Hey, being conceited and being talented aren't mutually exclusive!
The problem really is working all these nuggets of information into being functionally useful in your mod, and while I agree that there may be lots of tiny neat things that haven't been used at all or in other ways, I think that if they were really any use in a mod in the first place they'd catch someone's interest and sprout up - but the field is full of rocks impeding progress all over the place, which for me stops things being useful.
Stricken is just a chop shop of messing around with the file system and playing with the things I found in and out of the editor as I went along, pretty much nothing I 'discovered' got left out. That said, most of my time was spent playing it, rather than researching ways of developing it. I'd say that with work you can end up with more graphically refined landscapes and structures except for the things we can't change, with more missions and objectives except for the things we can't change, with livelier units with flowing intercommunication between them except for the things we can't change, with shinier special effects except for the things we can't change, with different/alternate sound scapes except for the things we can't change, etc. It just didn't seem... worth it to do that stuff to me, I only really did what came easily to me, I'm not a sound engineer, computer programmer or a 3D modeller, but I seem to be pretty good at transmuting one thing into another.
The amount of stuff we can envisage and just can't do is depressing if nothing else, and it seems to just kill off what's left of the ground that hasn't been covered because, to be honest, I don't really want to play Darwinia that much if it's just the same old send an engineer around the back or muster in an army of squadies - working out the best or most efficient way of doing something has never really been a problem for me, hence why Stricken was pretty much all about muscling in on the more... arcade aspects I guess - it's usually pretty obvious what you have to *do*, it was a case of actually doing it, but not in a dumb way (I hope, at least, hehe) - What I really want is a story, maybe you can see that from all the cinematics, and something that, while you play it, plays you right back (think playing gladiator properly, ie, major adrenaline rush, followed by darlington, ie, requiring patients and caution), or spouting vital plot at you while trying to fight a giant black centipede...
Really, I think the modding ground is pretty much worked over bar the rocky patches, and it's the plot field that needs some attention, but it's the same problem comming back, that you can easily get stuck at the first hurdle cause what you want to do just isn't possible.
But then, people are different, this is just how I feel, so who knows, maybe someone else will come up with something I want to play - Hell, I still can't believe people bother to waste all their time killing spiders in Stricken
