Dungeon Master Forum

After a long session of editing monster parameters in ADGE, I loaded up my graphics.dat to test a monster and got some strange behaviours:

1) The monster side view was distorted 2 tiles away
2) Killing the monster (the hellhound) results in shanks being dropped -- these were also distorted
3) The Champion name area where you see the little damage bar became distorted
4) Trying to pick up a dropped shank as another hellhound moved onto the same tile caused CSBWin to crash

I tried reverting to an earlier version, and made less changes to the monster parameters. I didn't get the graphics distortions but the game crashed when killing the monster.

I would need to do a lot of testing to determine what changes cause these crashes. Before I do, have you any information on that?

Maybe you changed the dimensions of the graphics?
With CSBedit, if you did so, then you needed to edit the file 558 and update manually the new dimensions. I don't know if ADGE update them automaticly.

Way ahead of you -- it's nothing to do with dimensions as they are all correct. I was used to hex editing dimensions using CSBedit, but you don't need to do that with ADGE -- you just edit the graphics.dat directly and can type new dimensions into text fields. Check it out -- it's great!

I tested my monster sizes before changing any of it's attack parameters and it looked perfect.

I think this corruption is related to the fact that several copies of ADGE were running without my knowledge. See the other bug I posted about ADGE not quitting.

Theres a lot of quirks in CSBWin, originating in the atari version, where certain 'dependancies' are not checked in the game, but rather just simply 'counted on'. For instance, I've noticed that all graphics have a width of multiples of 16, as well as most graphic information stored in 558 are all multiples of 16 (or 8 is it? i can't remember... They are halved, so 8 sounds right, since half of 16 is .

Changing the width of an image to a multiple not of 16 may cause alot of things to go haywire.

You say the hellhound gets distorted and seems 'farther' away? This could be a number of things, the monster graphic group could be corrupted (bad load/save method perhaps), or perhaps you simply shrank the monster so much that it is an optical illusion that he is far away! ^^ (Interesting idea eh?)

I'll look into the monster graphic code and do some tests, as well as the monster drop code (You posted another topic on it as well, i'll look into that problem as well, meanwhile I will post a comment there addressing one known issue).

-rain`

By the way, To address these problems easier, instead of just saying "they are distorted", it would be a great help if you could post a screenshot so I can see exactly what is distorted.