Two questions (to start with)

[Snowy_River]

Okay, so my first question is this: What am I missing with the controls in the editor? Given that the editor is used for setting up camera positions, one must be able to rotate the view in the editor, but nothing I do seems to do a thing about that. I can move forward, backward, left, right, up and down, but I cannot turn. It's a little frustrating...

Second question: I have a level with a SafeArea, and I'm sending unit into it. I have defined a primary objective as BuildingOnline for the SafeArea. But, the objective is never completed. I get the right number of units into it, the Objectives screen shows that the right number of units are registering, but the objective is still listed as "Incomplete". I'm at a loss...

Thanks for any assistance...

[Snowy_River]

Okay, I'm on to other questions, too.

I tried to put an enemy engineer in as a test, placing near a friendly control tower. The engineer dutifully went over and started to reprogram the control tower, then the game crashed. So, are enemy engineers a no-no?

[Snowy_River]

Yet more...

I've been trying to figure out how to extract main.dat. I tried searching, but came up with nothing.

It'd be nice to be able to use some of the shape files as static shapes, and the only way I can think to do that is to get access to the shape files which seem to be imbedded in main.dat.

Anyway, thanks, again, in advance, for any help...

[xander]

First, please use the edit button. My first inclination would have been to quote your post, then splice in answers to your questions. However, you split your ideas over three different posts, making that difficult.

As to your questions:

1) To rotate the camera, right-click-and-drag (as I recall).

2) The SafeArea should needs to be marked as global. If it is not global, then the mission objective will never register as completed.

3) It has honestly been too long since I actively modded Darwinia for me to be able to answer that question. However, if an enemy reprogramming a control tower consistently causes crashes, then that is obviously a modding no-no. Remember that everything that anyone knows about modding (aside from a very few people) was learned through trial and error. Basically, if you discover that something doesn't work, you have done the same thing that all the rest of us did. We probably don't know any better than you.

That being said, the source code for Darwinia has been released, so, theoretically, there are people that can get a better idea. I'm just not sure that more than a handful of people have bothered.

4) main.dat is a .rar archive. Open it with any archive utility that can handle .rar files. You may need to change the extension to .rar. If you extract main.dat, a new folder called data/ should be created. Darwinia will read from that folder, and files there will override main.dat. So, be careful making changes.

xander

[Snowy_River]

First, please use the edit button. My first inclination would have been to quote your post, then splice in answers to your questions. However, you split your ideas over three different posts, making that difficult.

Mia culpa. I was in the wrong space to be posting. Flipping back and forth between Darwinia and the forum and having other thoughts occur to me randomly. The "Post A Reply" button was big and easy to see and use. I'll take more care in the future...

As to your questions:

1) To rotate the camera, right-click-and-drag (as I recall).

Thanks. I'll give that a try tomorrow when I'm back in front of my computer!

2) The SafeArea should needs to be marked as global. If it is not global, then the mission objective will never register as completed.

Ah, that's the missing piece. Thank you.

3) It has honestly been too long since I actively modded Darwinia for me to be able to answer that question. However, if an enemy reprogramming a control tower consistently causes crashes, then that is obviously a modding no-no. Remember that everything that anyone knows about modding (aside from a very few people) was learned through trial and error. Basically, if you discover that something doesn't work, you have done the same thing that all the rest of us did. We probably don't know any better than you.

That being said, the source code for Darwinia has been released, so, theoretically, there are people that can get a better idea. I'm just not sure that more than a handful of people have bothered.

Okay. I'll play around with it a little bit more. Maybe it only crashes if an enemy engineer tries to reprogram a control tower that is set as friendly with particular settings. Enemy engineers are referred to in the modding guide, so I was surprised when I was able to crash the game with such a simple use of one. So, we'll see.

As to the process, trial and error I can do. No problem. Just asking the question to see if anyone else had any insights to save me some trouble. As they say, "the best mistakes to learn from are the mistakes made by someone else."

4) main.dat is a .rar archive. Open it with any archive utility that can handle .rar files. You may need to change the extension to .rar. If you extract main.dat, a new folder called data/ should be created. Darwinia will read from that folder, and files there will override main.dat. So, be careful making changes.

xander

Oh, okay, an .rar archive. I tried renaming it .zip and trying to extract it, but that didn't work. So, again, I'll check this out when I get back to my computer tomorrow.

As a final note, I do want to thank you, Xander. We got off to a bumpy start in our interactions here on this forum (in no small part due to my own missteps), but you have been friendly and helpful to me since then. So, again, thank you.

[xander]

3) It has honestly been too long since I actively modded Darwinia for me to be able to answer that question. However, if an enemy reprogramming a control tower consistently causes crashes, then that is obviously a modding no-no. Remember that everything that anyone knows about modding (aside from a very few people) was learned through trial and error. Basically, if you discover that something doesn't work, you have done the same thing that all the rest of us did. We probably don't know any better than you.

That being said, the source code for Darwinia has been released, so, theoretically, there are people that can get a better idea. I'm just not sure that more than a handful of people have bothered.

Okay. I'll play around with it a little bit more. Maybe it only crashes if an enemy engineer tries to reprogram a control tower that is set as friendly with particular settings. Enemy engineers are referred to in the modding guide, so I was surprised when I was able to crash the game with such a simple use of one. So, we'll see.

As to the process, trial and error I can do. No problem. Just asking the question to see if anyone else had any insights to save me some trouble. As they say, "the best mistakes to learn from are the mistakes made by someone else."

Of course, now that I think about it, I do seem to recall a problem with control towers causing crashes (the enemy engineer threw me off). As I recall, control towers need to be global, as well, or they cause crashes (or something like that). That is something else to play with, I think.

xander

[NeatNit]

As a final note, I do want to thank you, Xander.

Ohohoho...

You just keep making mistakes, dontcha?

[Krion112]

This may be a huge bump, however, perhaps his enemy engineer crashed the game because the control tower wasn't linked to anything? I've tested this before, and if a control tower is converted, without being linked, the game crashes.

[xander]

This may be a huge bump, however, perhaps his enemy engineer crashed the game because the control tower wasn't linked to anything? I've tested this before, and if a control tower is converted, without being linked, the game crashes.

Oi! Of course. That is probably the problem. I knew there was a problem with control towers.

xander