Populating the Level

Right, that's all that tomfoolery out of the way... now we need our start point, trunk port, research and virii hoard...

Buildings first, entities later! Also, understand what Dynamic means, dynamic means that the buliding information is in the mission file, and you only need that if you want your building to DISAPPEAR at some stage, or have a magical status about it that you can change saved (ie, other than team). Nothing else requires this.

Anyway...

Buidlings

Rotate everything! Including control towers. Nothing is more telling or lazyness than having all your control towers facing the same way!

Objectives need to be global! We're using a safe area building as an objective, right? Set it up how it needs to be, I set Size = 300, Capacity = 2, and that it detects Virii. Why 2? They come online when they detect their capacity, not more than or less than (a safe area was used to monitor the number of ants in Yard), and I don't want the player to have to chase around a stray virii up a mountain if that happens, and then set it to global.

Right, what else will we need to make this level work? How about an incubator, and an all important Script Trigger for the introduction. Both these buildings will want to be dynamic, because the incubator has a number of souls variable, which obviously we change, and we don't want the introduction to fire off every time someone enters the level (well, maybe we do, but this tuitorial says we don't!)

For the script trigger, set dynamic, the condition to be always, but ignore the rest.

You may notice this!



This is the effect from the research, and is in a stupid place because the editor sucks.

Enemies

Right, that's all our buildings done! Time for entities, we won't be adding any programs or friendly units to this map, so every thing will be on team 1

Lots of units with a huge spread is no substitute for well placed smaller blocks of units.

Right, we need some Virii for our Virii patch, or it's going to be a very easy objective



Eh voila, some virus. This might not be how the level is going to end up exactly, but it'll let us play it and think 'hmm this needs changing'.