Autocast

[Father_Chaos]

How could I make a custom ability based off Animate Dead on a tower autocast? So when there would be dead units near the tower it would cast it on them.

[tassadar920]

Animate Dead is an autocastable spell to start off with, but you need to do two things:

In the Unit - Ability area you have to add the ability so the tower has it. Then under, Unit - Active Ability you also have to add the same thing so that it can fire normally.

[Father_Chaos]

I know this - I think you are talking about raise dead (necromancer), which has already autocast. I am talking about Animate Dead, the Death Knight's ultimate which resurrects dead units around him into the same ones but controlled by the Death Knight's owner. This ability has no autocast. I tried adding the ability to the tower and also to the active ability but it didn't autocast, it was just a normal ability that could only be manually casted.

[tassadar920]

Abilities that would normally be cast manually cannot be autocast every time the unit can (which is what autocast does normally).

I recommend instead that you give the tower the ability, then make a trigger called "Autocast" which fires upon the generic unit even "A unit Dies". Then if the unit is within range of the tower, make another check to counts how many other dead units are near that unit, if there are more than say... 10? It casts Animate Dead from the tower.

Make sure you change Animate Dead from being a hero spell to a normal unit spell too, if the tower is AI controlled this could interfere with the AI.

[Father_Chaos]

Good idea Tassadar, I already thought about it and it was my last resort.

However, as I think about it more deeply, I agree I couldn't put autocast to new abilities... AI is involved in it (when to heal, when to raise dead, etc.).

Thanks for the help .

[tassadar920]

No problem, I know that's an annoying way to do it but it seems like the only one.

You could also write an AI script for it, but I don't even know how to do that...

[Chris]

As Tassadar probably suggested to you, you need to run a trigger to test and see if there are dead unit corpses around that area or something. If there is, force a unit near it to cast animate dead.