Basicallly, heres a whole bunch of ideas I've had.
Note that Ive posted some of these before, but the thread was largely ignored since it was labeled spoiler and only a small handful of people had finished the game at the time.
Adding your own buildings to the game.
Being able to add your own functional buildings to the game would be a big boon for Modders, given the very level-specific nature of a lot of the buildings in Darwinia. As best I can tell, some of what we would need is already there, it would just require some tweaking. I don't imagine many of you have taken a look at the .shp files that Darwinia uses for its 3d Models, but all of the Darwinian-powered buildings (the ones with the little bays) have their bays loaded in by hooks in the Building file. If the game was changed to check all custom building files for these Bay-hooks and load them in the right place (it doesn't yet, I checked), it would be easy to create custom Darwinian-powered buidlings. Some custom scripting might be needed for other kinds of buildings, telling them when to come 'online', or anything else they would need to do.
Adding your own units to the game.
Once again, most of the enemies in Darwinia are very scenario-specific. If the Virus is indeed destroyed at the end of Darwinia's story, that leaves very few options for story-driven mods. Heres my idea on how a unit creator/editor for the game could work.
Basically, you start with your model (Im not sure how animations work in the game so that might be an issue). You select an AI type for your new unit from a list, which can include options like 'AlwaysChargeEnemy', 'StayAtFiringRange', 'JumpOnEnemy' (spiders) etc etc. This would dictate the behaviour for a unit.
You then select the unit's weapons. Perhaps each unit has a Primary and Secondary. Once again there would be a list to chose from (though more would likely need to be added from the current selection), like lasers, rocket type explosives or grenade type explosives, or Damage on Collision (like centipedes). Through some kind of editor, you select the point on the model that these weapons fire from. Then you just create the stats (probably in a seperate file) for health, speed etc. Thats about it as far as I can see. With that you would more or less have a fully functioning unit. There's probably something(s) I'm overlooking, but this is a good starting point.
The ability to include new gestures for your newly created unit.
Adding the stuff we saw from hacking the Phase 1 Beta back in (albiet with some tweaking). The field gun and tank units were huge fun to play around with. If some AI could be added to these as well so that you could fight against them, that would be pretty awesome too.
New kinds of mission objective. Clearing all enemy units from a specific area, or from the whole level, for example. Mission timers would also be quite cool.
Damage zones - ie. areas that cause damage to units that enter them, like lava or radiation or cactii patches or something.
A couple of extra teams to add (blue and purple maybe). This would allow for multi-faction campaigns.
Destroyable buildings. Being able to destroy an enemy building for a mission objective. Give it a health counter and make it explode like everything else when it reaches 0.
Add the snow back into the game and give us a way of making it level specific!
Other unique bits like that would add a lot too.
The other bigger idea I had was some kind of miner unit. The Mine and Yard levels are all well and good for areas connected to them, but what about the newer areas which will be farther away?
A miner unit could be created that would move to a location and start digging polygons from the ground just like the mine facility, store them, and return them to a facility. The rate that the Miner digs polygons could be determined by the height and steepness of the land its mining. Once its full, or after a certain amount of time, it could return to the refinery or whatever, and go and mine more. The refinery would do exactly what the Mine level's refinery did - convert polygons into primitives.
These primitives could then be used to create units (like the Armour, or new things which could be added). Instead of just pouring out of a yard like in Yard, some kind of click system could be added - you click on the building and get a list. You can see the sort of thing Im talking about in the Darwinia preview movie, or you can see it on the Factory building in the early phase 1 betas.
I'll probably post more later, but I've gotta start getting ready for work now. I encourage people to add their own ideas, or expand on mine.
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