The joy and the pain of CSBuilding

[T0Mi]

Hi there, dear fellow CSBuilt users.

I thought I'd share a bit of the joy and the pain I have while creating my custom dungeon ("Creatures Strike Back").
The oldhands can lean back and smile, the newbies might learn about what kind of tasks will wait for them, when the dream of building your own dungeon slowly, very slowly becomes true with CSBuilt.

A little introduction:
CSBwin is (beside DSB) the most powerful clone when it comes to customizing your dungeon. This is a wonder of its own, because CSBwin is based on the original disassembly of the Atari ST source code. So it is all original and still you could create almost anything your mind can imagaine using Pauls Design Specific Actuators ("DSA" for short). However, there are limitations when it comes to custom graphics and sounds. The resolution will always be limited to 16 colors (except overlays) and a 320x200 resolution.

Still: Graphics are nothing without design and design alone can go well along without up-to-date graphics.

Working with CSBuilt is far from the easy point-and-click you're maybe used to.
It's a task of it's own to get a standard-options-only dungeon to work. Adding wallsets and alternate monster graphics is torture and to master coding your own DSA you'll either need the patience of a lifetime or the mind of genius. (Having both little spare time and an average mind I tried and horribly failed. )

So here here is my little story of trying to add smashable objects (weak walls/wodden barrels/tables) to my dungeon.

This is what I did first:
- Trap a monster between teleporters, so it could not move.
- Place a pressure plate underneath the monster.
- Place a visible trick wall at the same square, which is the target of the plate.
- Adding a custom wallset (the barrels) from Conflux (wallset #30).

Result:
As soon as the trapped-inside-a-wall monster dies, the barrel dissapears in a cloud of smoke.

Time to enter happy mode.

It then looks like the player is smashing the barrel until it is destroyed. The items carried by the monster drop to the floor and it seems as if these items were inside the barrel. Adding a few branches and it looks quite good. Adding a puddle as decoration can be nice too, it would not even be needed to make the monster drop the decoration (which seems perfectly possible too - see Conflux, Mophus ending, having a boss monster 'dropping' another monster, which again drops monsters and finally a floor decoration which acts as a pressure plate to open a door then. Also see the "Questions" example at pauls place)

Of course the monster (the barrel) is attacking the player.
In my case the barrel is either giggling or screaming at me.

*sigh*
ok, lets have another try with a DSA then.

(and time to go back to the depressed mode again)

In Pauls docu I found that the Monster Attack filter maybe could do what I want:

The parameter [14] set to non-zero should cause a monster to attack with a missle.
When the missle type is set to none, the attack should fizzle, yielding what I want to achieve: a non attacking monster. Also in the custom graphics demo the attack speed of a monster is modified, so it seems quite possible to directly alter that.

I then ended up being truely frustrated from endless crashes/edit/crash again/edit some more/turn on the trace/bow before those who understand this/edit/crash more badly with a blue screen/aso.

Then a (happy) memory from Conflux: the fur trader at 34[16,02] uses a similar mechanism. There is a monster (a grey lord with 1 HP, ha thats clever - he doesn't move, no need for teleporters) trapped inside a visible trick wall (with a custom wallset), preventing the Fur Trader (a giggler) from escaping his shop.

It was right before my eyes and I still could not get it to work.
The grey lord in my dungeon kept attacking (and killing) me.

I asked on the chat and I got that hint to look at the grey lord in ADGE.
There is was, plainly and simple: The grey lords attack speed was set to zero.

No DSAs needed, no ultra clever hex in-editor-tweaking, just a altered value for one of the monsters in the graphics.dat file.

And there it finally was: the chopable, non-giggling barrel.

Time to leave depression behind and go into happy mode again.


All in all, CSBuilt gives me a lot of fun and joy. I even learned to at least kind of enjoy the depression following almost everything new I touch and even for the standard stuff still several tries are needed. But then, when it's there and working, it is just a great feeling.

Of course, there would be a loooong list of things that would make the work with both CSBuilt and (especially) CSBgraphics a lot easier and more comfortable, but the more time I spend with it, the more I like it the way it is. Now please tell me, this is perfectly normal.

I hope you enjoyed your trip. Become happy.

greetings
T0Mi

[ian_scho]

Wow man. I had this same problem in DMJava - how to make a breakable barrel in the dungeon, leaving a puddle of beer. Again, I couldn't turn 'off' the fact that a) the monster 'flipped' it's image b) it attacked you for 1 hp.

All that I can say is after playing around for HOURS that part of the fun is in the process of creation and that the end user will never know how much time you've invested in that simple effect.

I keep myself sane by breaking down these sort of problems into manageable tasks on a list, otherwise you'd never start down this tortuous yet ultimately satisfying path.

Respect!

[beowuuf]

In normal DM, i had a bashable wall that should attack ou back - that was no problem. But i used a vexirk not realising it floated, so when it died the pressure release trigger would never work!

[zoom]

This is very cool, TOMi. Encourages me to start working on a dungeon again (call it masochistic)
Made me think about a different approach to document csbuild/dsa's aso..
you want to have a 0hp monster and how to achieve that in different ways.
Very valuable imho what you wrote!!!

[Trantor]

I haven't done much building in CSBuilt, but I can certainly understand how you feel. In the beginning, even simple things like doors and floorpads proved to be troublesome. I never even touched the more troublesome parts as and/or-things or even DSAs.

When I switched to RTC, it felt like I had te relearn even the basics anew. Relays and Counters seemed very weird. But once you discover a few things and get help by the wonderful people in these forums, you get a feel for everything. Now, items that work only on a certain tile, unlockable spells or the choppable barrel you mention don't scare me anymore, though this is only true for RTC (I guess for DSB you could simply name an empty text file as 'makeitso.lua' and be done with it, but that's beside the point).

[Paul Stevens]

understand this/edit/crash more badly with a blue screen/aso.

If CSBuild/CSBwin actually crash, feel free to
send a bug report. The editor should never
crash. CSBwin should tell you that you made
a mistake (Infinite loops in DSA, for example)
but it should never crash to the operating
system. It should provide a message and
quit. If it quits 'unreasonably', let me know.

[Zyx]

The best way I found to create bashable, blocking decorations is to create an alternate monster graphic (an AMG with the last version of ADGE).
If the decoration is not supposed to move then make it an alternate graphic of grey lord for example. (you need to neutralize its attack capacity by one way or another. I'll check later how I do it with the monster attack filter DSA).
This way, you need no teleporter or pressure pad.
You can even add intermediary states of the bashed decoration using alternate graphics 1 & 2 of the monster.

[T0Mi]

Thank you for your kind words, everyone.
(and sorry for taking so long to reply, I'm just awully busy. I've written the initial post in about 3 hours - spread among 4 weekends. :-/ )

It's good to know most, if not all, have been going through the same thing - both the pain and the joy.
When it comes to the gradient of the learning curve, I guess CSBuilt (for me) has proven (and is proving) to have the most steepest of all the programs I needed to learn for my job or otherwise.
Still climbing up that hill and hoping one day I'll be picking up speed in a more natural way.

Things indeed speed up a bit after turning down own expectations of what the dungeon -could- be like.
So probably there won't be intermediate states of smashable object in my dungeon, I'm happy it could be done without a DSA.

There is more or less one task left that -needs- to be done for my dungeon and that seem to be quite a hard one: inactive/blind monsters that do not attack the player.
But I will master that. It will be my top of the hill. A new top so to say.

greetings
T0Mi


P.S.
about the crashes:
It's not CSBuilt/CSBwin/CSBgraphics crashing... it's my brain.

and: wow, new version of ADGE including editing of the alternate monster graphics? Have to try that!