Dungeon Master Forum

A few things I was wondering about after converting my CSBWin dungeon to RTC...

In CSBWin you can set characters' luck value, but not in RTC - do they all get a flat 50?

Is RTC twice as "fast" as CSBWin? I found I had to roughly double delay times for "running" puzzles.

Damage modification? I've been testing with a super character with ArchMaster everyting. For guaging difficulty you do of course need to run through with a "real" party, but initially it's much easier to use a teleported in guy to test individual parts. Some of the damages done by the monsters were much higher than in CSBWin - is this because of the level of the character? If so would I get more realistic damages if he was low level but still with load of hit points?

Monster AI. The monsters in RTC are much faster and also seem to be more aggressive. This is mostly a good thing though sometimes you don't want the monsters to all rush up and attack at once. Can you make them hold back a bit by making a more fearful clone? Or perhaps penning them in with teleporters until the party reach a certain "release point" is a better bet?

I've sussed the speed / delay thing - the DMute conversion process halved all the delay numbers.

Oh and I just managed to get RTC to crash (no error message or diag) when activating a cyclic chain of teleporters. I'm about to try to fix it - probably just due to the differences in how triggers and teleporters work in the two engines.

Umm, a cyclic chain of teleporters would crash btoh engines, so really it must be something wrong with a trigger conversion...maybe CSBwin had a delay in actuators, but RTC has no delay (hence infinite loop, all resources taken, crash city)

I think that's it. A monster is generated and steps on a pad causing the telporters to activate, each with a delay. When the monster steps off the pad or is killed by a fireball generator, all the teleporters stop so the object stays where it is. Under CSBWin it worked though I guess may well have been eating CPU as once the object is sent back to the first teleporter, all are on so there is no delay other than the engine's intrinsic queueing mechanism. It looks like RTC goes into a fatal loop at this point, and testing shows that this is when it crashes. I think I can fix it using relays.

Going back to my question about making monsters hang back a bit in certain parts of the dungeon - I guess reducing their "view range" on the stats tab might do the trick?

I was also going to ask about experience modifiers but a search revealed an old thread in which George stated that RTC's experience algorithm is a dark secret..

Anyone know the answer to the luck question?

ALthough the algorith for XP is a secret, I for one would like a few more pointers on HSM gain when leveling the different classes FNPW

I'm trying to generate "accurate" characters of different experience levels, the 6 main stats is no probs there progression is pretty linear and also documented, but HSM progression fluctuats and even with lots of testing my numbers are "kookie" any help here would be coll as chimps