Dungeon Master Forum

Those kinds of barriers are just teleporters. You make them monster activated only and just target the square the monster is coming from as the destination.

Oh cool cheers

One other thing that's worth mentioning: You've created lost of new character names but you've kept the original DM and CSB names as their identifiers. You're not limited to that. For example, CHEYNA PLAINSKEEPER is assigned to CHARACTER_LANA. This should be CHARACTER_CHEYNA instead; just remember to change the names in the mirrors also.

Oh cool, thoguht it wouldn't recognise it if i changed that name If I was any good at drawing stuff in Paint (as opposed to with a pencil) I might even draw new pics for them. Well I could do that anyway I suppose, if I drew them by hand, scanned them in and coloured in Paint...although I'm not sure of the size limitations but I'm sure a pizxel number thingy is given in the char portraits tgat are already there. I'll check it later but i have to log now.
Once again thankies for the info Gambit, and for putting up with all my moanings and groanings abo silly ilttle problems lol

No problem; I like to help when I can. Anyway, this all helps with getting my post count towards that Archmaster rating...

<sigh> Having read through your explanation way back on page one of this thread, I'm afraid I'm still none the wiser as the the use and/or purpose of these relay things...are they activated by the party in any way? I can't see how they work or why they're needed. If I took out the "DISABLE_SELF" command from the floor triggers, would that make any difference to their effectiveness sinec they work fine now? Hmm, I'll try that and see if it buggers up or not

Wooooooooooooo
Deleted all the "DISABLE_SELF" and all those relay things I'd put in and now when I load it up I get...
"Critical Errors - 0
Warnings - 1"
Yippee
The warning is a stairs down that doesn't have a matching stairs up, which of cours I know about and I'm finishing this level before I start the next. Now to finish the inhabitants

OK, a relay is basically a switch that takes an input and spits out one or more outputs. Under most simple cases such as the party stepping on a pad to open a door, or putting a key in a lock to open a door, you don't need to use them.

But what about complicated setups? Say you want to make a shooter that permanently spits out fireballs every 2 seconds once the party has triggered them. There's no easy way to do that without a relay, because you would need the shooter to somehow continually activate itself -- which by now you will know can't be done.

So in this case what you would need is this:

1) The floorpad trigger
2) The shooter
3) A relay that triggers the shooter, and also triggers itself

The code for this might look like this (I haven't bothered with coordinates and directions to make it simpler):
OK, so how does this work? Well, the party steps on the trigger, item 100. This in turn sends an ACTIVATE command to items 101 and 102.

Item 101 is a relay that sends a DESTROY command to item 100, the floorpad. This prevents the floorpad from ever being activated again.

Item 102 is a relay that sends an ACTIVATE command to itself (102) and also the shooter (103). The DELAY parameter waits exactly two seconds before performing the ACTIVATE. In this way you can see that the RELAY controls the continuous shooter: every two seconds it fires the shooter and activates itself which waits two seconds and fires the shooter and activates itself, which waits two seconds and fires the shooter and activates itself... etc.

Basically, if you are trying to do something and can't manage it using simple triggers, you probably need a relay, or a series of relays. And maybe counters too, but I won't get in to that yet.

Does that help at all?

Brilliant answer Gambit - this sort of thing, in that sort of style (question followed by example answer followed by explanation) would be perfect for the "Definitive guide" (IMHO).

High praise indeed! Thanks George!

Can you clarify something please? Is the DESTROY command necessary in the scenario above? Does the FLOORITEM_TRIGGER continue to trigger the relays if you keep stepping on it and it hasn't been destroyed? What would happen to the timers on the relay if it's continually activated in this way?

Aye cool that does seem to make sense now Gambit I suppose I'll have to wait till I'm trying to make a more complicated setup before I see whether I truly comprehend but it does seem straightforward enough
Out of interest, it says "DELAY=(12)", so does that mean that one second is 6 whatevers? Or was that a typo that was meant to be 2?

6 whatevers, exactly! The whatevers are actually 'game ticks', i.e. the number of game cycles to occur every second. Bit complicated to explain, but just remember that 6 ticks=1 second.

Ooh btw Gambit I posted my dungeon to you again yesterday (probably when it still had those trigger errors), but this morning I had an e-mail saying it had been delayed. So if you recieve one from me with my dungeon attached it's probably a bit out of date But play it if you want

Another minor problem I've just crashed headlong into - what's the command to give an item charges? I've been getting errors saying it expects charge number X but has found 0.

And with Gambits permission, I will copy and paste it straight in there

Gambit?

Eh, what, I don't follow? Permission to do what? You don't need my permission to do anything!

Another minor problem I've just crashed headlong into - what's the command to give an item charges? I've been getting errors saying it expects charge number X but has found 0.

Easier than you might think:
You'll get a warning if you give a non-standard charge to an item, e.g. if you give a charge of more than 1 to a Magic Box, but the dungeon will compile and play no problems.

BTW, I didn't get your newest dungeon...

Ahh okies I did wonder if the command was something like that. It was saying I gave them a "non-standard charge" or something 'cause I hadn't given them any charge since until seeing the error message I didn't know you had to But yeah the dungeon works fine and I've played it through on a quick test run (ie one character legging it all the way through and trying every button, trigger etc to see if they work).
I've started drawing out the next level but it's REALLY hot atm and I think my brain has melted and it's also about half eleven pm so I can't think of any vaguely interesting ideas for puzzles etc. But you can have a go at the dungeon so far if you like Gambit.

...

I've just removed all the bugs and thus the dungeon has 0 critical errors and 0 warnings (woo). It only goes to level four, and level four itself is a bit...er...small, but I only made it so I wouldn't have the "pit drops to nowhere" bug So I can send you the proper RTC file rather than text file...damn wyh's your e-mail addy just a bunch of numbers lol I have to look it up again now

That email address is anti-spam: it can't be guessed by a bot so it's a bit more secure!

Just to help you out a bit more too: if you're not sure about how something works, just open up one of the original TXT files in notepad and do an Edt/Find and look for a keyword. For example, type 'shooter' into the Find dialogue box and it'll take you to the first one it finds.

Ahh yeah I didn't think of using that...I did look through DMO/CSB text files for something if it wasn't in Andyboy's guide and I knew where it was in the file, but couldn't be buggered if I couldn't think of a specific example since those files are so big

And another little thingy I'd like to know - is it possible to change the amount of damage monsters do, or is that fixed depending on the monster type?

but you can change the amount of strength that a monster has so that it is "easy" to kill or even impossibly hard to kill

Ah cool but how do you do that?

Way back...

Can you clarify something please? Is the DESTROY command necessary in the scenario above? Does the FLOORITEM_TRIGGER continue to trigger the relays if you keep stepping on it and it hasn't been destroyed? What would happen to the timers on the relay if it's continually activated in this way?

It's not strictly necessary, however I would strongly advocate it being there as it vastly improves the clarity of what the pad does. The reason why it doesn't have to be there is that (to prevent nasty timing and recursion issues) a trigger that is already triggereing itself (i.e. the relay), can't be triggered again with an action of activate. I don't recommend relying on this behaviour however; it's purely there to stop nasty bugs and it isn't obvious from reading the text files that this should happen (in fact you'd expect the opposite!).

Hey, look, me again
Had a look through the Phantom file and...I don't get it
Well, it looks like that's for adding a whole new monster in to replace an old one, but I just want to edit the amount of damage a monster is going to do when it hits you. I'm sure it's possible but I don't know how

You can't do that without cloning an existing monster. Check out this thread for the valid attack types:

http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... 8&start=60

Hmm...looks like I'll have to "Clone" a lot of monsters...
But what if, say, I were to have (for example) a Black Knight right at the beginning and therefore didn't want him to do much damage, but there would be more Black Knights much later on who would do "normal" Black Knight damage, ie hitting really hard? I wouldn't be able to clone it becuase I want normal Black Knights later on so wouldn't the clone replace the originals? Or has my poor little uncomplicated brain smegged something up in there?

Clones don't replace the originals, they are new unique items that inherit the properties of whatever you cloned, but can also be changed. So for example, you could clone MONSTER_KNIGHT_ANIMATED to produce new variations that might be called MONSTER_KNIGHT_BLACK_WEAK and MONSTER_KNIGHT_BLACK_STRONG and you just change the properties you want to be different--in this case the attack strength.

When you want to place them in the dungeon, you just use the unique name you gave them.

Make sense?

Umm, yeah, looks like it
I'll just have to make sure I do the right commands to add the clones and stuff...don't have time now but will maybe try later or tomorrow