changing darwinia objectives for official campaign

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stanwinia
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changing darwinia objectives for official campaign

Postby stanwinia » Thu Oct 18, 2007 2:32 am

Hello Darwinia community. This will be my first post in these forums. played the game through, loved it, read several of the forum topics covering levels that initially gave me trouble such as containment and yard. Eventually I learned the value of officers and managed to save 600+ darwinians in the containment level, not a single darwinian was left behind. It didn't feel right leaving any left to fend off the viral infection on their own.

My point is this: From what I read in the forums the number of rescued darwinians used to be much higher, but was lowered down after several posts requested it. I actually find 300 to be an achievable number, with higher amounts being more on the difficult side. Has the original campaign been modified for difficulty? could there be a containment level where you only need to rescue 50 while another requires 500? The difficulty settings just don't seem enough for me, I want to try more difficult objectives on several levels to test my patience and skill.

Has a mod pack been created to bring back some variety to the original game? Would it even be allowed? I know darwinia is moddable, but not sure if that includes changing the original levels, even if I use a seperate data folder with all the changes in it. Apologies in advance if this has been posted before. I haven't found any topics that address what I'm asking or just didn't use the right keywords.
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The GoldFish
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Postby The GoldFish » Thu Oct 18, 2007 5:25 am

I'm fairly confident that it would be perfectly permissable - people would still need the complete data packages in order to play them.

However, I don't think anyone has gone so far as to do this - I recall there was a mod which was supposed to increase the difficulty a lot but that's years old now and I dont think it ever really went anywhere. I think the number of Darwinian's to save used to only be about 50 or so higher - it was never actually a chore at any stage, but the player is given too much freedom and was never definately taught how to use incubators, so it was common for new people to get through almost the whole level before realising what they had to do, and now have to reset it, because they'd accidently made it impossible.

I'm a little curious as to what you mean by "bring back some variety" - I don't think any variety can be added since basically the net contents of Darwinia is the original campaign. However, increasing the difficulty of certain objectives by increasing the numbers of units you need to put in an area/destroy is really very easy (5 minute job if you know what you want to change and what to change it to) - so I'm sure that unless you have any unreasonable ideas someone could probably drum up a superdifficulty mod.
stanwinia
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Postby stanwinia » Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:35 pm

I was thinking of a "addon" pack of sorts. rather than setting the difficulty level through the menu, I was thinking of mission files that vary the objectives and game a little. One part could have fewer ants swarming around, while another has more, etc. When I said variety I meant objective variety really. I've just started modding my own sandbox to get a feel for the different scripted events, even went through some crashes too. :D but mostly I've been looking at mission files for the official campaign and working backwards from there. Perhaps I'll introduce spiders in containment area, or drop a triffid or two. Maybe in the mine yard I'll remove one of the triffids so the spiders won't be such a bother and make seperate mission files for that. Better yet, remove the squads from most of the game and have the darwinians fight their own battles from containment onward.

Maybe I'll have a new level where reprogramming a certain control tower determines how the rest of the game will play out, far as enemy count and objectives. Maybe it'll seem like a waste of time but I really don't have any ideas for my own mod right now, and there's already several good ones in the community. I just haven't seen anything like this mentioned in the forums yet so I figured I'd give it a go.

EDIT: just read the patch notes about the difficulty level. I've not changed it from the default setting but it's supposed to increase the number of enemies when raised to a higher value. Does anyone know the formula for the enemy increase vs difficulty?
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Postby The GoldFish » Thu Oct 18, 2007 5:23 pm

I don't think anyone knows the precise inner workings of the difficulty system - basically all I know is that it increases enemy stats from stats.txt, possibly decreases player unit stats, and increases the count and spread values when reading from the mission file to play the level.

I don't particularly approve of the difficulty system, because I think the fact that units get faster (virii in particular) just makes the game more of a chore. Regardless, I'm drawing a blank on how it specifically changes things.

Anyway adding in more units, moving units, changing research etc are all very viable, and actually, really quite simlpe to do.
-- 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!
stanwinia
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Postby stanwinia » Sat Oct 20, 2007 5:59 pm

My first act of modifying the containment level. I thought it fun to set the save darwinia objective to 600. Certainly took a lot of farming to do but was fun to direct a mass exodus of DGs from each island. haven't tried editing the level file itself. afraid I might break the campaign if I added in new objects and buildings without knowing what they'll affect, but am tempted to set darwinian research to v3 and remove squads. will require careful moving of enginneers to get the officer research before I can put the DGs to work annihilating the viri from the shielded area towards the incubator. if I get it working I'll drop a screenshot or two.

For now I think I'll read up every mod guide I can and just practice in a sandbox level. So many great tutorials and articles here I hope I'll have the time to read them all and not miss anything. Oh, I also read the topic on saving darwinians in the escort level and I'm thinking of tinkering with the objectives there next :D

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