Guide to RTC Structure/Editing (old RTC versions)

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Fri May 02, 2003 11:21 am

Well Work Continues on the guide ... although I wish there was a nice easy way to extract the "friendly names" of the objects against their ID names (i.e. WEAPON_AXE), does anyone know of a utility that would do this, or do I have to put them all in by hand.

Downloaded the encyclopidia onto my machine at home last night with christophes permission, I am going to have a proper crack at the guide this weekend.

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri May 02, 2003 11:48 am

For the items images, if you're putting the guide together as HTML, you could double them easily by changing the width and height tags to read:

Code: Select all

width="200%" height="200%"

Or better still, just double the pixel size (they're 16pixels square right?), so use:

Code: Select all

width="32" height="32"

Otherwise, I can do it in Photoshop very quickly using an Action, and email you the whole lot back?

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Fri May 02, 2003 12:22 pm

I was putting it together in MS Word, but I guess that HTML would be a good way to do it. Good thinking Gambit.

Post by **Lunever** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:08 pm

Anybody_uk: You asked earlier in this thread about IRC. Indeed, there is an DM-channel at IRC, channel #dungeonmaster at any random quakenet-server like uk.quakenet.org

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:18 pm

Im getting a connection refused on quakenet? do I need to do anything special to mIRC to get it working?

Post by **Lunever** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:24 pm

Nothing I know of. I easily get access in mIR as well as in Trillian or Trillian Pro, (I use de.quakenet.org, but any quakenet-server should do).
Just contact me in some other IM in case you need any furhter information now, you'll find my ID's in the memberlist.
If you have some special IRC problem, contact Amber, he is more adept at IRC than I am.

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:27 pm

Just added you to MSN, but you are not online (it says)

sucinum · Post by **sucinum** » Fri May 02, 2003 4:57 pm

andyboy_uk wrote:Im getting a connection refused on quakenet? do I need to do anything special to mIRC to get it working?

try connecting to a uk-quakenet-server (i have several servers to choose from, like "random german server"), this might help. im not an expert in this, i simply click it and it works. www.quakenet.org might answer, why your connection is refused.

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Fri May 02, 2003 6:25 pm

Thanks Amber, I am going to try it from home using mIRC, but I have popeys client now if I need to attach to the chat room.

Thanks everyone.

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Mon May 05, 2003 6:51 pm

Well I havent done as much work as I would have liked this weekend but Ive been doing the family thing and a mate of mine just got back from Vegas so im off out tonight to hear all about it (over a few ales

) but I havent deserted it and it is coming along nicely.

I have put up version 0.1 of the guide (which is IN DEVELOPMENT) so people can get a feel for what Im trying to do with it, it is unfinished and very messy and there are a lot of TODO comments (where I need to work things out - or get people to tell me

).

Most of the section headings are in there (although there may be nothing in there yet) for what I plan to write in and Im looking for anything that I have missed (I know that there are probably more sections to the text file that I haven't got to putting in yet, like New - Animations, but as I say its a first draft and they will be in there.

There is also a list of unique items (in alphabetical order - by ID name) at the bottom that I intend to extract and organise rather that write by hand.

Im after comments and suggestions (either post here or chuck me an email to the address on the document) and I apologise that the page is about 225kb in size at the moment - bit of a pain for any 56kers, I will tidy it up for the web on final release so that it looks pretty I promise, at the moment Im relying on MS Word to save it to HTML and there is a lot of crap that it puts in as a result.

@George: When I get this thing finished you are more than welcome to use this as the editing manual for the download (if you think it is good enough that is - although I would love to finish it if it is to be included), saves you having to write it eh.

Also, dont worry everyone, the clever stuff will be in there shortly, just gotta get the basics down first. There will be a full tutorial at the end to put together all the basic functions of a dungeon, and also a section on "How To" where all the clever things can go (im guessing that this will be added to until there is nothing left to add)

Ahh well, gotta go out and have a beer or two now, so here's the link. I think the bandwidth is limited on this freewebs host, if anyone knows of a free host that could hold the online version of this when its finished, I would be grateful.

http://www.freewebs.com/andyboy_uk/rtcEditingGuide2.htm

Enjoy,

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Tue May 06, 2003 11:01 am

Coo - very impressive. I'll try and have a detailed read through at some point soon but from a brief scan through it looks very good. One quick request however...

In my head I have a semantic difference between objects and items. An object is something like "scroll" or "dragon" or "fake wall", i.e. a type with properties common to all instances of that type. An item however is a very specific instance of an object, for example a scroll with reference 2543 at location 4,5,7 and text "Hello".

In other words a dungeon will only contain one dragon object, but there may be hundreds (!) of dragon items.

If you could incorporate that kind of language into how you describe each of the things in the document that would be marvefllous (or at the very last, not confuse me ;-)

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Tue May 06, 2003 11:39 am

Not a problem George.

Post by **Gambit37** » Tue May 06, 2003 11:49 am

Great, looks like a good start!

I've played around with RTC editing a bit in earlier versions; I spent some time last year with version 0.16 and tried out lots of different things. Briefly, things that I remember were very important, are things like the X,Y coordinates for new graphics. You state that it's an offset from the top left of the screen; that's not always the case and depending on the type of graphic it may be an offset from the middle of the play view. I don't want to comment in detail at this point, because it's probably better if George does that, but just so you know that things in the TXT files aren't always as obvious as they might appear...

As for Word's bloated HTML: If you have Dreamweaver, it has a function to strip all that out; but I guess you don't, 'cos if you had Dreamweaver you'd be doing it in that to begin with right? I can always do that for you if you send me the source file.

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Tue May 06, 2003 12:51 pm

Fraid so, Im dreamweaverless. Im writing it in word and I will do a proper HTML version when the content is finished. but it appears to work for now.

I will have a play round with the offset feature and make sure that I have got my story straight. Thanks for the tip Gambit.

Post by **Lunever** » Tue May 06, 2003 2:11 pm

Hmmm, if I remember correctly there was some patch at the Microsoft database that enables word to filter out the suoerfluos HTML elements.

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Tue May 06, 2003 3:13 pm

Yeah, but I think I would prefer to do the HTML version by hand anyway, Word sucks at that.

Thanks L

Lubor Kolar · Post by **Lubor Kolar** » Tue May 06, 2003 4:03 pm

I would recommend to use Mozilla HTML Editor for writing HTML. It is stable, doesn't require HTML knowledge and it produces valid HTML code (I wrote several docs with it and W3C validator didn't find any error), what I shouldn't say for Frontpage or Word.

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Tue May 06, 2003 5:17 pm

Thanks for the tip mate. I will look into it when I get home tonight (at work at the moment)

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Tue May 06, 2003 6:17 pm

As everyone else, only briefly looked so far, but so far very impressed : )
Edit: Lol, scrolled through all of it, and I like the format and descriptions you have - great work

Quick things (some just discussion points on points you've left blank)

For the 'import' for entrance - this is where the party appears when you 'make new adventure'
So for example in CSB, the starting position is the hall of champions, but the 'import to' position is the worm room

For game ending flag, someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is descriptive only? The games ends if you fuse Chaos, the game ends if you trigger an end of game pad...this part merely tells a player who looks at the info scroll what the finish should be. So I think any text string can go here, within reason for display purposes, right?
I could put 'End_of_game+Kick_dragon_with_booted_foot_and_run if i wanted

Scalings - once again correct me if i'm wrong, but i think scaling refers to the amount of bitmaps used to show distance. For example, a monster might use merely one, and this one is scaled smaller by the engine at load time. Otherwise you nominate three (or six for small creatures) individual bitmaps of you wanted to add shading effects as the creature disappeared from sight (for example have chaos heavily in silouette far away, eyes only closer, and the normal chaos when standing beside him)

Transparency - is power pink still the transparent colour of choice in bitmaps anyone? ( rgb 255 255 0)

Can't hep with buffers
Can't help with anything in descriptions

For the 'how to' section at the bottom, I would suggest including a 'chesting' secton on how to put items in chests and creatures
Also, perhaps how to set up monster generators and simple relays/counters

But once again great work!

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Tue May 06, 2003 6:28 pm

@Beowuff: Thanks for the tips, I will include them in the documentation and I will be adding all of the suggested sections to the How to. Thanks for reading over it, there is a long way to go. Also thanks for the import_to information, I dont think I would have found that one.

As for the end game flag, I will have a play around and if it doesnt do anything like you say then I will change the descriptions of what is going on.

Thanks for you're time, will continue work on it this week and post here when updates occour.

Cheers,

Post by **Gambit37** » Tue May 06, 2003 8:08 pm

Just some minor tips for you:

End of Game: can be one of the following parameters: NONE, FUSE_CHAOS or ESCAPE. I'm not sure how ESCAPE works though...

Buffers: used when defining sounds. The number dictates how many of these sounds can overlap. It mainly affects sounds that are played quickly, such as giggler footsteps: if buffers are one, then you don't get to hear every step, and the giggler sounds 'slow' even though he isn't. Setting it to two or more means you'll probably hear every step, but the more you play at once, the slower the game becomes (in my experience).

Andyboy, the best advice I can give you is to dump RTC.EXE into Wordpad, then look at all the ASCII error messages towards the bottom of the file. It'll give you loads of information that you won't otherwise find out from the TXT files (unless George tells you!)

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Tue May 06, 2003 10:49 pm

Ooohh, havent tried that one, thanks gambit.

george: fancy letting us in on teh secret of the ESCAPE end of game?

Thanks

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Wed May 07, 2003 11:10 am

Just a quick run through:

Buffers - the number of simultaneously overlapping samples of that sound that can be played. For most sounds this only needs to be 1. For monster foot(?) steps 2 sounds better and for doors (where the sample is played 4 times in a row very quickly) you need 4. The higher the number the more memory is used, so try to keep it down!

End game conditions. Fuse_Chaos, means you win if you fuse chaos (duh ;-); if this isn't the condition, then fusing chaos will just kill him, not end the game. Escape means that you must find and step on an End of Game pad (see CSB for how this works).

Background (transparent) colour for bitmaps is RGB (255,0,255)

Import - Location for "make new adventure" start

Scalings - The number of bitmaps internally used to show distance. For all standard objects and monsters this should be 6, for wall objects it should be 3 and for floor objects and interface bitmaps it should be 1.

Fell free to keep asking if you've got any more questions...

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Wed May 07, 2003 12:32 pm

Thanks for that george, I will update the guide when I get home tonight.

Added the following last night.

- Amendments to teh terminoligy used in the document (ala George)
- Put the correct definitions for END_GAME, SCALING and BUFFERS in.
- Better definitions on the [New - Objects] section
- Addition of requirements of section headings and entries in the [Main Data] and [Description] sections. - (@George: see post in RTC Suggestions)
- Added the Author property description to the [Main Data] - that I missed

How To...
- Chests (with items)
- Monsters (with dropping items)
- Simple Items (like keys)
- Simple doors (with the button on the door frame)
- Torches in Sconses on walls

Tonight I think pits(simple), and then onto the way that triggers work.

PicturesInTheDark · Post by **PicturesInTheDark** » Wed May 07, 2003 4:20 pm

Is the document available somewhere yet? Did I miss link posting?

Regards, PitD

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Wed May 07, 2003 4:44 pm

Version 0.01 is at http://www.freewebs.com/andyboy_uk/rtcEditingGuide2.htm

although im quite a bit ahead with version 0.02 that is at home on my computer at the moment. The idea of releasing a first version was so people could look at the style and chuck in comments and suggestions.

I am going to do a bit more on the document before updating the web with the new one.

Also, if anyone knows of a better (free) host than freewebs (as it is bloody slow), preferably one that supports ASP and ACCESS databases (not brinkster please

) then I would be grateful. Even a PHP/Database one could be cool (although I would have to learn PHP).

Thanks

PicturesInTheDark · Post by **PicturesInTheDark** » Wed May 07, 2003 4:55 pm

Thank you for your quick reply, do you want comments on it?

Regards, PitD

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Wed May 07, 2003 5:10 pm

Yes please.

General format, mistakes, suggested additions, better ways to describe things?

anything like that would be appriciated

Young player · Post by **Young player** » Thu May 08, 2003 12:42 am

Couple items i think that are missing from the large list:
1. Rusted items
2. The Conduit (staff)

andyboy_uk · Post by **andyboy_uk** » Thu May 08, 2003 4:01 pm

George, can you let me know what the ID tags are for these objects?

Thanks YP.

Dungeon Master Forum

Guide to RTC Structure/Editing (old RTC versions)

The work continues