Dungeon Master Forum

My feverish little brain has been thinking about a puzzle, and I wondered about the graphics for it.

The situation: the party is in a 5 wide by whatever room, with lots of evil creatures around. The main sub-villain is at the end of the room on a raised dais, laughing nastily. After dispacting the henchmen, the party dart up the stairs and heroicaly dispatch the gloating one too. Step onto dais, look smug and heroic, survey the now empty hall, then run like mad as the hall starts to fall apart in typical action movie ending cliche.

Building it: The hall is a standard room, there is a flight of up stairs at the end. The stair graphic is such that only the first few steps appear, there is no wall around it, and for the top of the stair graphic there is merely the villain.
Climbing up the stairs will lead to a 1x1 square with the villain, the stairs down are invisible except for the steps, and beyong is a 5x whatever opening. Standing on the 1x1 sqaure and turning to face the stairs will allow the 5 x whatever 'room' to be seen - each has a floor decoration that makes it look like the floor is of course slightly lower down than it is.

The question: Yep, there is one after all that. Is it possible, using the DM perspective, to create a convincing 'looming' set of graphics for the villaiin standing on the dais when the party is on the floor? And can a decent looking set of floor tiles be made to allow it to seem like the party is looking down on the room when they are on it (it will only be three steps up or so).
Aaaaaaaand, for bonus points, if I decide to let the main villain come down from the dais for the final battle, can there be a convincing floor decoration graphic to represent him standing on the ground below?

Thanks (or apologies?) ... you can see my brain is thinking odd things for RTC already

Well I love questions like these.. no really I do!

Ok this is a fun one and it's something I thought about before so you are in luck because I do have a solution.

The thing is that it depends on abilities of georges engine. I would require an alowance for adding new dungeon graphics not in the sence of overriding the current set but adding to the number of possible elements of a dungeon. For instance a staircase going up in the middle of a room.. well with the current type of staircase it would look weird there is no open side view of a stair case. Now you could make all staircases look as they are open by overriding the image with this new look however what of the others? You may want staircases that look that way. So what you would need is a 'create new Dungeon element' Option.. so you have a list of 3 posible views front side and back or 7 different positions, 2 at distance 1, 2 for distance 2, and 3 for distance 3, foor floor/ceiling elements.

Are you with me so far?

Then once you were done making those images needed for the object. this item would allow you to choose them (we'll do the stairs) so you pick your three images for the stairs _f, _s, and _B. Then you select stairs for item clasification. But you could have chosen wall, teleporter, invisible wall, fountain, door, alcove, altar of V.

For door it would need to know how things open sliding up, sliding down, spliting from the middle..

What defines and alcove? Anywhere you can put something so I suppose that would include sconces and you would have to define then what can fit there and how it looks (IE.. what graphics to load best bet would be an extension like '_A' for it)

The list goes on you see?

So, what can you do right now? well not a whole lot untill you can define 3 different levels for a wall item/walltype.

I will provide a visual representation of how this can be done in a DM style engine.

I'm starting now 5:40pm My time in BC Canada. I'll post it as soon as I'm done (probably about 2 hours max) so if someoen can think of a better way of explaining how the Dungeon element creation thing should work and explain it to George I'll have visuals for you as well.

I'll put it here when it's done
http://chaos.zpc.cz/elements.html

cheers

It's up it only took about an hour. It's pretty basic but should give you an idea.

If you don't get something.. just ask I'll explain further.

Except for the 3 views at distance 3...

I really do hope that you can create arbitrary numbers of different stairs, teleporters, wall objects, etc - I'd assume so, so that going deeper into a dungeon it would be nice to have a different looking set anyway.

Hmm, i've been thinking about the distance thing too. I take it walls are drawn after the floor and ceiling, so you can have very high walls that cover the persepctive?

If invisible walls and walls that only block certain objects are possible, then having wall objects on these walls that ape further distances could be used, that open whenever the party walk near to them (you wouldn't want to design a whole dungeon like that, but might be good for certain areas).

I'm glad someone is thinking abotu these things...I just keep coming up with ideas in my head and try to work out the mechanics...the graphics problems haven't quite gotten into my head yet...

Liike, the idea of having sets of stairs simulating a hill outside that the party are walking down..and they are going into a valley (with creatures, what else!) so you can see the next hill in the 'distance' with the hill gradually getting closer. Nightmare of views?

Right, thanks for giving me something to think about!

The perspective is arbitrary. From the example you can see that the furthest wall can be extened above the regular hight and thus cover the ceiling image.

this can be accomplished with with pits too.. ceiling and floor. just think of the whole screen as a drawing area.. made of different shaped tiles. those tiles can be made any size you want and appear in any location you desire. Just remember always what order they are drawn in.

As for the 3 levels part.. there are three levels of view. You can see up to 3 floor objects (pits walls buttons etc) in front of you. No more as the next set is 'in darkness' is that a litte more clear?