Dungeon Master Forum

Those icons are just tiny bitmaps, not a long bar. Although you can change the sizes of them, RTC complains of a CRITICAL error if you do and won't compile your file, so it's best to leave them the original size. (Interestingly, you can change their position relative to the inventory screen though!)

yeah, i remember crashing it too. alright, so what is the size from which i can change positions then? i think i tried changing it and it crashed. i'll give it another go and figgit

Hi Linflas, I DLed RTCIP, it won't seem to run on my system. When I run the .exe, an outline of a window pops up momentarily for a split second, and then disappears. No application fully opens. I am running Vista 64bit home. Graphics drivers updated reltively recently for Nvidia. Have tried compatibility mode options but to no avail. Any ideas? Thanks..!

I'd suggest you try re-downloading it first, in case you just got a bad download.

I'm not very familiar with Vista though, I never did like that OS and stuck with XP. I am familiar with Win 7 though, but neither of those will help you much, unfortunately. It is also possible that this just isn't compatible with Vista.

RTCIP didn't work very well originally, so I doubt you'll have much luck on newer machines.

You might need to run a Virtual Machine that can emulate Windows XP, or something like that, as Linflas hasn't updated that tool in years.

Ok, thanks alot guys. I guess it isn't going to happen on my machine... Are RTC co-ordinates the same as DSB co-ordinates?

No.

Here's a post with some info that may help, although it's a bit confusing:
http://dungeon-master.com/forum/viewtop ... =6&t=25931

RTC did not have any documentation: everyone who worked with it had to do tons of experimentation to find out what worked and what didn't. Item positioning is one of those horrible things that just takes hours and hours of trial and error, and with hindsight it's pretty bonkers that any of us put up with it. It's one of the contributing reasons why I switched to DSB

RTCIP isn't upgraded anymore because it's coded with BlitzMax, an extremely outdated language. But it may work better on 7 than Vista, with descent OpenGL drivers.

Thanks both for repsonses. Gambit, many thanks for the link. Whilst I think I understood it, putting it into practice is more tricky..! Did GG ever produce a diagram of the viewport stating where 0,0 is located in the viewport, and which way is positive and negative for each axis? Or is it not as simple as that...? I assume from the 'background.png' included with RTCIP that Linflas you clearly have a good understanding of the co-ords system to be able to make RTCIP.

I did. That background gives you the exact positions in RTC.

Linflas - yes, but I can't run RTCIP...! I can only see the png in photoshop. Could you put a crosshair on the png saying where 0,0 is? Or tell me what the co-ordinates are in photoshop? 0,0 in pshop is top left of the 448x272 image. In RTC is the co-ord origin at the center of the image, ie, at 224,136 if using the pshop coords?

if i remember well, origin is sometimes at (0,0) and sometimes at the center (224,136) ... depends on the tile !

Haha... sometimes 0,0 and sometimes 224,136...? Yikes, sounds tricky.....!

There's no consistent origin in the RTC viewport, Items are placed differently depending on their type.
Wallsets are relative to the viewport
Everything else is relative to the underlying tile or bitmap that the item is placed on.

This page on the Wiki might help:
http://dmwiki.atomas.com/wiki/RTC/Graphics

EDIT: This image might also help:
Each floor tile and wall tile are their own "region" with a central origin point specified by the yellow dot. (Floortiles also have 4 sub-tiles, their centre is shown with the pink dots).
Monsters and items you can pickup are automatically placed on these dots by the engine, using the Y offset specified when you imported the images. That Y offset tells RTC where to draw the bitmap.
Walls and wallitems work in a similar way: a wall has an invisible centre origin point and wallitems are placed relative to that point. Use the X and Y offsets to move a wallitem around that origin point.
Walls themselves are placed from the top/left (0,0) of the screen.
Note: Part of the trick of working with offsets for monsters and flooritems is imagining where the centre placement point of a 2D bitmap should be when projected into the fake 3D space of the game world.

I don't have the time to explain this in more detail, but hopefully you'll start to understand how this all works....?