Dungeon Master Forum

It's good to have RTC back on the scene. I played the first level and here are some impressions:

1) Water puddles (they're puddles, right?) should be a little transparent. For now they're the uglier decoration of DM.
2) Wall texts viewed from far should at least respect the length of the text, the number of lines, even if unreadable.
3) Comparing to DM for PC, RTC doesn't use all the screen: there is a great black space above and below the active interface.
4) This is the same in Dm, but several floorobjects like crack or moss, have a correct view and another, when you rotate 90 degrees to see the same tile, just don't fit anymore with the floor pattern.
I wonder if it is possible to rotate them also...
5) Each time I drop an object on the floor, then take it and dropit again, its position is never the same. Is it on purpose? It gives sometimes strange stacking results for piles of objects. (See the 2 cheeses in the room with several flasks, scrolls and 2 screamers on level 1)
6) I noticed that when the party is teleported on a monster, the monster is pushed away instead of being
instantly killed. Is it voluntary? I remember using a teleporting device in the worms level in DM to kill several worms...
7) In RTC, monsters always move from a half tile to another?
In DM, a monster one tile and half away from you (that is, on the rear part of the 2nd tile) could step on the front part of the first tile. For now it's too easy to slay monsters:
I hit them when they're in the rear part and I dodge when they're in the front part.

About (6) :
I remember there was a problem where teleporting onto a monster crashed the game, this must have been george's solution. I kinda think its better than insta killing the mob, but how does it work if there is no where to push the monster? ie teleport into a one by one room with a closed and locked door..... Of course why would you put a monster there? Then again can you always control where the monsters are, if someone changes the number of monsters in the init file?

A brief set of answers:

1) The puddles look very odd when transparent - as you point out it's an obvious thing to do (so much so that I tried it in about V0.5 or so) but I reverted it back to DM-style very quickly.

2) Unfortunately that's not too easy, but I'll look into it again.

3) This has been answered elsewhere, but it's because my pixels are square and the RTC resolution of twice 320x200 just doesn't fit with modern graphics cards who's nearest resolution is 640x480. I could stretch the pixels vertically to fill the screen but there doesn't seem much point.

4) Very tricky - I don't think I'll ever do this

5) The behaviour is by design - personally I think it's more realistic than always dropping things to be pixel-perfect, which is why I have written it that way!

6) Again, this is by design. If you teleport (or drop through a pit) onto the same square as a monster then it will try and move to one of the 4 adjacent squares. If all of them are blocked then it will die as per DM.

7) Once more, this is by design - it's necessary to allow monsters to be independent without adding huge swathes of complex logic.

I think I remember someone telling me about non standard Vesa modes that can be used to support things like 320x200 and 640x400 as well as some wacky ones like 325x325 and so on.. If you would like I can get that info for you..