Triggers

Triggers are what control anything you want to happen while the scenario is being played, from spawning starting base to calling waves of attacking enemies or giving players objectives. There are several types of triggers which activate off of different events.

Active vs Inactive

Triggers are "active" by default, meaning they will fire whenever their condition is met. They can be set to Inactive manually in the script.

Triggers set themselves to Inactive when they fire. This means that if you want something to be repeatable, you need to reactivate it somewhere in the script.

Repeating Triggers

Using <ActivateTrigger="triggername"/> to tell a trigger to activate itself will make it repeatable (if you want something to happen every time the player builds a Dreadnought, for example, or waves of enemies to spawn and attack every 15 seconds).

Conditional Triggers

Using the OtherTrigger and NotOtherTrigger arguments is a way to gate your scenario's logic. For purposes of those arguments, a trigger 'counts' if it has been activated at least once during the game. However, you can't stack multiple Conditional Triggers. To word it another way, OtherTrigger="Triggername" means only run the Trigger if this Trigger has happened, while NotOtherTrigger means only run the Trigger if this other Trigger hasn't happened.

There is currently no way to "un-activate" a trigger, as far as OtherTrigger and NotOtherTrigger are concerned.

Here's what that may look like:

<Trigger Name="tNE_Spawn1" Type="Var" Var="vNE_Spawn" Operator="==" Value="1" NotOtherTrigger="tNE_SpawnSuppress" >
   <SpawnUnit Name="uNE_Leader1" Template="PHC_2_Zeus" Player="5" Position="-9344,-8064" /><Trigger Name="tNE_Spawn1" Type="Var" Var="vNE_Spawn" Operator="==" Value="1" NotOtherTrigger="tNE_SpawnSuppress" >
   <SpawnUnit Name="uNE_Leader1" Template="PHC_2_Zeus" Player="5" Position="-9344,-8064" />
<Trigger>

In this case, the NotOtherTrigger means do not run the unit spawn trigger if the SpawnSuppression Trigger has been activated, (a certain region has been captured.) Another example is NotOtherTrigger="Difficulty4" means don't run the trigger if the player is playing on Expert.

Common Trigger Arguments

All triggers share some attributes in common:

• Name - Name of the trigger. Required.
• Type - What type of trigger it is. See below. Required.
• Inactive - If this trigger is inactive, to activate use the ActivateTrigger option from another Trigger.
• OtherTrigger - Name of another trigger that must have fired before this one will activate. Use this to set multiple conditions on a trigger occurring.
• NotOtherTrigger - Inverse of OtherTrigger. If the other trigger has fired this trigger won’t fire. Us this to create branching options in your scenario.

Trigger Types

These are the types of triggers you can use in a script, and any specific arguments they support.

Area

Fires when the human player moves a unit into the area.

• Center - Map coordinates of the center of the area. Required.
• Size - Size of the area.
• Template - Template name of the unit that can trigger this. If you want it to fire if any unit enters the area, do not specify a Template argument.

Build

Fires when a human player builds structures or units.

• Target - The template of the building that will fire this trigger
• IsBuilding - Set to "1" if the target is a building
• Count - How many of the target template must be built to fire the trigger (default 1)

Destruction

Fires when something specific dies.

• IsBuilding - If this is a building (if not it refers to a unit).
• Target - Name of the script-spawned unit or building.

Difficulty

Fires at the beginning of a scenario if the given difficulty was chosen

• Difficulty - The given difficulty (0 for Much Easier, up to 4 for Much Harder)

NamedCreate

Fires when a specific unit or building is spawned via a script.

• Target - Name of the script-spawned unit or building.
• IsBuilding - If this is a building (if not it refers to a unit).

Research

Fires when a player researches a Quantum Upgrade

• Player - The player doing the research
• Target - The name of the tech

Timer

Fires after a delay.

• Time - Time in seconds after this gets triggered that it takes place.

Var

Fires if a variable meets given criteria

• Var - The name of the variable to check
• Operator - What logical operator to use when evaluating the variable (equal to, less than, etc) [ == | >= | <= | > | < | != ]
• Value - The (integer) value to compare the variable against
• Example: <Trigger Name="tWeasleyDead" Type="Var" Var="vWeasleyDead" Operator="==" Value="1" > - this fires when the "vWeasleyDead" variable is equal to 1

This is useful if you want to make capturing 4 regions or killing 4 AI players do something, but only when all of them have been done at the same time. However, you have to be careful in the case of capturing all 4 regions that it doesn't get messed up by if the AI captures the region back. This is where conditional triggers can be useful.

ZoneCapture

Fires when a region is captured.

• Owner - Player who must capture this region to fire the trigger.
• Position - Map coordinates of the generator/Nexus.