Dungeon Master Forum

I guess this might be tricky, but would it be possible to have some objects permanently bright? For example, the fireball explosion gets darker the further away it is, and can look pretty muddy. It would be cool if it was always drawn with maximum brightness.

ah but then it would need to travel further. or else it would go so far and then just blink out.I try to think of the darkness as more of an evil fog.. banished by the party.

Well, during the last weeks I did not have the time to test V0.20, but there is a bug with the light in V0.19, which I suppose is also in V0.20 since no one posted it so far: If you have no or only dim light, you see fireball explosions bright, as it should be, but you also see those changes in brightness if the fireballs explode in a neighboring yet entirely secluded room. If you enter for example the starting room after having retrieved the green gem from Ros and your light is getting dark, you see the flickering light of the continuos explosions from Ros.
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the fireballs are supposed to effect the light of adjacent walls. I think it's an option in your startup config file.

It would be neat to be able to set brightness greater than 100. Perhaps a brightness of 200 would be pure white.

This would create a use for the darkness spell, too... a place so bright that you needed to cast darkness in order to be able to see. (Maybe in the presence of some kind of intense magic or something.)

Another interesting option would be to specify the light as an RGB value, not just one number. Then you could "tint" the dungeon levels in interesting ways (a fire-themed place having an orange light to it, etc.)

I'm not sure how hard that would be, but since it seems like the brightness is being dynamically generated, and RTC uses a truecolor screenmode, it seems like it'd be pretty doable.

As far as I know, RTC simply uses a black bitmap to cover the dungeon view and changes the levels of transparency to simulate darkness. There's certainly no reason why this bitmap couldn't be tinted the way you suggest.

I like your suggestion about the 'mega brightness', but if it were simply a white bitmap (as above), I think for it to look good it would need to have a procedural additive blend with the underlying view. In fact this also applies to the black bitmap, and has been asked for before, but I'm not sure that George knows how to do it.

This kind of additive blending would be much better, and could be applied to things like fireballs and explosions which would make them nice and bright and more realistic, rather than the muddy effect that's currently there. However, it would mean fairly fundamental changes to the engine, and also the dungeon format would have to change again to support extra transparency parameters for these objects.

Well, george did say speak now about format-changing suggestions : )
I too like the idea of tinting - lots of applications

Depends how complex you want to make it, but you could have torches etc with tinted light for atmosphere, and then have things like some switch graphics coloured so that they are less visible to that tint than to a full light or mystic light

You could have monsters that are harder to see in a bright conditions too (outdoors in the snow?) or in dull tinted conditions (dark red dragon deep in a volcano)

That sounds really good, I hope George can do this.
Besides, the dark explosions of the fireballs always annoyed me.
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I mentioned the permanently bright objects privately to George the other day -- thought I'd bump this post in anticipation of a "Done for v0.35" reply...

And lo, here it is...Done for V0.35.

Each bitmap now has a "SHADE" parameter which determines if it should be shaded with distance from the party. For all objects apart from spells and explosion clouds it's set to TRUE.

Whoa, you really are the man! What has brought on this fit of enhancements Mr.G? I actually never expected half of this to be done!

I've always been tinkering in the background with the RTC engine to make things easier to customise. Alot of that work produced no externally visible difference, but now they're done alot of the requested enhancements are easy to do...so I'm doing them.