Dungeon Maker - Alpha 2

MadMunky · Post by **MadMunky** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 4:57 pm

Just uploaded and updated are website where u can now download Alpha 2. This is what we had before me and wishbone started playing WOW

Anyways just letting people know the project isnt dead but just in a slow stage at the moment.

Download Link = http://www.dungeon-maker.com/downloads/dm.rar

Watch out though its almost 70mb (not recommend for modem users)

Please also visit are website at http://www.dungeon-maker.com

Release Notes
----------------

- New: Load/save option
- New: Animated Monster meshes
- New: Start menu, game options
- New: Music
- New: Particle effects
- New: New items, monsters and dungeon objects
- New: Animated textures
- New: Updated the sky
- New: In-game possibility to write on scrolls, or to copy spells
- New: Added an in-game item details view
- New: Runes have names now
- New: Improved Editor interface
- New: Wall texts now come in different colors and shapes
- New: Tutorial map (tutorial.dun)
- Fixed: spells must now be learned for each character, instead of once for the whole party
- Fixed: a lot of other stuff!

Enjoy!

Suule · Post by **Suule** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 5:47 pm

Oh God. Now you're done for. WoW sucked away most of my friends. I hope Dungeon Maker will live despite all the troubles with MMORPGing. The number of 3D DM clones is slowly getting low.

Post by **linflas** » Fri Sep 02, 2005 5:45 pm

nice intro/menu enhancements : where do the musics come from ?

still have "memory access violation" with '0.dun' and '1.dun' but 'start.dun' and 'tutorial.dun' are ok. i got the same error when launching the editor.

i made a little DM 3d clone in blitzbasic a few weeks ago and i quickly discovered the limits of the b3d engine : on my config (FX5700 Ultra 128Mb/P4 2.8Ghz/1.5Gb DDR), your game in 800x600x32/low detail/no effect is getting very slow when there are a few meshes (for example, in the garden with 3d mushrooms, plants, etc.)

i hope next versions of b3d will be faster... maybe you could add a n option to disable smooth walking between tiles.

Post by **Gambit37** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 7:38 pm

I'm just about to have a look at this, but my first comment would be to convert those two WAVs totalling 21MB down to smaller MP3s....

Adamo · Post by **Adamo** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 11:08 pm

hey MadMunky!
What are the minimal requirements for Dungeon Maker?
Have you tested it on slow computers?

Tom Hatfield · Post by **Tom Hatfield** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 8:50 pm

Yeah, I'm not gonna download it until the size is more reasonable. You need to look into compression.

MadMunky · Post by **MadMunky** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 11:17 pm

I also said this to wishbone and he said that the files have to be wav due to the way they loop you get a big pause when they are mp3s for some reason but i will get him to look into this again and see if there is anythink we can do, maybe post a midi version.

as for specs im not sure really depends of the map you load etc... but as a guess...

Min Specs (Guess)
---------------------

P3 1Ghz
128meg
64meg Geforce/radeon
Windows 2000/ME
DirectX 7

these are only a guess and it might very well run ok on lower machines. Please fell free to post your results.

Post by **Gambit37** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 12:32 am

It's pretty sluggish on my 3 year old AMD XP1900 with Geforce4 Ti 4600 and 512MB RAM running on Windows XP SP2. It was awful at 1280x960 and just about playable at 800x600.

I think you've seriously underestimated the power of machine you need for this!

I'll put more feedback on your forums -- disappointing that you lost the old one and all the good comments people had left.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:09 am

could always look at something Like OGG which is what they use in unreal tournament 2k4 and they have a lot of looping music.. Very nice compression on it as well.

I always thought that while Dungeon maker was a cool idea.. the engine was always very limited for the times. however, the idea that it's sluggish on those specs with such low polygon environments, a look into optimisation I think is key at this point if you want to boost it's popularity.

I mean it's free, and I don't know how experienced a programmer Wishbone is. I'm sure it's quite a challenge to make a good and fast 3D engine. Thankfully though there are lots of resources to help.

Is this thing being programmed in blitzbasic or something? That could account for some of the speed issues.

Anyway, these are not complaints.. just observations. It's always nice to see people making free efforts like this for the community.

moo

Post by **linflas** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 11:55 am

cowsmanaut wrote:Is this thing being programmed in blitzbasic or something? That could account for some of the speed issues.

it could. i've seen many optimizations in blitzbasic forums (single surface terrain, destruct/reconstruct entities, call external DLLs), dunno if they can be applied to DMaker engine... or maybe they are already (i've seen 'blitzbasic' in the game credits).

MadMunky · Post by **MadMunky** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:30 pm

The engine is in Blitz3D now BlitzMax is out maybe we will switch to that as that is multiplatform which would be nice but i think it will be alot of work.

There is alot of optimising to be done and maybe that should be are next big issue to look into. Also you have to remember that the maps which the game comes with are really to show off all the effects/possibilities of the engine and a normall conversion of a Dungeon Master or Bloodwych map would proberly run alot fast.

Deffently looking into it though.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:12 pm

yeah, I would call to anything you can to speed up your engine. either that or if you made your code modular enough you may be able to rewrite certain parts in something other than blitz to speed up things. Though that might be a rather large endeavor.. I don't know.

From what I understand blitz is supposed to be easier to learn and faster to program with but ultimately less powerfull and far more bloated than any other language. However, an engine that does less than quake3 rendering wise, and yet runs slow on a machine 4 times the spec of machines that ran quake 3 nice and smoothly...that is bound to be an issue for users.

But again, I say, that I know it's hard to do.. and you're doing it for free.. so anything you do with it is still nice to see.

moo

MadMunky · Post by **MadMunky** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:23 pm

I wouldnt say it was quake 3 like, the possiblities of DM is more like Doom 3 there is Bump mapping support, lighting effects etc.. I think there is alot which isnt demostrated/documented correctly which is why it is slower than people expect.

There is still alot of optimising and changes to remove unneed features but Dungeon Maker is really quite advanced for what it is as it stands it is completly possible to remake all the old classics the only problem in doing that is we dont have enough items or monsters which is just due to are lack of gfx experiance and animation.

MadMunky · Post by **MadMunky** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 12:14 am

http://www.dungeon-maker.com/images/screenshots2/

There u can see some newer screenshots, I will add thumbnails and update are website soon.

Tom Hatfield · Post by **Tom Hatfield** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 9:12 pm

I haven't tested it, but I wonder if the poor performance everyone is talking about isn't at least in part on account of your culling algorithm. Perhaps you're rendering way more geometry than is readily visible. I'd look into that first, and then examine hardware benefits such as vertex buffers, batching, multi-stage blending, etc.