General enquiries about future RTC development

[Gambit37]

Hi George. I just wanted to say a big thank-you for the many recent versions of RTC you've put out. After a long wait of over a year, I thought it had died -- how wrong I was!

I haven't lost the desire to produce a really good scenario for RTC. I already have a fair bit of stuff prepared. However, there's a few key things that I would really love to see to add atmosphere that currently isn't possible:

Ambient / Background / Multiple Monster sounds
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=20202
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=23488
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=23465

Breakable wall items
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=23394

Custom options for pillar objects
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=21000
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=23478

Doors with min/max opening
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=23299
(Kind of touched on in this thread, but in fact I think a 'min' and 'max' would work better.)

Experience gained on actuators
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=23395

Changing all the interface elements including fonts
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=24193
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=24157
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=24190

I know it's a lot to ask, but could you possibly give us an idea if any of this stuff would ever be implemented? I'm currently rationalising my time for the projects I want to work on and am ditching a few things because I know I will never get them done. But a really cool RTC adventure is one I don't want to ignore...

[George Gilbert]

Briefly:

- Sounds; probably.
- Breakable wall items; probably not (very hard to do in a generic way)
- Breakable pillars; can already be done by cloning a static monster and having it "drop" rubble when it dies
- half pillars; probably
- auto-scale of floor bitmaps; probably not in the main engine, but possibly an option in the editor
- half door states; probably not (actually quite tricky in the RTC engine!)
- experience triggers; possibly but need to decide on a format for their strength (probably a % of current XP - e.g. a strength of 100 means gain 1 level) and get over the fact that this feels very un-DM.
- fonts; possible, but this is will be very time consuming and therefore at the expense of any other enhancements
- other interface elements; probably, but again quite time consuming
- substitution of character names into strings; probably.

I think that's everything, please let me know if I've missed anything in the above posts!

[Gambit37]

Thanks for the input -- good to know some of this might be implemented.

A quick point about fonts -- why is that so time consuming? Surely all you need to do is offer the replace bitmap facility for them and to publish the dimensions and the order they are arranged on the bitmap? It would be down to the designer to ensure all the letters are in the right place. That's all I'm talking about, nothing more complex.