CSBuilder

[Paul Stevens]

I have been working for 18 days on a program to edit CSB
dungeons. The result is at:

webpages.charter.net/pstevens1 CSBuilder.rar

It is about 15 percent complete. There is a 'progress.txt' file
that summarizes my progress.

It works well enough for me to edit a dungeon, add a falsewall
and pressurepad that controls the falsewall. I can walk through
the dungeon and it works. Pretty exciting (for me).

I will put a new version there every couple of days just so
that anyone who is interested can keep track of my progress.
You are welcome to send bug reports for those things that
are advertised as 100 percent complete. You are welcome
to send suggestions about anything, including the list of
items in the progress.txt file. You are welcome to suggest
priorities for items to be completed. And you are welcome
to ignore the whole thing until version 1.0 is released....right
now there is only frustration to be had....the thing does not
yet deserve a version number.

PAul
prsteven@facstaff.wisc.edu

[PaulH]

I downloaded your editor and had success in removing the 'imaginary' wall in the first worm room (that leads to the armour) in the dungeon. However when I tried to add an imaginary wall (I call these 'false' walls) nothing happened. The tile remained the same, a piece of floor. It looks as if you have got the same icon for both these types of wall unless I am mistaken, and for the state of the toggle-able wall in both states.

I shall have another look, my eyes at this time of night are prone to deceiving me.

What I will say is that this looks like it will be a very powerful editor once complete, I just have to retrain my mind to the new functions and look as it is permanently set in DMute mode.

[Paul Stevens]

There is only one kind of False Wall. That is the way the
game is written and I saw no reason to split it into
two. There are two flags associated with the
wall. Fiddle with them and you will probably see the effect
you desire. The two flags are not totally orthogonal. Setting
one of the flags makes the other superfluous. The missing
combination is the one where no wall is visible but you hurt
your nose when you hit it. I don't like unused combinations
and perhaps we should add that to the engine.... but I fear
that I may start another Holy War.
(Right-click on the tile in the map. The flags
have self-explanatory labels.)
***********
The reason I am doing this is that you cannot get anywhere
with DMute. George can be rightly proud of it but he is not
maintaining it and will not release the source.
CSBuild will allow anything the engine can handle.
And with 'intuitive' interface (intuitive for me, that is. Your
mileage may vary). At least there will be no HEX. And it
will be maintained unless I kick the bucket. And the source
will be made available when version 1.0 is released.

[Sphenx]

I think this editor would be the better than DMute or mine (if even finished one day). I know you design it like you want now, but I would like to talk a little about graphics displaying. Not only with you, but with regular users of editors here.

In DMute, you mainly have texts for naming any objects in dungeon. In my editor, I rather chose to have only graphics, and I display them in the map view.

For example, you can directly see monsters on the map rather than just a red spot, you can see the floor decorations when there are some, in some test versions, I also displayed alcoves, wall fountains.. I also find nice to have tile graphics close to those that are displayed by magic maps.

Can't you think you could do that in your editor?

What do others think of that? How do you see the editor of your dream?
Send suggestions if you want.

[Gambit37]

I get errors when trying to unpack this RAR: "No such file" or "nothing to extract" or "unknown method". First time I've seen errors like this with RAR--I think there's summat wrong with the archive. Can you post it again?

[ChristopheF]

The archive is fine for me. You may have had an error while downloading it.

[Paul Stevens]

One person said that the latest version of RAR fixed such a problem.

[Paul Stevens]

To Sphenx:

First things first.......It has to be functional before I will consider
any of this (what I consider to be) eyecandy. And that will be
quite a long time. Probably several months. And the reason I
am writing this editor is to allow me to design a dungeon. I am
rather anxious to begin. So it is not likely that I will addd
extraneous features for a very, very, very long time. When
I an building a dungeon I have no need to see little pictures
because I already know what everything looks like. And the
dungeon design will likely take over a year.

One thing that I think might be useful is a 'popup' to the side
showing the contents of the cell over which the cursor is
placed. But even that will be text for now.

So far I have avoided opening the graphic file. I want to keep
it that way if possible until the editor works. And perhaps forever.
So the short answer to your question is: "Don't hold your breath".

[Paul Stevens]

One of the functions of CSBuilder will be to validate a
dungeon to make sure it is consistent and will not cause
problems when played.

I understand that there exist designs that have caused
problems. If they cause problems when played with CSBwin
then I would very much like to have the saved games so that
I can determine what is wrong and make sure that CSBuilder
can find, identify, and perhaps fix the problem.

CSBuilder has itself caused problems and in every case I was
able to both make CSBwin more robust so that it did not crash
and make CSBuilder not do the wrong thing. So I welcome
problems.....they are a big help.

PAul

[PicturesInTheDark]

As a non-programming user I can only say, that every visual help is appreciated with editors, ideally clicking on a tile or function and being able to change all the possible options via scroll-bar or suchlike.

Also, extended integrity checks (for instance for cloned objects, pits to nowhere, doors without triggers -just fantasizing-) would help the build process.

Since I am not really familiar with more complex functions, I sometimes have problems when facing a setup via DMute after playing a dungeon, trying to understand the mechanics going on. Either DMute (great as it is) does not show more complex designs or I am just too stupid (for example opening doors by "other" means - would be a real help to visualize things like that as well.

Ok, I know this is more than can probably be done, but you asked. Just my 2 cent.

Regards

Pitd

[Paul Stevens]

No, no....Those are perfectly reasonable requests.
For example, I already check that you cannot change
walls to open spaces if there are actuators present, that
stairways go to legal places, that stairs have three walls
adjacent, and quite a few other things. I plan to add
as many checks as possible and knowing what has caused
people problems will help me prioritize my work. The
checks will generally follow functionality but some things
come naturally during the implementation stage.

Please submit any specific requests. Email is great because
I can easily put them into a 'Request-priority 1' or Request -
Priority 2', etc folder. And please let me have any savefiles
that have caused CSBwin to die an ugly death.

prsteven@facstaff.wisc.edu

[beowuuf]

Are these 'checks' or 'blocks'
It's nice to know that you are told if you haven't lined up stairs
It's another to be blocked from creating one-way stairs

All three things you have mentioned won't crash the game, and can be used as designers see fit

You are right, DMute has many things that you can only work out by being familiar with the hex

For example, door functionaility is purely in the 3rd/4th byte, and is visible by no other means

[Paul Stevens]

Right now they are coded as 'Blocks'. I suppose that
if someone can convince me that it is useful, each of
the blocks can be changed on a one-at-a-time basis
to a "Warning!!! Do you really want to.....".

Take the actuators in a wall. If you change the wall to
an open cell then the actuator may have entirely different
meaning. I bet that I can crash the engine by doing such
a thing. For example, the wall graphic number will be changed
into a floor graphic number that might be illegal. Such things
are known to crash the engine according to Sphenx. Right now
the checking takes place when the actuator is added and would
not be checked for legality when the cell-type changed. So I
force you to delete the actuators before changing the cell type.

Right now you cannot make a one-way stairs. When you add
or delete stairs it does BOTH ends. Again, it can be changed
if necessary as a special case...I doubt you will make too many
of these. A one way stairs up is like falling through a pit in
the ceiling. That's sort of neat. A warning on the wall would be
nice.

At any rate, all of this is fine detail. A few month's of hard work
remain before version 1.0.

[Sphenx]

CSBuilder, alright. DMute, alright. And what about DMBuild ?!

[beowuuf]

Lol, DMBuild has no such problems - the actions of, say a door, are obvious and in graphival form - sword for choppable, fireball for explosive, button for push button, etc.

And that is a point, now that there is the little endian to big endian converter, why are you creating your own editor (Paul) rather than using DMBuild? Just curious : )


Personally I like to have the freedom, which is why I continue to use DMute first for any dungeon, and so haven't even got into trying DMBuild as much as I would like, let alone the CSBuild. I can use either after I DMute, I can't DMute after the other two, and there are just some hex tricks I still get a kick out of, like teleporting wall objects, etc

[Paul Stevens]

I posted a new CSBuild. Dozens of capabilities added. The most
significant is the ability to load/store all four Atari file formats.
It always saves in the same format that it loads except that
it adds a checksum if none originally existed.

It is a .ZIP instead of .rar because some people seem to have
problems with RAR.

[Sphenx]

What are these four file formats?

[Paul Stevens]

1- The Save-Game. It seems that the program does not have to
be aware whether it is a DM or CSB savegame.
2- The compressed dungeon.dat CSB (starts with 0x8104) I think this
is also the format of the dungeon.dat converted from the PC.
3- The uncompressed dungeon.dat without checksum. DM. 33442 bytes
4- The uncompressed dungeon.dat with checksum. 33444 bytes

Number 4 may have been my invention. It may not occur in the wild.
I don't exactly remember. I do know that the checksum makes me
feel more secure and so if it exists, I check it; I always write it.

[ChristopheF]

I can confirm about the checksum and the compression: they are both optional. I checked that behavior with DM for PC and CSB for Windows. I have yet to test with other dungeons.

About the checksum:
If it exists, the program will check it and reject the dungeon if the checksum value is incorrect.
If the checksum is absent, the dungeon will be accepted.
For example, in the multilingual version of DM for PC, only the english dungeon has a checksum. The french and german versions do not have one, and they work fine.

I have a list of all the dungeons from all the versions of DM, CSB and DM2 that I have (with file size, compression, checksum, etc...). I made it to help me write the file format specifications for the dungeon.dat which I'll publish when they are complete.

[Paul Stevens]

I posted a new CSBuild.zip at
webpages.charter.net/pstevens1

A lot of things work and a lot don't.
Perhaps 25 percent complete.

[Ola Lilja]

I've been working for an editor to create/edit the RTC .txt-files. So far
it's not too usable, but it will be...
Try it out and let me know what you think:

http://dorian.brattha.com/rtcEd.exe

[Paul Stevens]

I posted a new CSBuild.zip at
webpages.charter.net/pstevens1

Perhaps 40 percent complete. It is actually
somewhat useful already....certainly for just
looking around.

[Paul Stevens]

The latest CSBuild implemets:

-Adding Levels
-Adding Columns
-Adding Rows
-Rearranging floor,wall,door decorations and allowable monsters.
-Monster Generators
-Enlarged databases...changed from 1000 to 4000. Maybe 64000 someday.
-Checks Actuators/targets

webpages.charter.net/pstevens1

About 60 percent of Version 1.0. There is enough
already to make testing possible.

[Paul Stevens]

While improving my Pressure Pad Editor I got confused.
So I made some old-fashioned flowcharts of the code
that processes pressure pads. Now things are a bit
more nearly clear. I put them at
webpages.charter.net/pstevens1 (Two .GIF files)
I will leave them for a few days.
PAul

[Paul Stevens]

CSBuild version 0.7 is released. Get it at
webpages.charter.net/pstevens1

It implements the Designer Specified Actuators (DSA).
You can define 256 DSAs each of which can have:
-65000 states
-12000 inputs
-unlimited outputs to arbitrary dungeon levels
-multiple actions per state-transition

Each level of the dungeon can use 32 DSAs.

A DSA can be 'cloned' over several levels (handy
if inputs come from several levels).

The DSAs can be easily expanded to have actions that
do anything you can precisely describe. Right now the
only actions are the standard 'set', clear', and 'toggle'.
But the 'Help' describes a couple more that I already have
thought of but not yet implemented. You will think of
others, I am sure. Creating coins, adding wall decorations,
modifying character statistics, printing text, etc. will all be
easy now.

Do you remember the challenge to create a puzzle
that required four switches to be pressed in a particular
order? Nobody answered the challenge. CSBuild 0.7
comes with a demo that solves the challenge using a
very simple DSA. (Solve the puzzle to exit the Hall
of Champions.)

Check it out, let me know what doesn't work, and
we can get to version 1.0 in short order.