[Custom dungeon] Conflux III: The Undercity [CSBWin] [Benjamin Prieu (a.k.a Zyx)]

[Adamo]

when I killed Vecna in CII there was NOTHING (no treasure!)
Empty chest or somethingh, I don`t remember, but nothing valuable ! good that in CIII there`s something hidden!

[Trantor]

Yes Adamo, Vecna wasn't meant to be killed in CII, thus there was no reward. Somebody complained about that (actually, it might have been you, I don't remember), so Zyx added a reward.

[jason barnes]

Crumbling walls, how to get past them? Spells, Melee weapons, and Head banging have failed so far.

[Trantor]

One of the mentioned methods should do the trick. I only know of one place where to do this, though.

[Ian Clark]

Try whacking the wall in between the two that are said to be crumbling

[jason barnes]

Thanks, Ian. I'll try once I get out of this current problem.

I proved my innocence once and I'm trying to prove it a second time. The problem is that I've tried every combination of the 3 objects and I get sent to hell. There appears to be no solution, unless I'm over looking something obvious. Anyone got a clue?

[jason barnes]

Never mind. I found the problem. I had noticed that the council members remove anything in your hands when they judge you. So I put everything into my pack including the object that I proved my innocence the first time. This must've confused the game somehow.

By dropping the offending object before being judged, the test was passed.

[Zyx]

Derived from the theorem of humility: if you're proud of your innocence, then you must be guilty.

[Zyx]

Some answers...
- multiple puddle water elemental: that's normal, I just like the way they look.

- Characters at the back of the party take damage from some melee enemies: I think this happens when you're being charged. One of the character receives a small amount of damage, sometimes it's one of the back row. I could fix it if it really feels disturbing, otherwise let it be.

- sar wine: I'll make it drinkable

[Joramun]

...Charge damage : Not that disturbing once you understood the way of handlin' trollins.

For the Sar Wine : it was kind of a joke, but I can imagine the player having stupidly drunk too much of it and being unable to do some quest because of that...

I hadn't time to continue, and I must admit I'm a bit stuck at the dwarven fortress level.

[Parallax]

I was curious what the fuss was about with these conflux games, so I downloaded this one. Five minutes into it, I have to say:

The Gando character in inside Elijah's (?) portrait. Maybe he's just getting a quick shave when you click on him, or something, but it comes off as a mistake.

The various item holes in that same room turn to gem holes when viewed from two squares away. I am completely new to CSBWin, so I don't know if the 'front2' image (to use RTC terminology) of items can be changed, but if it can, it should be.

My "torch caused a gas explosion" even though I had nobody in my party, and was therefore not bearing a torch (and it was pitch black!) In RTC, that would be considered poor dungeon design, but I don't know the extent of CSBWin's capabilities, so maybe it's unavoidable?

Like I mentioned at the beginning, this is only the bugs I found in the first five minutes of play. I am disappointed with the dungeon so far. Given the lavish praises I had heard sung about it, I was expecting it to be more polished. It occurs to me that maybe I followed an old link and got a beta version by mistake? I got it from this thread and found the file at:

http://bprieu.club.fr/DM/Conflux_IIICompetition.rar

[Ameena]

The characters-in-different-portraits thing is deliberate - they're the Wizard Guild chars so have illusions or whatever to make them appear to be someone else at first glance, or something.

[beowuuf]

You are spoilt by having an engine made from scratch with alot of features - CSBwin is a hack into the original engine - the DM engine - the one that allows you a few monsters, basic graphics, and nothing but what you see in DM/CSB. Everything you see that is different in conflux is a result of someone spending time, in alot of cases zyx or Paul S (also others breaking the graphics.dat file structure such as gambit, charlatan, rain, kentaro).

The reason such praise is lavished on it is that Paul S and zyx contributed a fantastic amount of time and imagination to get the background mechanics right, and zyx has actually a dungeon with a hundred little quirks, a hundred little puzzles, a huindred little quests. It actually had good bones that have been added and added and added to even before trying to upgrade the graphics

As an old school DMuter he loves putting in things, like the portraits being different to how they are viewed in inventory, that are little 'hey, look, guess how i did this' cool things - if you read the readme you would see it's actually mentioned in the story

Yes, the limited pallette and graphics.dat means you can't have 1000 different views, you have to pick and choose your battles and almost blend it and accept some things won't come off 100%.

Conflux has been playtested to death but does have tons of new features to each release (like a certain RTC engine), so basically if you have discovered a bug then yes, it needs reported like the torch thing.. Trust me, it used to work fine in every concievable arrangement - don't use the words 'seems like bad dungeon design' for a bug that's re-emerged and not been picked up, bad dungeon design is a whole different spectrum of problems that you can see in other dungeons, not this one

I don't know if this is just with the new generation of gamers, but I have heard two people now praise Linflas's forest of doom, which is good, but merely on how it looks good in hi-res. The graphics are phenominal and add so much, Linflas has put in a ton of work to get that right, but when I have even heard the phrase, twice, the best game ever, of a demo, I get a little worried. I have no doubt linflas will create a good dungeon, but that is because he will put alot of effort into everything under the hood too, not because of the damn graphics!

Please, can I urge you to keep playing the game without focusing on the graphics, and definitely report any bugs. It's a dungeon to actually explore and find the missions in. People have complained about the difficulty also because it was supposed to be challenging, learning new spells, realising there are new abilities and items can do things and levels mean somehting and monsters are a bit worse than they used to be and your choice of charatcer actually matters.

I just rant since I have seen the development from close to and know how much effort has gone into it and how much cool stuff has gone into it, and it's a bit irritating to hear it dismissed so out of hand, especially for the reasons given

[Paul Stevens]

The reason such praise is lavished on it is that Paul S and zyx contributed a fantastic amount of time and imagination

That is not a good reason. I've spent a lot of time
on some things that turned into trash.

ConfluxIII is just plain great......no mater how much
or little time was spent creating it. It is consistent, massive,
complex, difficult, frustrating, rewarding, new, different,
and remarkably bug-free.

Bugs are not good. Please continue to report any that
you find. As beowuuf says, some 'bugs' are actually
compromises. But there is no doubt that some real bugs
remain.

The non-existent torch causing an explosion
is a bug in my mind and can likely be repaired if Zyx
is still around and interested. The original DM
prevented this kind of bug by placing a door between the
Hall of Champions and the rest of the dungeon,
preventing parties with zero members from proceeding.

[Adamo]

parallax wrote:

(...) The various item holes in that same room turn to gem holes when viewed from two squares away.

yeah, I know that problem. It doesn`t look good and might be concerned as a bug. But that`s the only thing I didn`t like in Conflux, so don`t worry about this! the game (at all) is awesome and really very well-tested and debugged, so there`s really a little probability that you`ll find for example a scorpion that you have to kill to get his item with 10000 hp (whoops, one zero typo when creating the level). And I seen things like this in some DMjava dungeons.

All in all, I think there`s very little probability that you`ll find a bug in Conflux that has an influence to the gameplay.

But that`s thrue, that CSBwin games has ancient graphick; there are resolution limitation and colours limitations; it worked exactly like that on AtariST! Believe me, Zyx would like to make a custom with such a beautifull design as Linfas` game, but on a code from 1987 that is not possible. However, PaulS added a lot of great impovements to the original engine; for example you`ve got additional wallsets in Conflux, wchich wouldn`t be possible in original DM

[linflas]

honestly, i don't think i'm able to make something as great as Conflux, even with RTC mechanics ! i don't have Zyx's fabulous twisted mind
and my second intention with FoD is to make a 'hi-res bitmaps framework' for the community.

[beowuuf]

I can't remember if I commented on the graphics before, but they are sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Got lost before I could actually find the goblins though, haven't done more than wander around once in it : (

[Parallax]

I guess Beowuuf is right. I am spoiled by RTC, where putting mismatched images for a character portrait and his mirror is trivial, and I was (still am) unable to appreciate the technical performance behind this particular feat. I stand corrected.

On the other hand, just being aware of a bug and choosing not to fix it does not make it disappear. I'm speaking of the modified gem holes here. I wouldn't have had a problem with the guilds using gems of different colors as keys, or even plain old keys. What bugs me is that the game is not internally consistent.

Let's be clear, I did not force anyone to use custom keyholes in the dungeon.
I did not write the layout in such a way that the inconsistent views could actually be displayed when it could have easily been avoided.
I did not go out of my way to trick the engine into displaying the bugged view.
Do not blame ME for the game not achieving the goals it sets for itself.

The consequence of such a bug (yes, bug) so early in the game is that it sets a terrible precedent. Now, when faced with something unusual such as the halfway opened door in that area, I have to stop and decide if it falls into the 'feature' category or the 'graphics glitch' category. Maybe there's an entire storyline based off unblocking the half-opened door, but I'll never learn about it because it's not worth my time, considering that it could just as well be another 'hey look, guess how I did this' case that I just can't appreciate, and it's a six-step trip to the other side.

Here's another bug/feature: With an empty party, you can step onto monsters' squares and kill them instantly. I know that you couldn't face monsters before putting at least one champion in your party in DM or CSB, so the case did not arise. It arises here, and it's not treated well in this (release) version. Once again, it's not my fault the dungeon was designed in such a way that it can be done.

My mouse pointer is blue when hovering in the dungeon view. Was that the case in the original DM/CSB? It's been so long, I can't even remember. Maybe it's something to do with my graphics card or something. It does not hamper gameplay, it just looks strange.

As far as the torch is concerned, so it's an old bug that had been fixed and is cropping up again. I don't know, and it. is. not. my. problem. If I release a dungeon with a bug like that in it I expect to be called on it.

I'm sure it was a lot of work coding this dungeon, and it required a lot of creativity working around the limitations of a very old code. But so far it is not the polished gem I was expecting the 'best custom dungeon' around to be. I'm not asking the game to be the prettiest pony in the show, but I require it to do properly what it sets out to do.

I'm not giving up on it yet, but so far it does not get my vote. I expect all the technical prowess stuff to fall flat, but that's just as well. I can still appreciate a good puzzle and a good riddle. In a good dungeon, it's easy to understand what to do, hard but not impossible to achieve it, and rewarding to succeed. You'll have my final opinion once I have explored all three aspects of the game.

[linflas]

The light blue mouse is the atari original one.

The black flame at the beginning is here to let you choose a special character for a super-hard version of the game : you must have an empty party to reach the mirror.

Conflux is the biggest/hardest/smartest/whatever-est custom dungeon ever made with original DM limitations, but some people (including me) just don't like it. For me, it's too hard at the beginning, harder than CSB. By the way, did you complete CSB ?

[beowuuf]

Sorry if I came across as very antaonistic, I just know that the critism of 'bad design' is certainly not one to level at conflux, and how much good puzzles, consideration to game balance, playtesting, etc has gone into it. I would shudder to guess how many times I have played through it just as a playtester from II.h to III. So much so I haven't properly played the newest release, even though I want to see everything new, just because of fatigue of having played it so much!

The problem is that it is large and complex, and the community is small. Or, in other words, to test it as it deserves and needs each revision would mean most of the community playing it for longer than the remianing community would then play it. Basically, every effort has been made to ensure everything works, but just like the RTC and CSBwin engines, when something new is released, someone can always find a bug because of the feature to tester to time ratio.

The gem hole thing simply cannot be done - you are using the portrait mechanics as a cheat to allow a multitude of additional small graphics such as new keyholes looks, mirror looks, etc. The price is the back graphuics will stay the same. So either they are all gemholes, in which case it looks fine but then people who don't read the readme (and any non-english speaker) is penalised by not knowing how to open the guides. The price of using CSBwin is , unfortunately, to expand the engine means that you will never have polish in this particular area. Persoanlly I think that as suspension of disbelieve if a part of any fantasy game, then a decision to ignore somehtign you cannot correct to ensure people can play your game without confusion must win out. It is a valid critisicm if it takes you out of the game, but isn't a valid blanket critisism as something that is a bug.

The mirror thing, and other small quirks, are two fold both 'cool, i can do this' for zyx's amusement, but ultimately aren't for showing off as they always have a 'feel' purpose too - somehtin gto add atomosphere. In this case, to indicate the special nature of the guuild of mages. In the half open door's case, it gives the feel of somehtign abandoned and not quite working/right.

The ghost sorcerer , as linflas says, is allowed to kill the flame. He actually is blocked from entering the normal starting dungeon, but can explore a limited section of the lower levels. You will probably not like this feature, but it is somehting zyx deliberately allowed as another small quirk for amusement assuming you play the dungeon normally, then on a whim try to play with only a ghost - there are even bonuses associated with using the ghost first before selecting characters.

Anyway, I hope that the quirks and any bugs or concensions to the tools do not pull you off the dungeon in the end (as you say, you cannot enjoy somehting if you are pulled out of the experience by having to determine what is designer error to what is a puzzle). As you can see not everyone loves it due to it's style of play and choices, but it is respected so I hope you get a chance to see and enjoy some of the aspects that make it loved by those that do, even if you still end up feeling it is not a dungeon for you.

[Gambit37]

I guess Beowuuf is right. I am spoiled by RTC, where putting mismatched images for a character portrait and his mirror is trivial, and I was (still am) unable to appreciate the technical performance behind this particular feat. I stand corrected.

The additional problem is that you are coming at Conflux III with a pre-made experience of how dungeons should look and work based on the original game and more sophisticated effects availble in RTC. CSBWin is more limited in that regard and as Beowuuf points out, while Conflux III pushes many boundaries of the engine, it is still limited by aspects that can't be improved. It also subverts some of the DM gameplay and not everything works the way you are used to, so there is also an element of "relearning" that you likely weren't expecting.

Additionally, those of us who defend Conflux do so in two ways: 1) We defend the GAME of Conflux as a pinnacle of dungeon design and 2) we defend the MECHANICS of Conflux because we have so much insider knowledge that we appreciate how far it has pushed the CSBWin engine.

When someone comes along who sees it only in terms of the GAMES, it's entirely understandable that quirks will be pointed out and possibly listed as bugs. We then leap to their defence because we're often thinking in terms of the MECHANICS of how such-and-such effect was produced. I can see that a casual gamer won't care about the mechanics and can be much more easily put off by seeming bugs and inconsistencies, so I do empathise with your position.

I'm not giving up on it yet, but so far it does not get my vote. I expect all the technical prowess stuff to fall flat, but that's just as well. I can still appreciate a good puzzle and a good riddle. In a good dungeon, it's easy to understand what to do, hard but not impossible to achieve it, and rewarding to succeed. You'll have my final opinion once I have explored all three aspects of the game.

Seriously, this is a dungeon you have to invest a LOT of time in. Once you have started scratching away at it's various layers, I think you may well revise your initial opinion.

[beowuuf]

Indeed, usually players fall into the category of not liking the gameplay choices (exploration/living in a dungeon over liner mission and of course mapping/caution required versus relaxed intial explorations) rather than not liking the features of the dungeon itself.

[InsomniaDMX]

(exploration/living in a dungeon over liner mission and of course mapping/caution required versus relaxed intial explorations)

That's what I think the best part of Conflux is... I have to say, I like it better than all of the originals. I've been hooked to if for about two months now, and I'm only starting to see an ending coming up.

That being said, and I hate to derail a discussion, but could you help me a bit with it? I have no clue how to un-curse my stuff, and sometimes it seems to get cursed randomly.

Oh, and I noticed the Pink Floyd quote in there too, very cool.

Edit: And does "The One Ring" do anything?

[beowuuf]

It calls to us, yeees, it calls to us.... Umm, I mean:
It recharges but at the expense of swapping onto your hand as the One Ring usually does. Dont know if other evil thigns have been attached since I've played.

As for uncursing:
There is an EE blessing that will remove a curse. The highpriest of the temple knows its secret, and it does not come free

Randomly cursed stuff - I have a funny feeling you were experimenting with magic and heard an ominous sound?

[InsomniaDMX]

Ohhhh... thanks for the hint about ring and the:
high priest... Didn't notice the coin slot...

About the spell:
Yeah, the ZO spell, what does it do? I noticed that the beggar (I ressurected Gothmog who had it) makes the same noise when I use "brandish." One last thing, what does the ultimate sacrifice spell do? It just seems to hurt me... And I used a skullseed for an item.

Does ZYX have an IRC channel for this game? I think questions should be directed there, I dunno.

[beowuuf]

Zyx is taking a break from all this DM stuff for real life, which given the amount of time he has spent on it is expected! He does occasionally lurk from time to time and answer questions

The ZO spell curses items - simple as that. There ios one spell that needed a cursed item, plus there might be more reasons now. Oytherwise, it's the price of carelessly casting the death rune!
As for ultimate sacrifice, don't know, it's a brand new feature - there is soemthign to do with a charatcer ending that may require it... it may have other uses

[Zyx]

in answer to Parallax:

The exploding torch: I´ll try to fix that. PM me to explain how to reproduce the bug.

The gem hole: I can´t do nothing about it. Paul Stevens could try to add code to the engine for the frontal views at distance 2 and 3, but would the cost/benefit ratio be worth it?

I´m not satisfied with the dungeon. It still has significant flaws that would require hundreds of hours of playtest to balance. I processed the bugs and glitches by priority. I may have left - or forgotten - a few minor glitches.
Anyway, I´m open to suggestions and constructive critics. I´ll release bugfixes when needed.
The reason I show off some features is that the original aim was to explore the technical possibilities of CSBwin and seed ideas for other designers*. However, nothing is fortuitous in the dungeon.

*: ie, the blackflames use 4 color schemes. This is the proof that you could use easily 4 different sprites for each position of the monster (front, back, side, attack)

[bitza]

Just as an aside, I have played conflux II and III and find them both enjoyable, especially III. It does have a steep learning curve, which I personally struggle with (I prefer to dive headong and battle through, which isn't always the best way...) but this adds to the challenge. I am limited in my own abilities and must admit that I am in awe of the wonderful thingsdone within the limitations of the engine. Having read this thread again,I might even go back to it again and persevere with it through to the end. I don't often post these days, tho I do often lurk (a combination of real life interfering and not having anything to say) but I do think this is one of the most interesting dungeons (non-RTC) I have played. CErtainly has that 'one more go' feel to it. Anyway, there's my two pennies worth...

Keep up the good work guys

B

[Trantor]

After taking a long break, I decided to play Conflux again (am I the only one who thinks it's sad that nobody entered the competition yet?), and I found a bug. In the Sewers, there is a spitter tree immediately behind Pit D. After closing Pit D, I killed that tree and gained a point in the competition for no apparent reason. Even stranger: When I later walked over the tile where the tree stood, I got the following message:

Boris says "This tree has deadly thorns. I used to make darts out of them."

Problem is, I don't even have Boris in the party. This message seems to appear only once, though. Also, I remember that the tree dropped a thorn, but it seems to have been gone (I am 99% sure I didn't take it with me).

[Zyx]

Thanks, I´ll fix that too. Just after I get married and buy a house in Argentina, that is... Cheers to all.