Dungeon Master Forum

MOO!

So anyway, I've barely even touched RTC since it's latest release but the introduction of the dungeon editing is very cool!

I think Beowuuf has become absorbed in it.. his emails have come less frequently and seem to have a distracted flavour to them. (wink) Am I right Mr Wuuf?

I wish I had more time to play with it.. I attempted to play a round of CSB but to my dissapointment it only would let me in to the character dungeon... am I missing something? I see people talking about the CSB dungeon..

(Shrug) I'll see it soon enough I suppose..

For all you fantasy lovers I'll let you all in on what I'm working on. The game of my dreams. A wonderfull 3d first person RPG. It will be flavoured with some of the things that made DM great.. it however will not be DM or in that universe so don't expect yet annother clone. I cannot say a whole lot about it but perhaps soon I may be able to release some screen shots.

cheers all

To enter the CSB dungeon, you can first select your characters in the prison if you want and save a game.

But to properly start CSB, start RTC, then use the 'start new adventure' porting utility, and voila...you can port whatever characters you wish into the main CSB dungeon (new CSB ones or old DM ones).

I rememebr trying to create a 3D FP RPG in Dark Basic, but my enthusiasm was greater than my talents or that engine really, and I got bogged down in creating the spell system!

Yeah, the dungeon editing in RTC is pretty cool, if a little fiddly.

I've been party to the format for several months and have slowly been working on building the Kid dungeon. I mapped it by hand from the XGS emulated version. Although it's a small map, there's a really complicated treasure maze which took a while...

Since George made the release public, I've been fiddling a lot more and found that some things aren't as intuitive as I first thought. I've emailed George about them - hopefully he'll consider improving them. Things like CONSTANT_WEIGHT triggers seem to be buggy (they certainly don't work as one would expect) and making pads INACTIVE using another trigger doesn't seem to work. There are other things too, but generally the format is pretty damn good and very stable.

I've also worked out how the creating new bitmaps stuff works. George didn't give me the code for this but I worked it out by hacking the EXE! I've been fiddling about with various graphics for doors etc. By combining certain features and multiple doors on the same tile you can get some really great effects. For example, you can have a door that first has some bars that move from side to side, then the door opens afterwards. There are some extra settings for doors that weren't in DM: open fully to the left, to the right, in quarters, split in the middle and open up and down and also the fade effect for power doors.

I've also been messing around with interface graphics, but some of the current limitations make it difficult to do what I want (there's no way of changing the 50% black overlays for ghosted options).

All the bitmaps and sounds get compiled into the RTC file, so potentially if you were going to change all the graphics for the whole DM dungeon the resulting file could be MBs big...

Anyway, all for now - will report any more stuff as I find it.

moo

So anyway, can you edit the walls yet? that's really all I still care about..

I didn't get to hugely mess around with the editing, but I didn't notice the constant weight being buggy...what instance?
Yes, deactivation is odd...I can't remember which way round, but I rememeber one set of signals (act/deact) didn't work well, while the other (maybe toggle) did. You can actually toggle a torch holder to work/not work...it won't release it's torch if the empty holder is showing, quite a fun idea really for a dispenser.

Personally I got distracted, but I too decided to test out an existing dungeon first, so I've got my original dmuted dungeon layout done, but barely started the first level, which was all I was goign to do to start off with to get the hang of things. Ah well.

I LOVE the sound of the door effects! There is definitely more scope with the flexibility/stability to have huge amounts of background mechanics doing cool things.

Lol, once I get web things finished, I might get back to it : )

I haven't tried messing with walls yet, but the support seems to be there now.

The difficulty is finding out the correct sizes for each of the elements. In theory everything should be double the size of the graphics for the original DM. That bit is fine, but I think some of the positions of graphics are still slightly different from DM which makes things awakward.

I have a Photoshop template somewhere with all the elements in their correct places (taken from an early version of RTC). Assuming this is still correct, once I've experimented with the current version a bit more, I'll send you the file which should help with the cutting up/positioning of elements.

You can have one unique set of wall images per level which opens up some nice possibilities...

Regarding the CONSTANT_WEIGHT thing. I have a floor trigger that should do something when a monster steps OFF the trigger. Regardless of how I set this up (inclduing example code that George sent me), the trigger is activated as soon as the monster steps ON it. This isn't expected or correct behaviour, so I hope George fixes it.

Remember I was part of the Dungeon Master clone project and one of the first people to see RTC. I built my walls first for the DMClone project when George was building the core engine. The walls are set based on the graphics for RTC which is what he used in the first version of NewDM.

in which case they all should be fine if this is true. George on the other hand has been rather hesitant to include wall support from some reason or annother so I'm guessing he's doing them differently.. infact he said as much.