General Introduction and Assistance

Kablizzy · Post by **Kablizzy** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:58 am

Hey hey to all.

First of all, I'm Kablizzy. Nice to meet everyone. Secondly, I am in love with this game. I played Dungeon Master, way back when, for the SNES, and I loved it. I remember playing with my dad when I was little, and we would map out the levels on graphing paper, and we would try different combinations of spells in succession, and try to figure out what each one did. Now that he's passed away, I wish he were around to see this.

So, a couple questions. I'm very interested in doing up my own campaign, I suppose you'd call it, but the editor is a tad overwhelming. A lot of it is intuitive, but if there were tutorials or guides out there that can explain some of the functions in-depth, that'd be great. If not, any resources at all that ya'll could provide would be awesome. I've looked around the forums and the site a bit, and haven't really found anything too overly significant. The editor manual and the ReadMe didn't shed much light on the subject, either.

In addition, what would it take to make some custom tilesets, objects, and so on for the game? I've been fiddling around with the game for a couple days, off and on, and I wanted to start with a couple of my own characters, but images that I throw down don't seem to do anything. Need I mess with the .dat file? If there's a place where more obscure questions could be answered, that'd be groovy.

There are some specifics, like some more in-depth info how errors are handled and how to correct them properly, and some other stuff, but I'll leave things at that for now. Thanks kindly!

~Blizz

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:24 am

Welcome to the forums!

First confusion - which editor are you talking about! There are a few clones now, which is good, but means we don't actually know which version you need help with!

ADGE is a good tool to use to rip the original graphics fro mthe original graphics.dat of the game - if you are using CSBwin, then you can use it to put them back, if you are using RTC or DMJava then you can use these graphics as the basic to import into these engines - you just need to use a different background colour for transparency, resize as appropriate, and for RTC watch out for offsets when importing (but that's an editor thing you sound like you need help with f it's RTC)

Basically, RTC, DMJava and CSBwin have their own forums, RTC even havign a forum for editing specifically. For original DM, and for the ADGE tool, the tools forum answers tool questions and can have hex editing/DMute tricks there.

Occasionally the creative forum has graphics turnign up too

Hopefully can help you better when we know what you are using!

Welcome again!

Kablizzy · Post by **Kablizzy** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:38 am

Oh, for sure. Just using RTCEditor.exe, but if there are others that are easier to work with, I might want to pick those up. So long as they all produce the same result, mm?

So, beyond that, sounds as though I just need to find all of these other tools.

Insofar as graphics editing, is it generally done manually? In paint? And can better-quality images than that of those in the game be uploaded/integrated? For instance, if I had an avatar fitting the dimensions, but of much higher quality image resolution, would that work for uploading?

Adamo · Post by **Adamo** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:59 am

hello Kablizzy & welcome to forums!

If you`re using RTC, the best way for you would be taking a look at original DM/CSB dungeons via RTC editor to get know the puzzles and how do they work. You can also play some custom dungeons -there are lot of them for RTC.

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 10:05 am

Hi there,

For the RTC editor, all you need to do is remember that before you can use a resource (bitmap, sound etc) you must first load it. For example, if you want to use your new portrait for a character, then just do the following:

- Start the editor
- Load up a dungeon (e.g. lets use the DM.txt dungeon as an example)
- Go to the "Resources" menu and select add "Graphics"
- Then click on the "Add new bitmap" option
- Then the "..." to select the bitmap
- Then OK to give the bitmap a "Unique Identifier" so that the rest of the RTC engine knows where to find it.

At this point the bitmap is loaded and you can start using it.

- Go to the "Resources" menu again and select "New Characters"
- Select one of the existing characters (in DM they're all in mirrors to start with, so go to that tab to find them).
- Then click on "Edit" to edit the character.
- Then click on "Bitmaps / Mirror" to change the mirror bitmap
- Finally select your new resource from the list given and click OK lots until you close all the windows.
- Save the dungeon as DM_test.txt
- Exit the editor

At this point your new graphic is being used for one of the mirror characters. Now all we have to do is run it.

- Edit the config.txt file to include the line "COMPILE<tab>Modules\DM_test.txt" (without the quotes and using a tab instead of <tab>).
- Start up RTC
- Play!

Once you get into the swing of it, you can do all of the above very quickly. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! There are lots of people who will be more than willing to help you out.

Post by **Gambit37** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:24 am

Hi Kablizzy and welcome. I'll move this thread to the RTC forum. Let us know when you've seen this message so that you know it's moved, as often new members aren't aware that posts get moved about.

Post by **Ameena** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 6:02 pm

Heya Kabby - youir name reminds me of someone I used to know on EQ. Hence my calling oyu Kabby. Umm...anyway, yeah, welcome and all that. Hope you have fun with the editor and can put something cool together which we can all go and die loads in

. And obviously just ask if you need help with anything - someone will be sure to help you. And the rest of us will just laugh about it and be scary and make jokes and stuff

.