Soaponarope is asking lots of questions again

[Soaponarope]

(Not just RTC related but didn't know where else to post this)

I have a lot of ideas that involve mechanics not normally found in the DM clones and I was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to achieve these if possible and if an editor like DSB would be able to do so better than RTC. Some may not be doable, but I thought I would just throw them out there.

1. Wanted to do some things along the lines of monster infighting/ warring factions. Back in 09 I originally did this in my dungeon, having the knights of order battling the knights of chaos. I scrapped it all, along with friendly summoned monsters because the lack of animations make it look bad. So my question is, is it possible to add in attack animations for back and side views so monsters can properly attack each other without facing you?

2. Want to allow dialogue options. I figured this was unlikely when I started on my dungeon, but Trantor, I know you did some things with going to a new screen where you could make a choice and I was curious what you did to achieve this. Others may have done similar things in their dungeons as well, I have only played a couple so far as I was waiting until I finished mine first.

3. I want characters to be able to join and leave the party without the use of mirrors.(Such as through dialogue after finding a party member in the game as a sprite.)

4. True stealth options. The invisiblity spell doesn't work well to make you undetectable, and I was thinking along the lines of a skill for high level ninjas that makes monsters completely unaware of them unless they attack or stand right besides them for several seconds. If I could figure out how to do this, I could figure out how to also put in things like pickpocket and backstab.

5. The option to disable standard leveling, so you don't keep gaining levels after killing monsters/making potions unless further mechanics are in place.

[beowuuf]

1. Hmm ,what you want is to fake it with a monster swap temporarily that has a front view that is an attack animation as if from the side. I forget if hit points are preserved between swaps for RTC though.

I do believe you can do monster animations in CSBwin (zyx managed it in conflux) so there too you could fake a monster swap or other replacement animation if the creature was attackign sideways.


2. You can create an 'attack' action dialogue both to open when you click on something (it's a wallitem_action trigger) that can then be used to generate further dialogue options. I know in CSbwin I froze the party and had left/right/back get temporarily be used to select three dialgoue options, where activated floor pads (and instant temeporting back to where you were) then run you through the conversation.

3. Hmm,. briefly looking down, I think it's a case of 'yes using a coding or pseudo-coding language in a dungeon' RTC's triggers are powerful, as are DMJAva's events. However, I find myself saying 'hmm, I could seethis being possible in CSBwin due to the DSA language (other than the party swaps), and hence must be possible in DSB.

4 and 5 would be easy in CSBwin, although I think the fact that monsters would still face you for 4 might not be good. Plus I assume you would want more graphical freedom than CSBwin allows.

[Sophia]

I have a lot of ideas that involve mechanics not normally found in the DM clones and I was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to achieve these if possible and if an editor like DSB would be able to do so better than RTC. Some may not be doable, but I thought I would just throw them out there.

I haven't used RTC in quite some time, so my RTC knowledge is pretty out of date. I'll try to help, but someone who has used it more lately might be more help. Since you asked about DSB, I can speak much more authoritatively about it, of course.

1. Wanted to do some things along the lines of monster infighting/ warring factions. Back in 09 I originally did this in my dungeon, having the knights of order battling the knights of chaos. I scrapped it all, along with friendly summoned monsters because the lack of animations make it look bad. So my question is, is it possible to add in attack animations for back and side views so monsters can properly attack each other without facing you?

Neither engine can really help you much at this point, unfortunately. RTC supports monster factions but as far as I know has no support for attack bitmaps from other directions. Even the DM2 monsters have only front attack bitmaps, and they had attacks from all directions in real DM2, so I'm guessing RTC just doesn't support it. DSB is more flexible when it comes to changing monster bitmaps, and I (or anyone, but it's so low-level it might be easiest if I do it) could hack in support for multiple-direction attacks without huge problems... but DSB has no support for monster factions.

2. Want to allow dialogue options. I figured this was unlikely when I started on my dungeon, but Trantor, I know you did some things with going to a new screen where you could make a choice and I was curious what you did to achieve this. Others may have done similar things in their dungeons as well, I have only played a couple so far as I was waiting until I finished mine first.

RTC has plot screens with clickable buttons and such. They seem pretty flexible but I haven't delved into it. DSB uses Lua scripts to provide the same functionality, with the scripting offering a few added things that wouldn't be possible in RTC: e.g., I think Remy's DSB implementation of pong is still out there somewhere.

3. I want characters to be able to join and leave the party without the use of mirrors.(Such as through dialogue after finding a party member in the game as a sprite.)

There are actions for doing this in RTC. ACTION_ADD_MEMBER_TO_PARTY or something like that. As usual, DSB does the same thing via Lua script.

4. True stealth options. The invisiblity spell doesn't work well to make you undetectable, and I was thinking along the lines of a skill for high level ninjas that makes monsters completely unaware of them unless they attack or stand right besides them for several seconds. If I could figure out how to do this, I could figure out how to also put in things like pickpocket and backstab.

5. The option to disable standard leveling, so you don't keep gaining levels after killing monsters/making potions unless further mechanics are in place.

In RTC, these are hardcoded. You can customize it very little, if at all. It may be possible to edit the number of xp per level in RTC, but I don't know if it is and I don't know how to do it if it is. The DSB answer is getting a bit monotonous, I admit: you can customize these behaviors pretty much however you want, using Lua.

[Sophia]

1. Hmm ,what you want is to fake it with a monster swap temporarily that has a front view that is an attack animation as if from the side. I forget if hit points are preserved between swaps for RTC though.

This won't work because at present in RTC there is no way to specifically target one instance in the dungeon with a swap. Gambit was trying to do the same thing, and couldn't do it. Here is his thread asking for a feature that would make this kind of thing possible:
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... =5&t=28895

[beowuuf]

If you are doing swaps in RTC, these will probably have to be carefully managed set pieces. I had no realised you could not only convert say a monster that stood on a pressure pad. Weird!

[Gambit37]

All good answers above, here's some extra info on a couple of the issues in RTC:

2. Want to allow dialogue options. I figured this was unlikely when I started on my dungeon, but Trantor, I know you did some things with going to a new screen where you could make a choice and I was curious what you did to achieve this. Others may have done similar things in their dungeons as well, I have only played a couple so far as I was waiting until I finished mine first.

Yes, easily doable, check out WALLITEM_INFO_SCREEN if you want to do cutscenes that take over the entire screen. If you want to do stuff within the viewport, using the standard text area, you can try creating custom action menus. Look in the example folder that comes with RTC -- there's an example of a Grey Lord that asks you what you want him to and he opens and closes a door.

3. I want characters to be able to join and leave the party without the use of mirrors.(Such as through dialogue after finding a party member in the game as a sprite.)

Again, easily doable using the action Sophia described. Make the sprite clickable (perhaps it's a pillar that looks like a person) --and the click should activate a cloned relay that fires the ADD_TO_PARTY action. Note that you still need to contain any of these characters in a hidden mirror somewhere. However, since these mirror ACTIONS require CLONED mirrors (because you need a unique item to reference in the action), you'll fall foul of this nasty bug: http://dungeon-master.com/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=27777

[Soaponarope]

Yea, for number 1 swapping would be a ridiculous amount of work as every single monster would have to be made unique.

I knew number 2 was doable in RTC but just didn't know how. The WALLITEM_INFO_SCREEN is one of the few things I never played with. Still not sure how it tells where the clicks are at. I thought about using action menus, but this limits the text to 12 characters and wanted more than just things like "gossip" or "ask about dr(oops out of room ).

For number 3, the actions (add/remove party member to party) I know how to use but I've found them to be very buggy. This only works by using cloned mirrors, and I remember when doing this before the new party member would also start with 1 in all stats for some weird reason. I was wondering if there was a way without using the mirrors at all, but there likely isn't then.

Seems DSB is the way to go for most of this stuff, as I kinda suspected. Thanks for the answers all.

[Gambit37]

The WALLITEM_INFO_SCREEN is one of the few things I never played with. Still not sure how it tells where the clicks are at.

You create buttons by importing bitmaps you've created. The X/Y position you enter when importing the bitmap is where it will be placed on your info screen (with a 40 pixel Y offset to account for the black bars top and bottom of the play area.)

[Soaponarope]

So you place the bitmaps for the buttons in the "side","right", etc. slots and then reposition them over the top of the full screen bitmap?

Here I thought I knew RTC like the back of my hand, and now I feel like a newb again.

[Gambit37]

Side and right? Dunno what you mean. Just import your bitmaps into the Images editor the way you normally do. When you create an Info screen, specify the imported bitmaps under the tabs labelled Button 1-7. Notice that every button can have an associated ACTION.... also, if you're doing interactive cutscenes in this way, make sure the Timeout tab has a Duration of -1 to stop the screen from disappearing after a delay.

[Soaponarope]

Er, okay I'm a totally idiot. I thought you needed to clone it to add new graphics and somehow forgot to open it up and see all these options. I surely thought I checked out everything in the past, but clearly I totally missed this one! When you said something about a timeout tab I knew I was way off...

Yes um, it's quite clear now. Thank you.