The first patch for Darwinia is ready for download! This patch is for Windows and brings Darwinia to version1.2. Mac OSX and Linux patches will be coming very soon. This patch has been in development since the games release on the 4th March 2005, and contains a number of important fixes, tweaks, and new features.
Click here to download the v1.2 patch for Windows.
To install the patch, simply unzip the downloaded zip file into your Darwinia directory.
The changes include a brand new mouse selection system (which is much better than the old one), massively improved Radar Dishes (they were a bit unreliable in the initial release, we have to admit), performance enhancements, new modding features, and a bunch of bug fixes and difficulty tweaks. There's a lot of stuff in this patch.
You can read the complete change list here.
In other news,
- AppleLinks has reviewed (the Mac version of) Darwinia, giving us an amazing 5 A's out of 5. Click here to read the review. Here is a quote: "This is a subtle, complicated strategy game; one with a structure that you can pick up in minutes, but with a depth of play that will surprise you....Old school graphics combined with a modern rendering engine. Old school gameplay combined with sophisticated level design. Recommended."
- Gamer.no has reviewed Darwinia and given us 7/10, stating "Darwinia is really charming, and a charismatic piece of art for the veterans and the curious gamers." Click here to read the review.
- jeux vidéo Micro has reviewed Darwinia and given us 7/10. Have a look at the mag scan here (French).
- The BBC Collective wrote an article / review about Darwinia. No score is given but they do say this about us: "Imagine something somewhere between Rez, Pikmin and the Genesis sequence in Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan, and you'll get some idea of Darwinia. It's retro, wilfully geeky and unique." Click here to read it.
- Edge magazine very kindly gave us permission to print the Reviews Editorial from their March issue (in which they reviewed Darwinia). We already have scans of the review (page1 and page2) but you can read the Editorial by clicking here.
Patch v1.2 released for Darwinia (win32)
Here's the BBC Collective feature, if anyone's interested 
Link
Back to the future.
Immediately, Darwinia is a refreshing, appealing experience – from the very act of first immersing yourself in the retro gameworld, consisting of tinted wireframe islands populated by pixelated goodies (Darwinians themselves, plus your Squads and Engineers) and baddies (various virii, which are corrupted Darwinians).
Using your Squads, the soldiers of the game, and Engineers – which look like something out of Tron, and effect repairs and gather upgrade data – you must fight the viral forms, collect data “souls” and restore the world of Darwinia.
It's not just the world and its internal narrative that is novel and will make this a cult title. The very premise itself is very retro and very British. The game introduces itself as a “virtual theme park” gone sour. The park is the brainchild of one Dr Sepulveda, a distinctly Clive Sinclair type who was once the darling of British computing, but took a tumble with his flawed Protologic 68000, a strangely familiar machine. Using his warehouse of returned Protologics, Sepulveda networked them and created Darwinia as a kind of AI research tool.
There's something special about a game that offers not just the scenario of the game's world and actions, but also a strong, significant context - the narrative of the play itself part and parcel of a wider fiction outside the game.
In terms of the actual play mechanic, developer Introversion relies on the player drawing shapes with the mouse to summon the Squads and Engineers. It's an innovative ploy and, even if it's not quite as intuitive as the developers would like to think, ably adds to the distinctiveness of Darwinia.
Imagine something somewhere between Rez, Pikmin and the Genesis sequence in Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan, and you'll get some idea of Darwinia. It's retro, wilfully geeky and unique. Oh, and it's reasonably priced too.
Link
Installed the patch and played Biodome to test it out. My performance is VASTLY improved. iirc, one of the fixes is in the way that souls are rendered, right? I figure that must be the thing that is helping my framerate so much during large battles. Plus the new mouse selection system is quite nice.
From my quick impressions, this patch seems to fix all the nagging issues I had with the game. I can now completely recommend it to all my friends!*
* just gotta test pattern buffer. That's the only level that ever crashed on me. Though, I expect it is probably fixed now.
From my quick impressions, this patch seems to fix all the nagging issues I had with the game. I can now completely recommend it to all my friends!*
* just gotta test pattern buffer. That's the only level that ever crashed on me. Though, I expect it is probably fixed now.
faster, but not in a good way
Yep, it's faster -- now Darwinia crashes immediatly rather then taking a while. I was one of the many people who was having problems with memory building up and crashing from what appears to be sound related issues (the crashes were almost always during explosion sounds, and turning down sound quality allowed me to get further through tough levels).
I just installed the 1.2 patch in hopes that this would resolve the problems. But, it actually made it worse -- much worse. All I've done is unzip the patch over the existing files, start Darwinia, and create a new user profile. Then the only level available is 'garden'. As soon as I click on Garden, Darwinia crashes and windows offers to send a bug report. I've tried this a couple times now, and all I get is that windows offer of a crash report, but I don't get any blackbox or other files in the darwinia directory.
Both the Win32 and Linux versions crash in similar places on the same machine. Maybe I'll get lucky and 1.2 will work better on Linux then on Windows.
I just installed the 1.2 patch in hopes that this would resolve the problems. But, it actually made it worse -- much worse. All I've done is unzip the patch over the existing files, start Darwinia, and create a new user profile. Then the only level available is 'garden'. As soon as I click on Garden, Darwinia crashes and windows offers to send a bug report. I've tried this a couple times now, and all I get is that windows offer of a crash report, but I don't get any blackbox or other files in the darwinia directory.
Both the Win32 and Linux versions crash in similar places on the same machine. Maybe I'll get lucky and 1.2 will work better on Linux then on Windows.
Re: faster, but not in a good way
vigor wrote:I was one of the many people who was having problems with memory building up and crashing from what appears to be sound related issues...
vigor also wrote:I just installed the 1.2 patch in hopes that this would resolve the problems. But, it actually made it worse -- much worse.
I had the exact same problem with V1, but the patch fixed it, I can play Biosphere and Pattern buffer without a hitch, no memory leak. Sounds like you are having some other issue if you can't even load the garden level....
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The GoldFish
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/me indicates the line saying 'new bootloader'
edit - also, try fiddling with the new Landscape render methods - they might help with the crashes.
edit - also, try fiddling with the new Landscape render methods - they might help with the crashes.
-- The GoldFish - member of former GIT and commander in chief of GALLAHAD. You could have done something, but it's been fixed. The end. Also, play bestgameever!
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panda of doom
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I'm kind of wondering if the patch didn't mess up the radar dishes a bit.
For instance on the Generator level for the life of me I couldn't get the radar dish on top of that mountain to connect to the last island in the upper left, right next and below the mountain dish. The line of sight was fine, the radar dish I was trying to link up to could link up with the mountain dish but I could not return the favor and get a 2 way connection. The mountain dish refused to link up so I couldn't get any darwinians to that last island.
I could swaer that before the patch that same dish was able to make the connection.
Oh well at least I hope my slowdown problem is gone and I get better then 3 FPS on the later maps.
For instance on the Generator level for the life of me I couldn't get the radar dish on top of that mountain to connect to the last island in the upper left, right next and below the mountain dish. The line of sight was fine, the radar dish I was trying to link up to could link up with the mountain dish but I could not return the favor and get a 2 way connection. The mountain dish refused to link up so I couldn't get any darwinians to that last island.
I could swaer that before the patch that same dish was able to make the connection.
Oh well at least I hope my slowdown problem is gone and I get better then 3 FPS on the later maps.
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trickfred
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I had the same problem with that dish. came here to see if it was just me - yeah, it conencted fine before the patch, doesn't seem to want to now. It's not just me/you. I can connect going the other way - from the western island [calling the generator island north] to the middle island, but can't go the other way, or establish 2-way. To get the D'ans to the 3rd island, I dished them in from the starting island.
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