Dungeon Master Forum

George, I already asked you this, but I'd like to understand it better: what's the importance of the graphic engine in RTC?
i'm talking about the dungeon view only (the window with walls, objects and creatures).
I guess the data of your dungeon is principally hold in matrices and lists of variables.
With this data, RTC draws the correct view with the function drawviewdungeon(); for example.

Question 1: Now, is it possible to make it external? I mea, would the data still be accessible by an external function?
What I have in mind is the possibility for any good programmer to create alternate drawviewdungeon() functions.
For example, for a map view, an eagle view, and specially, a 3d view.

The only thing needed is where to find data of the dungeon, the core programm would still be unknown. If I remember well, Ryan suggested something like this a long time ago on the Dm Clone board.

Of course I'm just interested in the possibility, I'd just like to understand: I won't program it myself!
Though, if you find the idea worth it, and if a coder is willing to do it, well, the idea was sounding too interesting to be not mentionned.

I know the loading of the bitmaps is a problem, but a simple(is it?) option in the .ini would allow then to choose the drawviewdungeon().

Hmmm, I hope I'm not talking nonsense!

I know this is a question for George, but just had to post a reply.

I think the functionality that you describe would be way too complicated to achieve using this kind of 2D engine. The problem is that the engine relies so heavily on all the data files (bitmaps) to be drawn with one perspective only - the two work together and you can't really separate them out. To write a function to draw the view using a different perspective would also require ALL the bitmaps to be re-drawn by hand for that view. Add on top of that the layer ordering, etc, and it's quite a job.

I'm sure what you're asking isn't impossible, but doesn't really seem worthwhile. For the amount of work involved, you'd be better off coding a true 3D engine from scratch...

Hmm interesting idea though - having a 3-d isometric view (leave everythign else intact, including icons around and picking up things close to the party with mouse, and movement, etc
You could have the party visible, and the surrounding 7x7 squares (ghosted out if needs be) around them.

Hmm, having other engines that also ran off of the RTC text files could be nice...so dungeons could be portable between engines, and you almost choose your display mode/style of gaming.

the problem would be graphics - you would have to design a new set of textures for each engine...but once the code is released i suppose a RTC clone (hehehehe) could be started lol

dagnabit george I want to be able to edit my own posts. I know you can set that, I have my own EZ boards =p

Anyways by code I meant the dungeon txt file format.