[Custom dungeon] Conflux II [CSBWin] [Benjamin Prieu (a.k.a Zyx)]

Custom dungeons for CSBWin. Includes all Confux 2 and 3 discussions.

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Zyx
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Post by Zyx »

The "quickest record": I think it is a little too early to start such a competition. No one has even completed the Fiery Cerberus Quest yet!!!
Competition by time is a little unfair for people with few spare time. And how many people would enter such a competition?
Let's wait a little, I would say...
And as Beowuuf said, there are still other secrets to discover/share/compete for...
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Gambit37
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Post by Gambit37 »

I agree -- I still have lots of stuff to explore, some of my maps are basically empty! And I want a fiery cerberus! It has growled at me though, so I wonder if that is relevant...

Also, I like the nice little touches in the game that refer to the organisers. A certain 'chute' and a certain staff spring to mind. Haven't found one for Mr.DMweb though. Or even yourself Master Builder.
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Post by Zyx »

I already quoted or even mirrored a lot of my previous dungeons, I don't need any more personal references!!!
As for Mr. DMweb, I simply didn't find how to refer and didn't want to force it... I'm opened to suggestions :)
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Post by Zyx »

I forgot to say... release II.i is now available.
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beowuuf
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Post by beowuuf »

Fountain with an L beside it?
Fountain L....Fontanel... *runs*
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Post by Guest »

Hmm, why not?

*runs too*
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Des
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Post by Des »

Perhaps people could work some of the references into their Quest of a Legend narratives?.....

"One of the party's worst decisions was to check out PitD's bottom. It was horrible, quite horrible."
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Post by beowuuf »

LMAO

'It was a horrible end...' ?

And out of interest, who apart from Gambit is working on a quest of legend? I'd love to see some
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Post by PicturesInTheDark »

As you already previously mentioned in an email, Beowuuf, eternal fame awaits for being referenced in this dungeon ;o)

Regards, PitD
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Post by beowuuf »

i mock because i'm jealous that mine isn't as obvious : )
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Post by PicturesInTheDark »

The more rewarding once it's found. You might consider a different (second) nickname for reference in future dungeons... :D

Regards, PitD
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Post by beowuuf »

lol, can you have the cerberus called mhutt?
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

I received what I believe is a ConfluxII dungeon and
a playfile.log that causes a runtime engine crash.

I think the crash is due to a Fluxcage that got dropped
down a pit. The engine expected to find it in its original
position and when the cell was found to be empty it
crashed. I believe I can fix this.

But the dungeon is pretty obviously broken. There are
currently 3715 monsters roaming about. And if that were
not enough to make my poor old 166MHz machine slow
down then the 2613 monsters waiting in the queue at the
generator in cell 03(25,24) bring it to a standstill. It takes
over one second per move.

Moreover, there are cloned items in the dungeon.
One of these days I am going to refuse to debug dungeons
with more than zero clones. The Fluxcage problem is
pretty obvious in this particular case. But clones can cause
such terribly intricate problems that they simply are not worth
the effort. In the dungeon I received, there are about 30
cloned objects. In the release g there are many fewer. So
what has happened? I don't know. It appears the runtime
engine has created some of its own. So far nobody has sent
me any complete games with recordings. Hard to reproduce.
Many of the clones seem to be associated with cells containing
portraits.
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Post by beowuuf »

hmm, i know in long games of DM there seemed to be something in the engine that accidentally created cloned tiles and objects..soemthing to do with object generation and numbering?
so it could be this queue of monsters is the reason for the crash. it depends on how long the game has been going on for...conflux really encourages exploration, character building, and baically makes for long games if you try and map everything and sit around training in food areas...i don't know if you should be expected to fix a hard to track original flaw in the engine that conflux just makes more apparent!

the dropping the fluxcage is a 'cheat' for cloning items in the dungeon because of the engine's reaciton to them suddenly appearing, as you said, down a pit... using this dogy trick to create a cloned item then finding the engine crashing shouldn't be a surprise, your code has become harsher than original DM engine to stop strange behaviour the original semi-allowed, sometimes with bad results later
i don't think it's somehting that needs fixed unless it's easy
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

he dropping the fluxcage is a 'cheat' for cloning items
i don't think it's somehting that needs fixed
Well I believe it has to be fixed one way or another.
The best way is to make it work right. Dropping a
Fluxcage should work as well as dropping a Rock. The
alternative is to make the Fluxcage 'float' and not
drop through pits.

What about teleporters????? Do they move Fluxcages, too?
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Post by beowuuf »

i would have to guess they do, since teleporters can move clouds
clouds float so can't be dropped down pits though, right? or is this going to be the same bug opening a pit under a cloud

i'll check later if no one else does
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Post by Antman »

This was my game by the way. I was trying out the duplicating items trick to see if it worked, but i could not get it to. I have had other random crashes about two or three times but i have not been able to reproduce them. As for cloning objects in portraits, exploiting the ghost trick can cause this, you get the items from the first ghost, then click on another portait and click cancel, and then drop his items aswell. Then later when you are not a ghost any more, some of the portraits show the characters having no items because you removed them, and some still have the item you dropped while a ghost, so it has been cloned i am guessing. Maybe you should remove the ghost trick?
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

Antman: Thanks for the tips about the 'Ghost Trick'. I will
look into that. Also, are you saying that the crashes could
not be reproduced by playing back the recording? Usually,
that will work.

The Fluxcage in a Pit problem is very simple once I found
the code that was suppsed to make it work. The Fluxcage
is a Cloud. Clouds have a timer associated with them to cause
the Cloud to 'shimmer' and ultimately disappear. When a
Cloud is moved, the code looks through the timers, locates
the one associated with the Cloud, and changes the location
in the timer. Unfortuately, a Fluxcage has a type 24 timer
and all other Clouds have a type 25 timer. The code only looked
for type 25, so it missed the Fluxcage timer update. Simple to
fix with one additional phrase in the code.
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Post by Antman »

No, the errors should pop up in the playback recording but both times the errors occured i had already saved over the game i had originally loaded from so i couldn't get playback to work without the original save. The very first time, I didn't even realise where the recordings were going, or that they were being made all the time untill my folder got to 100.
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

I have been playing ConfluxII of the purpose of
testing CSBwin and the Record/Playback options
and SpliceCSB program.

I wandered around a long time. I enjoyed just
taking it easy. When I looked at my game I see that
there are over 1000 monsters queued at 03(25,24).
I did nothing to deserve this. I wandered into this area
once and then left for another area. It is slowing my game
down ( a 166 MHz machine ) and it will soon bring the
runtime engine to a crash.

If you really want to create an infinite number of
monsters here then let me know. I can devise a way
to do it that will not cause any problems. But this
simply MUST be fixed. We cannot tolerate an infinite
number of monsters or an infinite number of timers and
this is causing BOTH. Tell me what you need.

On the positive side: The only other problem I found was
in the CSBwin Playback and I have not been able to
locate or fix the problem. Otherwise, the game seems
very solid and nicely balanced. But I have only seen
perhaps one-eighth of the dungeon. And I cheat....I wrote
a program to decode it for CSBuild. My purpose is to test
CSBwin, not to explore uncharted territories.
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Post by Zyx »

Paul,
current version is 0.i. Please confirm you're using it. I thought the 03(25,24) generator was fixed, I'll see it again. There is no need to implement a new function in CSBwin, a correct design should be enough. So I'd better put a better thinking into this generator, that's all.
I can send you the non-encrypted version if you want to make some testing.
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Post by Paul Stevens »

Sorry. I thought I was using the most recent version.
But I have been using 0.g.

No need for unencrypted version. My little program
decrypts it in a few milliseconds. I'd rather use the
version that everyone else uses.


Monsters are queued if they are teleported, drop
through a pit, or are generated onto a cell that contains
the party or another monster. After that the cell is checked
every 5 ticks of the clock for each monster that is in the
queue.

I have added code to CSBwin that counts the number
of monsters queued for a single location in the dungeon.
If the number exceeds five it displays:

Code: Select all

Excessive monsters queued at 03(25,24).
We will begin deleting them without warning.
After the single warning, additional monsters will not
be added to queues of length 5 or more. The warning will
be supressed in Playback mode. If anyone wants to exceed
this limit I can create a DSA that will maintain a count
rather than creating a timer entry for each monster in the
queue. That would raise the limit to 65535.
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Post by beowuuf »

sounds like a good Arrangement, more than five critters queued is probbably quite excessive anyway..and a DSA for diehards seems like it should satisfy everyone : )
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

I have been playing version 0.i. I very quickly
encountered more than five monsters queued at
03(25,24). It looks like Zyx put a limit of 30.
Also, I realize that a limit of five will break the
CSB Worm generator room on level one.

So I have changed my mind. I will set the limit to
31 (the maximum that a single counter can count)
and I will not issue a warning at all. That will simply
be the way the runtime engine works. That number is
still too high in my estimation (because 30 generators
each with 30 queued monsters is 900 monsters) but
it makes life a lot easier for me, removes the ugly
warning, and very likely makes life easier for the
designer.

I still offer to devise a DSA if anyone wants to exceed 31.
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Post by beowuuf »

Ah, i slightly misunderstood how the limit worked, but still, I think the problem with generators is the backlog...for example the 30 limit in CSB stops the generators from generating monsters full stop. But for example the mummy generator only activates when the previous one has stepped off, so there is no backlog, or at worst one
The real problem is when you have 20 monsters walking around generating creatures from multiple pads at one generator, and even if you kill the flood you still have 30 or more creatures queued up which will come off and start generating more critters...i would still think that 5 monsters queued is more than enough - the only unfortunate situation there is if the generator is doing say twenty activations right away then stopping dead, but the first creature hasn't moved...however i don't imagine there are many places this happens in either conflux or csb, is there?

For example, in my dungeon there was a ghost generator that constantly fired every seven seconds until you left the area...i didn't realise that monsters stayed queued, thinking the engine woudl have some cut off so if the pad was filled with monster, there would only be one or two waiting to generate at worst. A queue of 30 still soudns like alot in this case...
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Post by Paul Stevens »

The Black Flames in the DDD area of CSB are another
example. They are triggered by player movement.
But, of course, they never move. So if you visit that
area 50 times there will be 49 Black Flames queued
up. CSBwin version 9.7 will stop adding to the queue
when the number reaches 31.
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Post by Paul Stevens »

I posted ConfluxIITest.rar at
dianneandpaul.net/CSBwin

It has everything needed to play ConfluxII with the
latest version of CSBwin. It is version 9.6Plus4 and
is very likely going to be released as version 9.7
on Windows, Linux, and macintosh. The purpose of
this particular posting is to certify that it works identically
on all three platforms. There is a playfile.log that represents
about five hours of playing time. Not very exciting....I spent
a lot of time kicking rats. But I did discover two problems
while making the recording. Very minor problems with
splicing files and playing them back. Nothing in the
playing of the game itself.

Anyone who is starting a game really should use this
version of CSBwin. There are quite a few changes from
the previous release.
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Post by Antman »

Using the latest version, i sent some time recordings. Incase you don't check the conflux inbox anymore i decided to post here.
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Post by Zyx »

I'm downloading right now the new CSBwin to watch your records, Antman. What do the others think about setting a TIME competition? Are there players willing to participate? If Antman is alone, this won't be much fun :(

Also, ConfluxII lacks a review (though PitD did one but not released). Now that the version seems stable it's time for some feedback from the players about the gameplay and all :)
So I invite every player to review this dungeon. (maybe in another thread because this one is already too long)
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Post by beowuuf »

There seems to be password protection on the newest CSB files...am i missing an obvious bypass?
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