Monster colors

[Big-J-Q]

This may have been covered here before, but here goes anyway...

Will it be possible to alter colors of single monsters without creating new graphics? I would like to have CSB-worms and black dragons in my coming dungeons.

(You *ARE* aware that the CSB-worms are not purple, right?)

[cowsmanaut]

well, the only current option is a new graphics.. now having a new graphics is not so bad. I don't know if you ever did a GFX override but the overridden pics load faster since they don't need to decompressed or scaled or antialiased..

So if you want to add in your tan worms and blackish dragons.. there is nothing stopping you. just take a screen capture of them even and then put the 'power pink' in the places you don't need make sure to check the size of the image in the bitmaps.txt and there you go..

[Big-J-Q]

Yes, but that is, in my opinion, a very inconvenient way of achieving my goals.

In DM, if you put certain monsters to levels they are originally not meant for, the game would change their colors.

Besides, if I chose to modify bitmaps, would I need to take a screenshots from all sides of the monster? (I think I know the answer to this, but asking never hurts)

[beowuuf]

As far as I know there is already a graphics ripper for DM (check out the encyclopoedia pages or forums...it's a programme by Brian...can't rememebr his second name...).

The colour override you are talking about is way more complex than in DM, since the colour palette has shifted from 256 colours to 16.7 million..., and the displayed colours from 16 distinct colours to...16.7 million? So even if you told it to override the red of a draogn to black, then have to match a range to range...I'm guessing this would make it reeeeeeeeeeeeeally slow when unpacking and changing the bitmap on loading.

[sucinum]

just for he fun of it, the worms in csb ARE purple.
BUT in the beginning level, they are turned orange by the flying eyes, and lateron in the game they are turned red by a dragon (because there is only 1 monster colour available at each stage, and the "mightier" colour is set for all monsters...read more about that on the DMute forum)

[cowsmanaut]

now there are a few things mentioned already but I'm goint o recap a little here and make sure it's all clear.

The colour shift that caused dragons to change brown and what not was simply due to the pallet selection of that level. Remember it only had 16 colours. There has been a large discussion on this and though it was in a 256colour mode on the PC they still used the orriginal pallets. This colour set changed everytime you changed levels and everytime you reached a certain level of darkness. No as mentioned above the difference between the low 16 or even 256 is that we are now using a whack of colours and in true colour and even high colour pallet information is far more complicated for George to just shift colours to a non-contiguous string of colours just to recolour an image.

There is a ripper made by Brian and witha naming convention provided by ZYX. It's called DMDecode and was built for the
DMClone project which is pretty much in permanent slumber however it can still be found there for download. I think it's in the uploads sectoin of the page.

<a href="http://enzofr.free.fr">enzofr.free.fr</a>

last but not least, remember that you need to scale this stuff up to(more or less double look in the bitmaps.txt for exact sizes) 640x480 since they are for a 320x200 screen size right now. you must also poke out all the unneeded bits with power pink (255,0,255) make sure not to any smudge or blur tools after the pink has been applied or you will get pink bits all over your dragon.

[Big-J-Q]

Ah, of course, I should have known this... I knew it applied to the original DM, didn't think it would do the same in CSB... I just haven't played CSB enough to knew about red worms etc. (George, when can we have the CSB-dungeon? Though dealing with bugs should (and probably are) your priority number one)

[beowuuf]

I actually think that it might get even more people interested and playtesting if the CSB dungeon was released...with the new porting feature added and the original DM dungeon in place it has such potential!

[Big-J-Q]

Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE to have the CSB-dungeon, since I've never played it. But as far as I understand, the CSB-dungeon is a lot more complicated than the DM. So, is it wiser to fix the remaining bugs (if any) from the DM and the RTC-engine, and then move to CSB? George might drown in work and complaints, if the CSB was released.

However, you are perfectly right about more people getting interested in this project. I might also keep the rest of us interested. Playtesting is getting boring; I've completed DM 3-4 times during the last six months, the dungeon has lost its capability to keep me awake.

[beowuuf]

I would think that when george releases the csb dungeon he should create a second forum for dungeon bugs differences, and have the original for 'engine bugs'
I think a) as you say it's annoying to playtest on the same dungeon, and b) the more complex csb will of course put more test on the engine to make sure all the bugs are worked out - there would be nothing worse than having the engine and editor out befroe new dungeons throw up more complex faliings...

At the moment it;'s little things that are being thrown up, like dungeon things, errors due to fixes, and the old favoutires (like stamina, food deplection and so on) that needs more playtesting to tweak right, not anything large.

[BRL]

If you want to play CSB, why not download the csb conversion from the clones section of the DMCSBEncyclopeadia.

The src is also there so you can see how it works.

Thanks to Paul R. Stevens for dissasembling and converting to MSVC6 the atari version of CSB

BRL

[cowsmanaut]

am I wrong or isn't CSB already offered? I know I went through the prison and the oracle... I didn't go back to play the dungeon yet though.. however I assumed that it was there.. or am I sadly mistaken??

[Big-J-Q]

I've tried CSBwin, and personally, I don't like it. It's just... I don't know, but I'll wait for George's CSB.

[beowuuf]

No, CSB dungeon is still only on george's hard drive..last update he only had to do the puzzles (oops, only! ha, that's quite a bit of work). But still everything else neccessary for it (hint oracle, prison, portability, monsters, weapons, magical map for amiga style game) are all in place.

As for CSB for windows, the newest versions are good - 640x480 display, good movement key layout. It's emulating the atari version of the game, and has the same place as DM has - it's the original and can be dmuted, but you can't expand it beyond and doesn't have the features RTC does.

I'm happy that Paul has taken the time to do it, and I'm still eager to play through it on RTC too!