Various modding questions

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daset
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Various modding questions

Postby daset » Tue Oct 04, 2005 3:57 am

I couldn't find any of these in the search so here they are

1) How can you use, for example, the darwiniandeath sound for squaddeath sound short of doing massive copy-pasting of sounds? I looked through nihilesthetics sound modding but was completely lost.

2) Is there any way to make an AI Spawnpoint begin spawning after a certain number of seconds instead of instantly? The Spawnpoint has the value "Next spawn in: 0 seconds" but it is not editable.

3) Is it possible to make a preexisting squad have, say the rocket weapon preselected beforegame. Prexisting squads seem to not be able to change weapons. Or is it just me?

4) What is the limit on centipede size?

5) In each mission file there is a variable for each unit: waypoint X,Z or something. I tried these out and it seems that armor seems to follow these on the map maybe??? it only works 10% of the time. Does it work or is this just a fluke?

6) Why is it that the waves will occaisionally pop up in a long strip going away from an island where there are no islands nearby? It's very unnatural looking.

7) Why is it that the faster a centipede goes, the more it tends to go in circles?

8) Is it possible in any way to put marker lights where there are none required, or is it only for the buildings that have it hardcoded?

9) Are invaders invincible? They sure seem to be…

10) Is it possible to edit the starting HP of anthills/triffids?

11) Is there any way to make units on team -1? Souls can be so why not units…

12) Can you have units created by a scriptrigger?

13) Do squads only fight on teams 0 and 2 and if not how do you do it?

14) Is there any way to create a tank unit. I changed the name "Darwinian" to "Tank" in the mission file and the unit group disappeared.

Whew. I think that's about it.
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Re: Various modding questions

Postby xander » Tue Oct 04, 2005 3:17 pm

I will answer the ones I know about, and leave the rest for someone else:

daset wrote:2) Is there any way to make an AI Spawnpoint begin spawning after a certain number of seconds instead of instantly? The Spawnpoint has the value "Next spawn in: 0 seconds" but it is not editable.

No. However, you could link the AISpawnPoint to some other
building, and have some way of triggering that building after a certain amount of time. TGF did something similar in Stricken Souls -- he created an AISpawnPoint that created virii. When a SafeArea for these virii was full, the timer went off. For bonus points, he put the virii on player team (I believe), which makes them invisible. You might try triggering the AISpawnPoint in such a manner if the timing is that important.

daset wrote:3) Is it possible to make a preexisting squad have, say the rocket weapon preselected beforegame. Prexisting squads seem to not be able to change weapons. Or is it just me?

Pre-existing squads cannot, as far as I know, switch weapons. However, I believe that if you send such a squad through a radar beam, the weapon will become changable (and the squad will take a place in the task manager). Again, I believe this is the technique that TGF used in Stricken Souls.

daset wrote:4) What is the limit on centipede size?

I do not believe that there is a strict limit, though if you make it too large, the game is likely to stutter to a halt. I have never created one with more than 50 units (and remember to check the 'In Unit' flag).

daset wrote:5) In each mission file there is a variable for each unit: waypoint X,Z or something. I tried these out and it seems that armor seems to follow these on the map maybe??? it only works 10% of the time. Does it work or is this just a fluke?

This sets officer orders, in conjunction with the 'State' flag. For an Officer, state = 1 is a goto order, and the waypoint is the target of the goto order. I have not tried it with Armour, though I would imagine that it would be similar.

daset wrote:7) Why is it that the faster a centipede goes, the more it tends to go in circles?

Hrm... I have never noticed this. Is it possible that it only looks like it is going faster?

daset wrote:8) Is it possible in any way to put marker lights where there are none required, or is it only for the buildings that have it hardcoded?

Have you experimented with this at all? You cannot, to my knowledge, put marker lights on a static shape -- the shapes are STATIC. However, it should be possible to move marker lights on buildings that already have them, and it may be possible to add more, or get rid of a few. I doubt that you could use lights on buildings that don't have them in the first place, but this is a situation where you could experiment a bit and report back to the rest of us.

daset wrote:9) Are invaders invincible? They sure seem to be…

No, they are just very hard to hit. I have had Invaders bite the dust in Temple, and in a few levels of my own creation. You can change their stats (and the stats of any other unit) in the file 'stats.txt'.

daset wrote:10) Is it possible to edit the starting HP of anthills/triffids?

Not that I know of, though I may be wrong on this one.

daset wrote:11) Is there any way to make units on team -1? Souls can be so why not units…

Open up the mission file for whatever mission you are working on, and change the team. However, I am not sure what good it would do you to have units on team -1...

daset wrote:12) Can you have units created by a scriptrigger?

Not that I know of. The only way that I can think of would be to link an AISpawnPoint to a script trigger, but this would create a stream of units, rather than just one.

daset wrote:13) Do squads only fight on teams 0 and 2 and if not how do you do it?

As far as I know, Squads will only fight for team 2 (the player controlled team). However, (again) experimentation if your friend. This seems like the kind of question that you could answer yourself by trying a few things. As I recall, there was a bug where Squads on team 0 would cause the game to crash on exit, though that may have been fixed (it could be used to distinguish between 1.0/1.1 and 1.2; it may have been fixed in 1.3).

daset wrote:14) Is there any way to create a tank unit. I changed the name "Darwinian" to "Tank" in the mission file and the unit group disappeared.

Tank? Are you refering to Armour? You cannot create any kind of unit that is not in the game. There are no units called 'Tanks' in the game, thus you cannot create them. However, if you are trying to create Armour using an AISpawnPoint, you might try telling the AISpawnPoint to create Armour in the mission/map file. Again, try experimenting with it.

...

Having read through your post, and my responses, I get the impression that you have not yet had the opportunity to play around much with the files that are created by the editor. If you seriously want to mod the game, you are going to need more than just the map editor. As it stands, there is no way to create mission objectives with the editor (for instance). When you create a mod, new files are created in your mod directory. If your mod is named 'War', for example, there will be a folder in 'mods/' called 'War/'. In that folder, there are several files and folders that control game flow. 'game.txt' and the 'level/' files are perhaps the most important. I would suggest extracting 'main.dat' to see what IV has done, then experimenting a bit with your own mod.

xander
Last edited by xander on Tue Oct 04, 2005 6:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Tortanick » Tue Oct 04, 2005 5:33 pm

in beta there was a tank unit, and a an artilliry I think, I don't think there was a way to get it in your mod though.

any beta guys know how it was done? maby if we downloaded the file you used?
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Postby xander » Tue Oct 04, 2005 6:28 pm

Tortanick wrote:in beta there was a tank unit, and a an artilliry I think, I don't think there was a way to get it in your mod though.

any beta guys know how it was done? maby if we downloaded the file you used?


Again, AISpawnPoints can produce nearly all of the units in the final game. My guess is that it will cause the game to crash if you attempt to produce centipedes (because the 'In Unit' flag will not be set), or if you try to produce units that are not fully functional (landers, laser troopers, &c.). Tanks were taken out before I was a part of the beta, and were probably not part of the demo (phase 1) beta anyway. However, my guess is that you could not get them to work in the game, either. It would require that they be hard coded (like all of the other units) into the game, and they do not seem to be. You could alter some shape (say that of Armour) to look more like a tank, but it would still behave like Armour, rather than mechanized infantry or some such.

Furthermore, the files from the beta (esp phase 2) are covered by an NDA, and will only work on one specific computer with a specific configuration (I couldn't play the beta anymore after upgrading from OS 10.3.7 to 10.3.8).

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Postby nihilisthetics » Tue Oct 04, 2005 10:29 pm

Other people have mentioned that. In retrospect it could have been clearer. Ive rewritten the first few paragraphs on the sounds file tutorial. Hosting is playing up so you cant see the tut at the moment, but here is an excerpt

At the most simple level, the sounds file tells the game what sound to play when something happens. Here Im only talking about the three main values you need to worry about : the object, the event and the soundname. The object can be an entity, eg a Darwinian, or a Building, eg a Radardish. There are other object types, some of which arent really objects, but dont worry about that for now. Events are like states of an object. For example if a Darwinian dies, a death event occurs to a Darwinian object. Similarly, if a Darwinian is created, a creation event has occured to a Darwinian object. Finally there is the soundname. This is the name of the sound that is played when the event is true for an object. As an example, take a look at this excerpt from the sounds file

Code: Select all

ENTITY Engineer   
       EVENT Die                 
               SOUNDNAME engineerdie

So whats happening here? Well every time an engineer dies, the game will play the engineerdie sound.

If you want to change the sound that is played for a particular event, simply change the soundname parameter. As explained later the sound can be either an actual sounds file, or can be a group of sound files.

Hope this is a bit clearer.

Edit : With regard to marker lights, the trick is to choose a shape with marker lights that you wont be using and make it invisible by removing all the triangles from the shape file. You then put the invisible shape at the same coordinates as your static shape, play about a bit with the light positioning and you have a static shape apparently with marker lights. To see what shapes have market lights look at Cybers markers doc

http://www.cyberdyne.homecall.co.uk/markers.rar

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Postby daset » Fri Oct 07, 2005 1:16 am

Sorry about the n00b posts, but last time it crashed i lost one of the levels I was working on so now Im a bit more cautious

Thnx for the help but the sounds still aren't working. Here's the code.

Code: Select all

ENTITY Squadie
   EVENT Create             
      SOUNDNAME          darwiniancreate


I completely copied the code of darwiniancreate onto squadiecreate but still nothing. What's wrong?
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Postby Hankyaku » Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:29 pm

Hi!

I tried Darwinia, and it's a good game in many ways. But in my point of view it's much more. Or it can be much more if used well.

I'm working in a research group, where once one of the guys came up with an idea of modelling social interactions based on proximity. He used simple algorythms to make this simulation.

While I was playing Darwinia I was just thinking on things like this, and I was wondering if those little green men would do else than just walking around and operating buildings...

So my question is: will there be anything available to program the Darwinians themselves? I'd gladly even edit the Darwinians. Give them new properties, to make them change themselves, change their behaviour, set themselves on different tasks. Basically work like a small society.
The most simple solution is a simple scripting language which has been used during the developement, but since my brain is hard-wired in C, I'd gladly edit my little Darwinian society in C, or C++.

I hope U guys will help me make this game more like a real virtual world for my own. You've created the "earth", the "sky", the "plants", and the rest. Let us create the society.

Bye!
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Postby xander » Fri Oct 07, 2005 3:51 pm

Hankyaku wrote:--==<snip>==--


Well, changing the behaviour of DGs would require changing the source code of Darwinia. I doubt that the DG AI (or any of the other AIs in the game, for that matter) are seperate enough from the game engine to be scripted. So, short answer: no.

Long answer: if the development of Darwinia progresses anything like the development of Uplink, IV will release as source CD in a couple of years (after the game takes on its final form, and sales have been sufficently slack for a while, would be my guess). Once the source CD is released (if it is released), you will be able to do anything you want to the game, assuming you have some knowledge of C, and are able to decode Chris' code. Again, though, it will likely be several years before a source CD is released.

xander

EDIT: typo
Last edited by xander on Fri Oct 07, 2005 4:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby NeoThermic » Fri Oct 07, 2005 4:57 pm

xander wrote: and are able to decode Chris' code.


From what my eyes and ears have seen/heard, the source to Darwinia is far cleaner than Uplink's :)

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Postby nihilisthetics » Fri Oct 07, 2005 7:55 pm

Where is your sounds.txt file? I think sounds.txt still cant be in your mod folder. Its one of the few files that has to be in <darwinia_root>/data/ folder. Try creating a data folder in your Darwinia root folder and moving the sounds file there. Note that you can put your sounds folder in the mod folder, but not the sounds.txt file. They may have fixed this in one of the patches, so make sure you have the latest patch applied.

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Postby daset » Fri Oct 07, 2005 10:35 pm

Uh, still not working.

I placed sounds.txt in the Darwinia folder but still nothing on any mods.

I don't have the 1.3.3 patch because it's not out for mac.

What do I do?
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Postby xander » Fri Oct 07, 2005 10:45 pm

daset wrote:Uh, still not working.

I placed sounds.txt in the Darwinia folder but still nothing on any mods.

I don't have the 1.3.3 patch because it's not out for mac.

What do I do?


Ah! You are on a Mac. That makes a world of difference. The data for the game is contained in the application package. Right-click (or control-click) on Darwinia.app . A contextual menu should appear. Click on "Show Package Contents". A new window should pop up, with one folder (Contents) and three data files (langage.dat, main.dat, and sounds.dat)*. In this new window, create a new folder called 'data' and put your sounds in there. That should work. If it does not, change 'sounds.dat' to 'sounds.rar' and use UnRarX to extract it. This should create a folder called data, and sub-folders that contain important sound stuff. Replace the appropriate files**.

xander

* The three data files are all, in reality, .rar files, and you could have fun by extracting them and playing around with Darwinia.
** When you replace files, make sure you have a backup, because you could easily break Darwina. For a long time, I had two copies of the application package on my computer -- on for messing with, the other for playing. That became unnecessary for me after 1.2 came out, as strings_default.txt was made to work properly, but it sounds like this may be the solution for you.
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Postby nihilisthetics » Fri Oct 07, 2005 10:49 pm

The sounds.txt file doesnt go in the darwinia folder, it goes in a folder 'data' within your Darwinia folder. This folder isnt there by default so you will have to create it. So it would be something like c:\program files\darwinia\data\sounds.txt ( or whatever the mac equivalent is ). If that doesnt work, send me your email address to mail@nihilesthetics.info and we will get it working.

Edit : Oops, I just pulled off Xanders favourite trick there :)

Edit : Ive incorporated all this this in the tutorial now, and pasted in Xanders Mac tips. Hope you dont mind :)

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