE="position:relative; height:78px; width:353px;
     filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='/images/pullmonkey_logo.png', sizingMethod='scale');" >
</DIV>

The code:

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      <DIV ID="oDiv" 
        STYLE="position:relative; 
               height:78px; 
               width:353px;
        filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(
          src='/images/pullmonkey_logo.png', sizingMethod='scale');" >
      </DIV>

Ok good, so we can make it work in IE and firefox but with different solutions.
The fix in IE does not work in firefox and likewise the firefox solution does not handle transparencies in IE.

The solution is to put everything in CSS and use the * html IE hack:
Here is my solution:
The header where the image is displayed:

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    <div id="header">
      <h1>
        <a href="/">
          <img src="/images/pullmonkey_logo.png" />
        </a>
      </h1>
      <div ID="pullmonkey_logo_ie">
      </div>
    </div>

The CSS to hide the regular image from IE:

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    * html #header img {
      display: none;
    }

The CSS to do the directx transparency:

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  * html div#pullmonkey_logo_ie {
    position:relative;
    height:78px;
    width:353px;
    filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(
      src='/images/pullmonkey_logo.png');
  }

Applying the stylesheet:

<div id="header_demo"><a href="/"><img src="/images/pullmonkey_logo.png" /><div ID="pullmonkey_logo_ie"></div></a></div>

So there it is, see that it shows up transparently in both IE and Firefox.

RCSS, who woulda thought!

DRY, DRY!, DRY!!
Rails Developer's dream, take something like this:
graph.css:

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    #vertgraph li.critical { 
      left: 25px; 
      background-position: 0px bottom !important; 
    }
    #vertgraph li.high { 
      left: 100px; 
      background-position: -28px bottom !important; 
    }
    #vertgraph li.medium { 
      left: 175px; 
      background-position: -56px bottom !important; 
    }
    #vertgraph li.low { 
      left: 250px; 
      background-position: -84px bottom !important; 
    }
    #vertgraph li.info { 
      left: 325px; 
      background-position: -112px bottom !important; 
    }

And using rcss turn it into this:
graph.rcss:

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    <% %w{critical high medium low info}.each do | severity, i | %>
      #vertgraph li.<%= severity %> { 
        left: <%= 25 * (3 * i + 1) %>px; 
        background-position: <%= i * 28 %>px bottom !important; 
      }
    <% end %>    
  

Learn more about RCSS here.

haml is awesome!

Haml is a new templating engine primarily for ruby on rails.
It's an alternative to rhtml files one generally uses with rails views.
Let's see an example:
Here is the rhtml version:

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  <div id='content'>
    <div class='left column'>
      <h2>Welcome to pullmonkey.com</h2>
      <p>
        <%= print_info %>
      </p>
    </div>
    <div class="right column">
      <%= render :partial => "sidebar" %>
    </div>
  </div>

Here we have it in haml:

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  #content
    .left.column
      %h2 Welcome to pullmonkey.com
      %p= print_info
    .right.column= render :partial => "sidebar" 

So, 11 lines written in 5 and much clearer.
I am going to start using haml for everything, it is amazing!

Happy Birthday to me!

Yup, I made it another year. Hurray!

“if you don't do it this year, you will be one year older when you do.”
- quote from Warren Miller (favorite snowboarding video Fifty)