Gambit37 wrote:Yeah, this is very cool indeed. I have no idea how all these new actions work -- the weather in particluar looks complicated!
It's actually quite simple - the rain is just a haze (like those used for teleporters, but with rain shaped / coloured bitmaps rather than blue dots) and the puddles, clouds and lightning are just different wallsets.
All the actions and relays that control the weather just toggle the hazes / wallsets on and off.
So it's big (because there are lots of different levels of rain / cloud) but not that complicated.
Gambit37 wrote:I also need to investigate how the 'area portal border images' work -- those wall elements that are displayed right on the edge of the screen as you transition between each wallset. -- This has given me some nice ideas about how to update DM with new distinct areas, say giving the Tomb of the Firestaff a different wallset from the rest of the dungeon without having a jarring wallset change.
They're nothing special - no different from a puddle, grating, slime or any other benign flooritem. The key point is that the bitmaps they use are quite large and cover up the sharp lines between the different wallsets.
Gambit37 wrote:You must have worked on this for ages, GG -- getting all the assets in alone must have been a long job!
Ignoring the resources themselves, surprisingly little time actually - probably less than 10 hours to put together everything.
For the bitmaps, it was just a question of copy-and-pasting-and-resizing the DM2 bitmaps (extracted easily thanks to Kentaros editor). In fact, the longest part was resizing those border images and wallsets by hand because the perspective used by DMII is different to those used in DM / CSB / RTC.