Dungeon Master Forum

Hello Paul,

1) Could it be possible to add levels after the 16th, even if DSA won't work there? (CSBuild forbiding to put DSA on those deeper levels would be a fair solution for me right now)

2) could you add darkness and light spells for spell shooters?


Also, Am I right to think that theoretically, a dungeon working on CSBwin (windows and linux) should work for PocketPC without any change in the dungeon design?

Sixty-four levels should be possible. I will try and see what
breaks. Give me a few days before my first report.

Light and dark spells. I will investigate.

PocketPC should theoretically run any dungeon that
CSBwin can run. Also practically.

just another idea...

The footprints graphics have the same characteristics as a floor decoration. Could it be possible to make them available as a floor decoration?
(I tried by hacking the dungeon.dat, but I would need to put the index -1, as the footprints are just before the square drain which is index 0.)

Oh, I just saw the "Peek at location" feature! Nice!

Hmm.. "Peek at location" -- what's that?

When you edit a tile, there is a box: "target of". Right-click on it to see where is located the actuator or teleporter targetting to the current square. Very useful for teleporters from other levels!

Hello, some more requests/ bugs reports:

-could you add a search for a specific decorations (ie: fountain)?

-When you put a text on the wall, the wall should be automaticly cleared of random decoration, since the new feature would display both graphics.

-If I put a monster generator delay to 350, it is saved as 320!

-on open tiles (floor), it is impossible to change the order (pop) of pressure pads.

Four cards added to top-of-heap.

Search for Decoration....painful. Someday.

Monster Generator 350/320. Here is how it works.
This is a 8-bit field and could normally contain numbers
as large as 255. But they cheated a bit. It goes in steps
of one up to 128 then in steps of 64. So it goes:
1,2,3,4,...,127,128,192,256,320,384,....,8192,8256

Pop Pressure Pads.....fixed in next release. Not posted yet.

Random decoration plus Text. If I disallow this you will scream.
You always scream when I make something impossible. And
therefore I will not disallow this combination. But I added
it to the 'Check/Decorations' menu and it will warn you and
I even provided an automatic 'Fix It' so that it is easy to fix
by one click (or Carriage Return). Next release. Not posted yet.

I do not remember where the question/suggestion was
made so I will post the reply here rather than start
a new thread for such a piddling subject. And discard
one of the cards in my pocket.

The question was "Why can't I make the experience
multiplier for a level greater than 15?"

The answer is "Because that is the way it is." There are
four bits in the level description that are used for the
experience multiplier. We could get around this
restriction if it is important. If, for example, Zyx told me
that ConfluxIII ( the 64-level, time-warp, dungeon-to-be )
could not be built without an experience multiplier of 16
then we would have it done by the weekend. We gave up
on forward compatibility a long time ago and this change would
be no worse than many others. Nevertheless, it should not
be undertaken lightly.

I think it was Zyx who asked for this:

Allow Text and Actuators in walls to be reordered.

Why? What are we trying to accomplish here?

This is the problem. I have noticed that the Original code
would look for actuators in a list and it would stop looking
when it came to a non-actuator.

I considered this a bug, introduced to save time looking
through long lists. I changed some of this code but I cannot
guarantee that I changed all the places that did this. Nor can I
guarantee that I will not change some more in the future.

So.....all-in-all, if Actuators do not come first in the list then
I cannot guarantee that the runtime will not treat them differently
in a future version. I can guarantee that future versions will
change in the direction of looking deeper into the lists, not
shallower.

I solved this backward-compatibility problem by having CSBuild
enforce the rule that Actuators come first.

What should we do? Give you a "non-standard" warning and
have you check the "I take responibility" clause? If I knew what
you want to do maybe we can fix it some other way.

"Allow Text and Actuators in walls to be reordered."

Sorry, I don't remember out of my head why I asked for this. I can't find the post either.

But here's my guess: to choose wether you display the text first, then the decoration over it, or on the contrary, the decoration first, then the text. This results in different displays.

Also, displaying a text adds a small wall graphics (in order to erase a line between two bricks). This is very useful for text only, and very bothering with text-and-decoration since it systematicly disfigures the decoration.

I don't think it works that way anyway. When summarizing
the contents of a cell a note is made of the last actuator
graphic and the last text graphic. Then when the wall is
actually displayed, there is no way to know which came
first. It is only known that there is one of each.

I had to add that business with the text for you, if you
recall. It originally only knew about one or the other, not
both. Since this was an addition for you there should be
no harm in your deciding which should be first.

I guess that you want the text drawn first and the decoration
drawn second. Is that correct? Or do we need to be able to
control this ordering by reordering the records themselves in the
list? So that it can be either way. This would be more work
and might break other things as I have pointed out in my
previous post.

I received a complaint a long time ago but I don't know
from whom or where.

DM 01(23,22) should show text if something is on pad and hide it if not. It acts as a toggle when you step off.

I just played down to that point and it works fine for me.
So either I fixed it and forgot or I need more particular
information. For now I am throwing this card away.

Another request that I received:

Allow somehow a character's name to be inserted into
a message displayed at the bottom of the screen. Example:

"TIGGY SAYS LOOK OUT FOR THE PIT."

I guess we need to be able to substitute:
1) The active character (the one with the cursor)
2) The n'th character (0,1,2,3) across the portraits
3) The last character.
4) The character in position (NW, NE, SE, SW)
5) By name. Message would not display if that character
was not alive and in the party.

What else would be useful ?
We would supress the message entirely if
no character meets the criterion.

The text is maintained in 5-bit fields so we will have to
do some fancy encoding to pull this off. Perhaps a string
of three periods can initiate a substitution.
case 1) ...A
case 2) ...B ...C ...D ...E
case 3) ...F
case 4) ...G ...H ...I ...J
case 5) ...K<name>...

Multiple substitutions would be allowed. For example

"...B SAYS LOOK OUT ...D" might result in:

"TIGGY SAYS LOOK OUT HALK"

I'll turn you all into programmers, yet.
Comments anyone? I'll wait a couple of days for feedback.

I like the text name idea, and i think the proposed way of doing it is fine

As for the text/wall thng it seems to me that the states wanted are

a) Text dominates the wall tile it is on
b) Text can be hidden by a wall graphic on the tile it is on
c) Last graphic shows through the text (this might relate to (b) if the text is set to be 'silent' on a wall)

Whether thsoe states are mutually exclusive or would take too much effort to balance and keep some form of compatibility i guess is the question!

Don't you think characters more like @#$% are more usable than numbers or letters? for example if you were to use A then the statement " A.. I think there's a passage here" might turn out like "Halk.. I think theres Halk passage here" or if it all gows awry "Halk.. I think there's halk phalksshalkge here"

I suppose things like *A* or (A) etc could be used if you wanted to keep the ABCD sort of thing..

I'm probably stating the obvious here and I can just shut up now.

At any rate. this sounds like a wonderfull inclusion and makes it more personal within the story line created by characters. As now they call each other by name.

moo

Paul Stevens wrote:I had to add that business with the text for you, if you recall.

I think it was for Gambit. Not that I couldn't take profit of this feature, but I wouldn't have dared ask for it!

The main current problem boils down to this bit of graphic hiding the line betwen the bricks which hides also any decoration.

If you can remove this operation when there are BOTH text and decoration it would solve most of the problems.

For the designers, the text can be formated with empty spaces to give the impression that the text is behind the decoration, if needed.

The best, IMHO, is:

- the text being displayed at last, so you can write on decorations, at distance 0, frontal view.
- the decoration being displayed at last for distance 1, 2 or 3 or sideviews. (because in this case it would be a garbled text graphic that would ignore the real size of the text and would always disfigure the decoration)

Don't you think characters more like @#$% are more usable than numbers or letters

Yes, I do think that but ......

The text is maintained in 5-bit fields so we will have to
do some fancy encoding to pull this off.

We don't have all these options.

The elipsis might be a problem, as you point out. What about
using ".Q." instead of "..."? Not too much chance of that
appearing in a real-life text.

Zyx: Your first suggestion sounds like the simplest solution.
But perhaps comes up short of what is needed.

Your (IMHO) suggestion sounds like it provides what is needed.
But it has the disadvantage of being rather "special-case"
and not obvious to the person who has not learned the rule.
Nevertheless, I think I will give this one a try.


Beowuuf: Your solution requires that the designer make the
decision as to which case should be in effect. This is not
impossible but requires addition to the file format. Such changes
are not to be undertaken lightly. I prefer a runtime-only
solution, if possible.

Zyx: Well, I started implementing your suggestion.
I had a very complicated way of implementing what
I thought you had said. But when I re-read your suggestion
I discovered that you had a very clever solution. This
is a 'virtual' quote:

Only the order of the display needs to be changed

I consider that observation to be extremnely insightful. I am
glad I re-read it. Thank you for your insight.

I posted a new CSB17Levels.rar at
dianneandpaul.net/CSBwin

It has a new CSBuild and a new CSBwin.

There are so many changes I lost track. I put the
release notes in the .rar file because there is
too much to list here. The biggie, of course, is the
64 level capability and level swapping. But lots
of other stuff like the text/walldecoration, command-line
options, DirectSound option, hero name substitution, etc.

I would really like to stop about here and wait for Erik and
Tomas to catch up so we can release a version 9.7. I
don't see anything too critical in my deck of cards. I'll
fix bugs, of course, but let us otherwise pause.

Nice! 64 levels! would be nice to try a 64 levels dungeon; I think I will start one , but Paul, I downloaded your new 17levels pack and I cant load CSBuilt, there its no tiles.bmp file, and if I try to use the tiles file from CSBuilt775, it issues a Fatal Error: "tiles.bmp Height is not a multiple of &d" ; am I doing something wrong here?

Regards.

Version 0.775. Oh, my. Keep that a few more weeks
and it might be valuable on eBay. Talk about ancient.

I added a tiles.BMP to the RAR file. I probably should try
to remember to do that.

Keep that a few more weeks
and it might be valuable on eBay.

LOL!! Thanks Paul!, but, I really was used to the alternate tiles file in 0.775 (it looks so cool when editing ) I was trying to recreate it superimposing the alternate tiles layer to the new tiles.bmp using photoshop, but when I save, I cant load it on CSBuilt (and Im making sureit have the same file size) I wonder how this tiles file work where I can read more about the matter? (sorry guys for my intromission in this thread)

Did you try the one that came with the 1.0 version?
You can get it at dmweb.free.fr (downloads)

Once again, thanks Paul! it worked like a dream; now I just need to do 60 levels more

Please be careful. The 64-level feature is very much
untested. Zyx reported a crash that I have fixed but
will not post until later this evening or tomorrow. And there
are probably going to be more. So keep backups and
be suspicious.

Hi Paul, I don't mean to push, but I was wondering if you're still considering implementing the light/darkness shooter and the footprints floor decoration ideas, and if you have an approximation of a possible ETA.

Sorry. I am very busy trying to make a version 9.7 release.

I have a card for the 'light'dark' shooter and have moved it to
the front of the stack. Just exactly what are these supposed to do?
The 'Light' could do the same as a spell cast by the party, I suppose.
What power? The 'Dark' could do the same with negative effect but
what should happen if the result is negative? How fast do you want the
effects to go away?

I don't even remember talking about the footprints. Are their graphics
numbers in the same group as the other floor graphics? If not, they will
have to be a very special case.

Thank you. The effects should be exactly the same as when cast by the party: there are two light spells and one darkness spell.
Negative results should be handled as with the darkness spell.
So, to simplify, I would just need the shooter to make a call to the corresponding spell functions.


For the footprints: I think it is not in the group of floor decorations. But now that I'm thinking of it, it must be in the "cloud" group since it's a spell.

Is it possible for a cloud to be permanent? In this case it would be enough for CSBuild to allow to put clouds in the dungeon, with their duration editable.

Otherwise a shooter for the footprints would be enough.