What patch version do you prefer to play mods with?

[trickfred]

Just for potential future reference... I'm curious as to how many people take advantage of the whizz-bang 1.5.11, or stick with the old 1.42 due to lack of Vista/cpu horsepower/fear of change/whatever reason.

You know, just in case I wanted to, oh I don't know, start on a new mod.

Feel free to discuss your choice below.

(If this is considered more of a 'general' topic, then apologies for having to move it, whoever moves it )

[xander]

I'm on a Mac. We have no 1.5.x whizz-bang. That being said, I haven't opened up the editor in ages.

Also: TRICKFRED! YAY!

xander

[trickfred]

Yeah, I suppose that was a bit PC-centric of me, and I suppose that answers my question. It totally didn't occur to me that after a year IV would still be neglecting the Mac and linux versions, as if they were (fraternal) twin red-headed stepchildren.

Been playing a lot of Rez on my shiny new Xboxen (the wife spoils me), and kind of had the urge to get back to Darwinia. Oh well, I guess I don't need any fancy blowed-up-building or trunk-port-turning-on scripting.

Now where did I leave my notes...

Edit: Hmm. Guess you can't lock a thread when it has a poll in it. :/

[briceman2]

Hail Trickfred!

That's a nobrainer for me: 1.4.0b9 on linux. And 1.4.2 on WinXP, and add xander's 1.4whatever it is on Mac these days. I think 1.4x rules because it is the only cross-platfom version.

Personally I don't like the slickness of 1.5 -- it's not Darwinia. Especially the new grenade distortions. But the reflective water is cool. And I wouldn't mind the old grenade effects with burning DGs...

I am forever working on a "circuit bending" mod that takes advantage of quirks in the 1.4x engine. Obviously my README will disappoint any 1.5 lovers. But 1.4x users will get to play a Darwinia mod they never knew was possible -- many many new behaviors and cool effects...

Of course my mod may never get released, but I hope it will since I have found scores of cool things you can do with the old 1.4x engine -- using only tweaked game, map, mission, building, and shape files -- all "legal" as far as the engine cares. AND the quirks play *exactly* the same on 1.4.0b9 linux and 1.4.2 WinXP (and I assume Mac 1.4x). Maybe I will end up releasing a collection of my warped test levels without a storyline... But once Multiwinia gets released (esp with the dual pak) there will be new Darwinia players, and renewed interest in mods...

Anyhow, to finish plugging my vapormod (and maybe psych myself up to finish it), it's many megacycles in the future and the Ants have risen! They have tunneled into the quantum fabric and their Brains and Queens have learned to bend the system to their own purposes... which of course include full Internet (and thus World) Domination! You arrive just in time to help the Golden Ants undermine the evil plans of the Red Ants... but as in Insurrection, sometimes you're not sure if you are player or pawn... or maybe both. You will travel underground, get launched into space, run malevolent mazes above and below ground, indoors and out, and generally have to forget all you ever knew about the rules of Darwinia. Did I mention the Red DGs are no longer easy pickings? They fight like ants now...

It will be a hard mod.

-brice

[trickfred]

Totally off topic, but I hate juice bags. My daughter however loves them. Easier to create a juice geyser all over the couch; less resistance than a juice box.

*wipes grape juice off the couch*

If you choose not to release it all publicly and stuff, I'd love to try it out 'behind closed doors' so to speak.

Yeah, I feel kinda silly now looking at that poll with no "I'm using 1.4x on a Mac/linux, you insensitive clod!" option.

If anyone's read down this far - please disregard.

[briceman2]

If you choose not to release it all publicly and stuff, I'd love to try it out 'behind closed doors' so to speak.

No prob! You and xander and TGF are on teh short list if I ever completely decide I won't finish anything I can release.

But 'cause I know you're the curious type, I'll tell you the engine is very tolerant of out of bounds values just about everywhere. Like if you want to take *complete* control of Research, just set all the current research counts in the game.txt to a very large negative number! Like minus a billion or more (it's a 32bit signed value). The player can't live long enough to get out of that hole, so you can grant what you want when you want. Period. EDIT: and if you're nasty, you can "grant" higher levels to disable most weapons, except AirStrike. Give and Take! Unfortunately there is no "wrap-around" way to get the Research item back

Also, if you run the linux version from within a console window, the linux port will display a running log of Darwinia server messages which can help explain engine behavior and crash probs. Very useful. Plus the linux environment handles darwinia crashes much quicker than WinXP, so you can afford to tinker more without loosing your mind (or maybe I just don't know my neglected WinXP partition well enough...?)

Other things I've learned: tripods are *not* broken -- they head for global concentrations of enemies then do some local tracking, but they wander off only when there are no enemies on the board, *and* when too many tripods are headed for a given enemy location -- the engine tracks how many of which types of units are headed for a given goal -- this includes DGs heading for building ports -- after 30-40 have commited to run for a given port, no more can select *that port* as a goal -- same for tripods chasing distant enemies. EDIT: So #tripods >> #enemies causes the wandering behavior most of the time.

And bridge buildings can be very very useful! -- they are the only building that can grab an engineer indefinitely -- also, there is a flag at the end of the Bridge bldg line which selects whether the bldg will be an end node or a middle node, and there are two corresponding shape files which can be different if you want... EDIT: like if one version prevents engineers from getting to the hookup location... it becomes an eng trap!

If you are looking for a certain kind of functionality, email me or post and I'll see if I haven't found something that fits the bill. But a lot of my mods involve shape files, esp. buildings, and many of them are kind of complex to setup -- I've written perl scripts to place things for many of the test mods. But I'm happy to share what I've learned when I should have been doing other stuff .

Bending the engine has been an on-off hobby for two or more years now -- It's amazing!, but I *still* keep finding new things the engine can do... if gently coerced

EW4 would be awesome!

-brice

[briceman2]

... another really useful fact is that building visibility (to DGs) is related to their overall bounding sphere. If you want DGs to see a building from further away, simply add an empty fragment to the shape file to increase the bsphere. I usually add the frag at (0,h,0) where h is high enough so the DG's can see the building from the distance I want. You'll see the new bsphere in the editor if it isn't too big to display there.

If a building has ports, the DGs find the ports by "asking" the buildings. They don't see the ports directly. So if you make a port building visible from far away, the DGs will then see the ports from that same faraway point. They will go running for the ports as soon as they can "see" them.

Changing the bsphere with empty frags also controls the placement of several building effects, like the glows in the Yard and the SpawnPoints, and the transport field in the Trunkports. So you can change these buildings and still have some control over where their effects get placed. IIRC these three buildings only let you adjust the ycoord of the effects this way.

So many things! So much time and so little to do...

[trickfred]

So much time and so little to do...

Strike that. Reverse it. ;D