Darwinia Dev CD (G'wan Chris, you know you want to!)

[RoystonD12]

Granted releasing the source for purchase this soon after release is risky, but I'd be more than willing to sign any legal stuff obliging me to never let anybody see it etc. I'm just eager to get to work making new units (I've had a fair few ideas).

Legally binding agreements plus a fee like with the Uplink DCD should work well enough, perhaps coupled with a system similar to the beta setup, so only registered and approved users could install/access it.

Plus you could release it as an online purchase only, downloadable content meaning no CD production and mailing costs, saving you moolah, plus the fact if you charged a fee that would be more income from your work.

It's worth at least considering, right?

[Icepick]

I would hope not, definately this soon after release. Uplink was out, what, 2 years before the Dev CD was released? Darwinia has been out 2 months.

[The GoldFish]

Yeah, and barely anyone did anything with the uplink Dev CD

[RoystonD12]

I hereby consider myself completely smooshed. anybody herer on WoW Europe?

[Darksun]

Hmm, it's possible an SDK could be released without full source, could allow unit scripting, creation of new buildings, etc. It depends how Darwinia is coded I suppose.

[Icepick]

I brought this up with Chris the other day on IRC, coding Darwinia to take DLL's for units and allow people limited access to the unit code. He didnt seem to keen on the idea though.

[RoystonD12]

That's a real shame. A modular approach to darwinia would have meant all kinds of modding opertunities but from what I've seen it's missing out on a lot .

Still, that doesn't mean I'm not going to make a mod for it, in fact I've got a couple of really good ideas that I'd like to develop and work on. But for now though, I'm at ubernet with a day pass, so world of warcraft is the soup of the day.

[Dave2]

I brought this up with Chris the other day on IRC, coding Darwinia to take DLL's for units and allow people limited access to the unit code. He didnt seem to keen on the idea though.

The problem with that would be that you'd have to make it platform independent (presumably pretty easy - just have different blocks of code for loading modules), but even then people would be most likely to just make their mods for one platform. The current system, although less flexible, is totally cross-platform.

Another potential problem would be viruses (ironically); if you allow executable code to be directly run, you risk being infected. I think Q3A had a virus distributed this way, but it could've just been the potential vulnerability. In this case it was obviously a more severe threat due to the auto-download feature, but it would be possible all the same.

And yet another problem would be that this would mean that they'd have to have a frozen internal API, or risk people complaining about broken mods; with the current system they can implement a better designed/more powerful/whatever API, but with a public interface either A) the API would have to be frozen, B) a wrapper for the new API would have to be provided, or C) both APIs would have to be implemented. Admittedly this is a smaller problem, as I'd imagine that the API is unlikely to change, but it's something to bear in mind.

Generally, properly done platform-independent modding stuffs is better than native code.

[RoystonD12]

this brings me back to my initial post, I'm sure if the only people who could get their hands on adequate tools (be it the source or a much more substantial SDK) were those who paid a licence fee and/or signed an agreement stating they'd not be naughty, then there would be little threat of things like this happening. Of course, I could just be talking bollocks, as is usually the case.

[Icepick]

I brought this up with Chris the other day on IRC, coding Darwinia to take DLL's for units and allow people limited access to the unit code. He didnt seem to keen on the idea though.

The problem with that would be that you'd have to make it platform independent (presumably pretty easy - just have different blocks of code for loading modules), but even then people would be most likely to just make their mods for one platform. The current system, although less flexible, is totally cross-platform.

Another potential problem would be viruses (ironically); if you allow executable code to be directly run, you risk being infected. I think Q3A had a virus distributed this way, but it could've just been the potential vulnerability. In this case it was obviously a more severe threat due to the auto-download feature, but it would be possible all the same.

And yet another problem would be that this would mean that they'd have to have a frozen internal API, or risk people complaining about broken mods; with the current system they can implement a better designed/more powerful/whatever API, but with a public interface either A) the API would have to be frozen, B) a wrapper for the new API would have to be provided, or C) both APIs would have to be implemented. Admittedly this is a smaller problem, as I'd imagine that the API is unlikely to change, but it's something to bear in mind.

Generally, properly done platform-independent modding stuffs is better than native code.

Well, you raise some good points, although I'm not too sure that there would be anymore of a virus risk than there is now.
My original idea was to implement a sort of unit/building scripting system. It would allow you to dictate a units behavior from a list of presets (always aggresive, flee when injured, etc etc), set its weapons and the model to be used (or sprite for 2d units), whether its flying or a ground unit, and whatever else, and the game would load these from a units directory.

Buildings would be a similar case, you could set whether it was activated by a control tower or powered by Darwinians, etc etc.

Anyway Chris said that there were no plans for anything like this, so I guess its moot anyway.

[Jackmn]

We need methods for modding far more powerful than what we have now.

[Dr4goN]

We need methods for modding far more powerful than what we have now.

Yeah. Then, we could make our own stand-alone mods/expansion packs.

[LLamaBoy]

Uh, making them stand-alone would be a terrible idea. IV have worked for 3 years on the game engine, I highly doubt they'd be willing to let people distribute free versions of the game just with different levels or a new unit/building, etc.

[Superpig]

WRT the cross platform element... each platform has dynamic link libraries in one form or another. Provided the API exposed to a DLL was complete enough, there'd be no need to write any platform-specific code; the only platform-specific thing would be building the library, and it ought not be too hard to achieve that (information about how to do it, people volunteering to help others out by building for them, etc).

In general I suspect that IV wants to avoid a repeat of what happened with Uplink. DevCD owners may vaguely remember some work I started doing on a DLL-based mod system for Uplink - I did actually manage to get the tic-tac-toe mod working as a DLL, along with new namepacks - but it broke down a bit when I realised how much work would need to be done to the savegame system. Maybe I'll get back to it at some point. Anyway, the stuff I learnt in the process was that it's not too hard to conduct things in a largely platform-independent way, especially when you consider that the majority of the game code (the stuff you'd be wanting to write more of) is platform-independent anyway.

Sure, they may have done things completely differently on Darwinia, but I can't think of a reason why they would have done.

Personally, I'd like the full source code to Darwinia because I'd like to tinker with the engine - see if I can optimize it, and maybe port it to Xbox to see how well it works as a console game.

[#fookin.RedOctober]

Beings that somone's already worked out how to impliment the MP aspect, and that most of the original mods (TFC and the Jet Set Willy level editors) were done by hacking the games code, is it completely unexpected that extra models/animations could be implimented this way?

Admitedly tools are A) fun and B) a way of simplifying stuff needed for modding, but you have to start somewhere.