Broken Units, Broken Lights...

[AC_PureRage]

Okay, so, I love the game Darwinia and decided to make a mod for it. I've got a semi-detailed, kind of in-depth, pretty general idea of what I'm doing, locations, storyline, objectives, etc. thought out. The problem is, I can't put it into motion. And I'm on my first level. -.-;;

So I followed the guide on Thenextgame. I made a land tile, customized it a bit, and plopped down some Darwinians, added lighting, and placed a camera. Except when I load up the level, my camera still starts skyhigh and there are no Darwinians.

What's up?

[brice]

You must be using a profile. That means that when you add new stuff to your level, you MUST reset it. If you don't reset the level, then any instant units you added will not show up. Also no new dynamic buildings will show up (anthills, tiffids if you remembered to make them dynamic like they should be). The profile acts as a memory. Sometimes you have to erase it to make things sync up right.

So enter your level, reset it instead of plain leaving it, and then re-enter the level. All the new stuff should suddenly be there. Go look inside the mods/yourmod/levels/mission_levelname.txt file to see what stuff is affected by level resets. Cameras are.

Read the thread just before this one here. You will also want to be careful whenever you add global buildings like Control Towers. If you are using a profile they will behave strangely until you clear the profile. You might take TGF's suggestion of using profile "none" while you are working on your mod.

Both problems are caused by the way Darwinia saves the game's state. Your profile gets a copy of the game.txt from your mod each time you start the mod from scratch. Then whenever you enter a level, a copy of the mission file for that level is also copied into your profile. Whenever you reset a level this mission copy is erased and you get a new copy next time you enter the level. But the copy of game.txt is not erased.

When you are editing levels, the editor does NOT update your profile (under the "users" directory)... only the original mod files under the "mods" directory.

Hope this helps. When all else fails, and you get weird behavior, aways try clearing your profile and restarting the game. You can always delete the profile files (the encrypted ones) because they are just copies of the plain text originals. If you want to see how the profile files change as you play, search these forums for "redshirt2", which is the encryption algorithm used. Search both the mods forum and the regular gameplay forums.

[AC_PureRage]

Ah, thanks so much! Time to get working on that mod.