New Modding Features

[NeoThermic]

Icepick, I want to bear you children. I love you. The team information feature is great. I am going to have to do something with that... One question however -- is there any way of making it possible to change it mid game? I ask for this reason: in Insurrection, the team that the player is working for can change mid game. Right now, green is good, red is bad, and there is no reason to use any other color scheme. However, if it could work so that blue is good, and green is bad, then switches half-way through, that would be über-cool. If it is not easy to implement, no worries, but I would love you forever.

[...]Current things on the list include [...] scripting commands to let you change alliances dynamically.

emphasis added

NeoThermic

Quiet, you! I will have none of your reading comprehension. You see, I live in George Bush's America, and around here, we don't read what other people write! We simply assume that they wrote what we responded to, even if it isn't what they wrote! Either you are with us, or you are with the trrrists!

xander

Oh yes, sorry. I'll just go back to making my circles with a value of Pi as 3

NeoThermic

[Testrie]

when do I get to try / beta test this?

elyea

[martin]

separate out, or give the option to separate out, graphics which are used in multiple places(example, glow.bmp - used in shadows, the soul repository, trunk port effects, receiver soul rain aura, virii aura...)

Seconded

thirded

also I like the team thing - I presume there is no upper limit on the number of teams? (hmm, autobattle 2?) and that safeareas and script triggers will be modified to cope with the new teams?

[KingAl]

Would teams share colours for your proposed 'no upper limit'? Otherwise you'd need some way to randomly select a colour sufficiently different from those already in use.

[martin]

Would teams share colours for your proposed 'no upper limit'? Otherwise you'd need some way to randomly select a colour sufficiently different from those already in use.

alright, read no upper limit as a very high limit - or maybe teams could share colours - could create interesting cutscenes of greens killing greens!

[KingAl]

It's a Darwinian civil war!

[The GoldFish]

Updated the first post with some new features.
Im especially interested to hear what people think about the newest feature (team detail extraction), and any ideas they have for it.
Current things on the list include separate image files for the Darwinias/virii of each team, as well as scripting commands to let you change alliances dynamically.

Any chance of extending this to shape files? EG Soul destroyers on one team with one shape and those on another with a different one! (Thus different colours and stylings if so desired)

[Icepick]

separate out, or give the option to separate out, graphics which are used in multiple places(example, glow.bmp - used in shadows, the soul repository, trunk port effects, receiver soul rain aura, virii aura...)

Seconded

I presume there is no upper limit on the number of teams?

There will probably be an upper limit of 6 - I honestly can't see a reason for more teams than that. Plus there are performance issues to consider - each team adds a significant number of calculations that need to be done.

Updated the first post with some new features.
Im especially interested to hear what people think about the newest feature (team detail extraction), and any ideas they have for it.
Current things on the list include separate image files for the Darwinias/virii of each team, as well as scripting commands to let you change alliances dynamically.

Any chance of extending this to shape files? EG Soul destroyers on one team with one shape and those on another with a different one! (Thus different colours and stylings if so desired)

I'm not too sure about this one, but we shall see. Would you want to be able to choose models for just units, or all buildings as well?

[The GoldFish]

Well, just units would be good, I would imagine - units don't usually change team so I can see that being a lot simpler!

It's mainly so that modders can (if they choose to) set up say, ants to be green or red depending on which team they're on, or make one look like an ant and one look like a Darwinian. Or officers, or centipedes, or spiders!

[prophile]

I'm currently in the process of adding some new modding features to Darwinia. This thread is basically for people to request any features they would like to see.
Obviously, the more reasonable the request, the more likely it is to get added to the game - requests for a dozen more unit types are much less likely to happen than, say, the ability to change text avatars (Dr Sepulveda) dynamically (which is already done, incidently.)
<snip>

- ChangeAvatar scripting function, allows you to change the directory that the avatar images are read from. Any number of images can be used, and changed randomly.
- DynamicBuilding, a versitle building with numerous features

- Can use any shape (ala StaticShapes)
- Can be assigned a 'Health' value, which will make the building destructable
- If set to Global, the building can come online when it is destroyed
- Will Dynamically read 'port' markers from the shape assigned to the model and create working Darwinian ports, which will cause the building to come online once all used
- Can be assigned a unit type to spawn, in the same way as an AISpawnPoint building.

- Virii will now render for teams other than 1 (red)
- Team information can now be extracted to a text file. You can use the text file to specify the team colour, alliances between teams, and the Player team. See http://the-icebox.com/Darwinia/screenshot3.jpg for an example of this with 4 (randomly) coloured teams. An example of the file format for the main game would be:


Code: Select all

Team 0
   Colour 100 255 100
   Ally 2
EndTeam

Team 1
    Colour 200 50 50
EndTeam

Team 2
   IsPlayer
   Colour 200 200 30
   Ally 0
EndTeam

I never thought I'd say this, but you're awesome, Icepick.

[sirvoks]

I'm currently in the process of adding some new modding features to Darwinia. This thread is basically for people to request any features they would like to see.
Obviously, the more reasonable the request, the more likely it is to get added to the game - requests for a dozen more unit types are much less likely to happen than, say, the ability to change text avatars (Dr Sepulveda) dynamically (which is already done, incidently.)
<snip>

- ChangeAvatar scripting function, allows you to change the directory that the avatar images are read from. Any number of images can be used, and changed randomly.
- DynamicBuilding, a versitle building with numerous features

- Can use any shape (ala StaticShapes)
- Can be assigned a 'Health' value, which will make the building destructable
- If set to Global, the building can come online when it is destroyed
- Will Dynamically read 'port' markers from the shape assigned to the model and create working Darwinian ports, which will cause the building to come online once all used
- Can be assigned a unit type to spawn, in the same way as an AISpawnPoint building.

- Virii will now render for teams other than 1 (red)

- Team information can now be extracted to a text file. You can use the text file to specify the team colour, alliances between teams, and the Player team. See http://the-icebox.com/Darwinia/screenshot3.jpg for an example of this with 4 (randomly) coloured teams. An example of the file format for the main game would be:


Code: Select all

Team 0
   Colour 100 255 100
   Ally 2
EndTeam

Team 1
    Colour 200 50 50
EndTeam

Team 2
   IsPlayer
   Colour 200 200 30
   Ally 0
EndTeam

I never thought I'd say this, but you're awesome, Icepick.

Seconded.

[The GoldFish]

A few more ideas;

Ability to create a damaging explosion at some coordinate via script as many times as you like

Some sort of timed building which can activate a script X (or infinate) number of times when it's counted up to a value.

Ability to call in an airstrike based on some coordinates or another marker via script

An option to make script triggers not vanish when activated (within the same instance of a mission)

StaticSprite building - just creates a flat plane with the supplied image on it, with scaling options ideally

edit - and! Way to set the lighting and colour and such of the world map and soul repository

[Testrie]

does that mean that we could have one team think that an enemy is an ally? That would make an intresting plot.

elyea

[sirvoks]

Sounds really nice. That's in the new patch, right ?

[Icepick]

Merry Christmas, everyone. Have some dynamically coloured spiders playing in the snow!
http://the-icebox.com/Darwinia/spiders.jpg