Discuss Chaos Strikes Back for Windows and Linux, an unofficial port of Chaos Strikes Back to PC by Paul Stevens, as well as CSBuild, an associated dungeon editor.
Bummer about the loss of forum data last week... One post that i think got lost was a query about using multiple graphics.dat files? Is that possible paul? I guess the player could do it manually, play the game until a certain point save and quite then overwrite the graphics.dat with another one... That'd let some one recreate the indoors & outdoors of DM2 but could CSBwin do it automatically?
Also, I was wondering how much customisation can be done with items, montsers etc... Can you create brand new items, with new attributes, actions etc... and new monsters, that maybe shoot arrows etc... Can we change the monsters names? Ahh, thinking about it the montsers names aren't in the game, its us that gave them the names... Ok, so can we change the item names, so the shank is a shoulder of lamb ?
Anyway, just musing...
On the graphics issue, anyone have alternative graphics.dats with outside/sewer/cave graphics... that are just gathering dust??
A lot of what you mention is already possible using various utilities:
CSBEdit by `rain allows modification of all item and monster names, monters strengths and weaknesses, monster attacks (in theory, I can't get it to work in practice), spells and their runes, item properties, attack types and combos, food strengths, plus other things. It's also possible to create a couple of new items using this tool. Generally though, completely new stuff isn't possible -- you need to modify existing stuff.
DMExtract allows you to extract graphics, change them as much as you want, then rebuild the graphics.dat.
One of the files that gets extracted from GRAPHICS.DAT is numbered 0558.dat. Using a hex editor and Charlatan's notes, you can edit all kinds of stuff in here which tells the engine where to place graphics, what colours monsters can replace, how to scale wall decorations, etc. It's quite complicated, but Zyx did some of this in Conflux 2 and I'm working on a dungeon that pushes it even further.
Using these 3 tools, you can effectively create a full 'mod' for CSBWIN. The tools are available in the quick links drop down box at the top of the page.
I beleive Paul also put forth a vague notion that there already was a limited graphics call each change of level level. Nothing that would call a full graphics.dat worth of new creatures and monsters, but could possibly allow mutliple wallsets - I'm sure i will be corrected if i remembered this wrongly...and i don't think he was offering to isolate the specific items to be loaded himself either : )
I am still looking into this. A ***LOT*** of graphics get loaded whenever
the level changes. Remember the floppy drive getting turned on whenever
you went up the stairs?
AFAIK, everything is already in memory since the initial loading of the game. The disk accesses when you change level are used to perform a copy protection check.
Yeah, the graphics loading surprises me as I also thought it was all loaded up front. Having said that, there's no way you could get the megabyte or so of uncompressed graphics into the ST's 512Kb of memory in one go. It's probably different in the Amiga version, which I played.
In the distant future you may build up to 64 levels, 32 x 32; that is four times the size of dm1 !!
The thought was, to make it possible to have, for every 16 levels(or even each level) a different graphic.dat, which would work well with walls and the like, turning them blue, and monsters,too.(totaling four(or even64))
But newly defined items would just transform into their modified form,(making an apple turn into a frog if you like), so there will only be as many items which were already in dm1(not for the total amount,though, but for how many different items there are, not four times greater).
You may not use all 16 colours and the transparent colour(pink?) in each level, or you risk of having graphic glitches with some monsters...
Anyway 4 different graphic.dat files would be nice, just take eob1 and you get what i mean.
I wonder what would happen to a party after 60 levels, taking the character(s) to a very high experience level!!
