Darwinia

[martin]

I'd just like to tell everyone that my BIG MOD is now under construction again. The mod comes in several parts:

maintanenceSYS (complete)
Civil War (complete)
The deserts (complete)
FTP (under construction)
Depletion (under construction)
Revolution

and has one huge storyline.

You can find our website here:

http://www.crimsonsun.cc/big_mod.html

(thanks to lowell for hosting)

or our new one (under construction) here:

http://martindevans.googlepages.com/thebigmodmain

(thanks to google for hosting)

Last edited by martin on Fri Nov 02, 2007 8:37 am; edited 8 times in total

[hitm4n]

cool !! I'll add a url to this thread

[martin]

what? you mean a webpage entirely dedicated to my mod?! :0 wow.

[The GoldFish]

I'm pretty much done with MaintenanceSyS now...

[hitm4n]

lol.

my impression of TGF...

"What have i let myself in for... oh no woe is me, this will take forever"

5 minutes later...

"Well thats the first bit done"

lol.

[The GoldFish]

Well, it took more like the best part of half a day, and then the rest of it to test, - mostly trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do with levels which looks like this

I'm hoping that Civil War is less of a collection of method zero! lumps with random buildings scattered across and the odd spam cube, and more of a collection of actually playable scenarios... I can't script something that won't happen, after all...

edit, zero, not 1! curses!

[hitm4n]

I'd prefer to see all the levels remain in, so none are lost from the "upgrade and bundling" process. If its a really simple level design, like the one you pictured, then make its objective simple too. So that its a quick map to play. I think i played that level as well and it was damned hard !! As soon as you started killing stuff it all started spewing out of the cube until you have a mass of virii, spiders and soul destroyers... Simple design, but deviously hard level.

I guess the hardest part with levels like this is to give the level a meaning or purpose within the story. But that should be martins problem...

All i hope is that the levels are locked off until you complete each one, and research cubes flow along with the gameplay so that you feel you are advancing thru the mod. Rather than a bunch of levels slapped together that you can play in any order with no help or objectives...

I quite like a lot of martins levels, but the lack of scripts are their downfall. I hope you can sort this out between you.

[The GoldFish]

Well, my first reaction to that was to do this, so the level has some backbone in the supplied story (it's called Haven, the idea being as an area to amass the Virii from Grid), and Martin can apply any further Soul Destroyers and overlapping Spam cubes as he may wish, or revert the level to it's former state; Spam cubes and Soul Destroyers aren't my forté...

Yes, I have 'eye candy'd, ie, added new terrain so it looks less manufactured noting where that does/doesn't fit with the story, added lights to all levels, added different landscape, water and waves textures, adjusted buildings etc to fit objectives, and significantly changed the landcapes and appearences of 2 of the later levels, mainly as they seemed like a messy attempt at playing with the editor and not actually had any time spent standing back and looking at it as a level that had to be completable in some way.

Why have I done that? Because I got given a story that was supposed to fit the mod, and I did my damdest to see that realised in a realistic manner. Have I done the right things, I don't know, I'd like to think I have, but that's for Martin to decide. My opinion is that, the story is good, the concept is good, the level ideas are good, but the actual content wasn't, and seriously needed some love.

On that, a lot of the levels have had mechanisms put in, how they all balence out wasn't my primary concern - research needs to be added, though there are plenty of control towers to get research points from, and unit counts and spawn rates may need changing, and as I usually say, I can't balence it because I'm not an average player nor do I get average gameplay performance. (See Balaal for evidence of this )

[hitm4n]

Balaal played ok for me. Even with 60 gazillion souls floating up.

Quote:

My opinion is that, the story is good, the concept is good, the level ideas are good, but the actual content wasn't, and seriously needed some love.

exactly.

About the balance. My personal opinion on this is only that levels are at least completable. I don't care if theres a really simple level followed by a really hard one, with no real difficulty curve. My only concern is that a play order is given (maybe where you can do some in any order before advancing) much like the original missions. The lack of Dr.Sepulveda made the mods feel unfinished too...

Well, seems to going well, so you better crack on with it !!

[The GoldFish]

I can't, I'm still waiting on Martin to get me the version of CivilWar he was playing with, and get back to me about if he wants me to or wants to change anything with MaintenanceSyS, at the moment I'm sitting pretty.

Currently, the beta style verion of MS I've put together has intros on every level, outro text on every level, objectives on every level, proper level by level advancement and storyline development, and a couple of cutscenes.

[hitm4n]

Excellent...

But is it finished yet

[The GoldFish]

Don't ask me, ask Martin.

Like I said, from my point of view, it was finished (and tested) yesterday to a functional quality that you could expect from one of my own mods (once I've remade them at least twice ) - I'd say you could load it up, start a profile, and enjoy a nice mod with it in it's current state.

The only problem is how short it is due to lack of actual content in some of the levels (in fact, one of the grandest looking levels only lasts 90 seconds) - much of the poorly manufactured content, like, single groups of 300 virii with a large spread, has been removed and replaced with more realistic smaller patches of fewer units - but it's better to make it better to play once I/we know it doesn't need to be completely changed...

[martin]

The GoldFish wrote:

I can't, I'm still waiting on Martin to get me the version of CivilWar he was playing with, and get back to me about if he wants me to or wants to change anything with MaintenanceSyS, at the moment I'm sitting pretty. Currently, the beta style verion of MS I've put together has intros on every level, outro text on every level, objectives on every level, proper level by level advancement and storyline development, and a couple of cutscenes.

Can you send me the version of maintanence sys for me to look at then. As for civil war; it could be some time. I made this ages ago and it is really just a collection of levels which fits bits of storyline ideas I had for a civil war. I'm working on it though... slowly. I like what you've done to some of those levels but I hope you haven't made haven too different! I liked it , it looks simple but to cut a hole throguh those virii to the central port is actually quite hard with all those spawners.

Tell you what, do you want to skip civil war for now and do the deserts (my favourite of the three, and the biggest) while I finish off the civil war?

[The GoldFish]

Apparently I needed to test the end more - I only briefly checked that the relays were the right settings by looking at two and checking they weren't 0 (but there were two ones, you can blame Martin for that since they're his original buildings! ), otherwise it apparently plays fine. Also;

"<Mart> i love it!"

Anyway, Martin, add these two files when you're finished;

this in the root mod dir

and this in the scripts dir

[martin]

done. nice avatar BTW.