Tips and Tricks

So, this is it, the end of the guide. Just a few more bits and pieces you might find useful and thats the end!

Simulating Reinforcements
You can simulate a team receiving reinforcements mid battle through a trunk port quite easily. Simply place an AISpawnPoint at the base of a TrunkPort, and link it to the TrunkPort. Set it up so that, say, 20 Red Darwinians spawn when it activates. Now, when you activate the TrunkPort, it seems like wave after wave of Darwinians come pouring through the gate! Don't forget the SpawnPopulationLock though, or you might overload your level!

Show some Restraint
I know you might be tempted to fill a level with 2000 Darwinians, 2000 Virii, turn the cell size down to 1 and make huge 8-iteration trees, but remember that computers have a finite amount of resources, and doing even one of the things on my list there would be enough to bring many computers to their knees.
Remember, you don't need to use thousands of units to make a good mod.

Lights
Don't go mad using lights - there are better ways to colour your level than using large numbers of extremely coloured lights. Make a new texture file, or modify one of the existing ones.

Replacing Files
It is possible to overwrite almost any file in Darwinia. Textures, sprites, models and sounds can all be replaced if you know the original file name. The game is very flexible in what files it reads too. Just because the original texture was only 64x64 pixels, it doesn't mean your replacement has to be.

Main.dat
The main.dat file is actually just a .rar file. You can open it up and extract everything in there and take a look. Most things in there can be changed in your mod, by creating the relevantly named folder in your mod directly and putting your replacement file in there. You can also put a copy of stats.txt in your mod directly, and change the values for all of the units.

So, that's it. I hope you've found this guide useful. As always, Comments, Suggestions and Criticisms are very welcome. If theres anything else on here that I've forgotten to add, or something you'd like to see on here, let me know and I'll see what I can do!

Special thanks to The_GoldFish and StormChild for providing me with information on stuff I had missed and various updates to the guide - without their help it would probably be out of date forever!

Thanks for reading!

Icepick