Odd quirk with CSBuild816

[PaulH]

After converting a dungeon from DMPC I noticed the following oddities. I left a lot of stairs in that led nowhere (DMute didn't complain!) but when I tried to remove them with CSBuild, I got the message 'strange there are no stairs on the other floor'. The pointer then freezes into 'empty cell' mode and paints empty cells wherever you move the pointer! Eventually it says 'opening that cell would make a stairway invalid' and the pointer then points as normal.

The same happened when I tried to edit/delete the end game pad: it said it was an unknown object and did the same bizzare freeze thing as above. Also sometimes when asking it to check things (monsters esp.) it says 'not implemented'

The dungeon was Black Flame

[Antman]

I got stairs leading to nowhere in 3 places in original conflux after i converted it, two of them may have supposed to have been there, but the other one i found was a little odd, you had to move sideways to get off it and then it is invisible from the side and you could accidently walk down it.

[Paul Stevens]

Antman: It souds like the Staiway is facing the
wrong direction. I think there is a north/south versus
east/west variable in the stair's definition.
CSBuild checks this when you 'Check|Pits and Stairs'.

[Antman]

Its facing the right way at the bottom, but at the top you can move directly forward or right of it and when walking toward it from the right you can't see it untill you walk down it. Maybe it was what Zyx intented?

[Zyx]

Could be... where are these stairs located? At level 0?


Anyway, there is not much point in converting conflux into CSBwin, I already took the effort and it resulted in Conflux II.

[Paul Stevens]

I posted CSBuild 0.817

============================================
Version 0.817
--Discontinue drag operation when mouse button is up,
even if we did not see it go up. Like when a message
box is displayed.
--Color blocking Trick Walls with a red cast and non-
blocking Trick Walls with a green cast.

[PaulH]

Thankyou Mr Stevens, these additions have been most valuable. However I have other suggestions...

Graphical difference between active and inactive teleporters would be a bonus

Graphical difference between monsters and objects would mean general reading would be easier

Why can't I place a door in a cell not ajoined by two walls? DM will allow this no problems.

The program obviously reads item names from an internal database. Is there any way of changing the lists so a modified graphics.dat can be linked to this database to make modified .dats easier to read? That is new item names that may have been created?

CSBWIn seems to correct problems that might actually not be problems, ie pit destinations, stairs etc... Is there any way of overiding this parental influence so we can create things that maybe not crash the engine? A pit into a wall will work under certain circumstances. A warning is all well and good, but the designer should have the ultimate descision

[Paul Stevens]

Heh! Heh!!!!! Heh!!!!!!!

God! What have I done to deserve this? I fix something
and get inundated

I cannot attend to all these things at once. Let me say a
couple of words about each. Then you start a new thread
for the ONE that you would like to see me work on.

Active/inactive teleporters. If I were to do this then I
would modify the bitmap file to include a lot more tiles
and modify the code to be more general. Quite a lot of
design and implementation work. Several weeks. Perhaps
well worth the effort. I am not against it. Perhaps a
palette of tiles like the palette in MSPaint.

Graphical differences between monsters, objects. (and
actuators perhaps). See answer to previous question.

Mal-placed doors. I can certainly add an Edit|Options
option to allow doors anywhere. If it crashes CSBwin then
I will fix CSBwin. I have no objection to this. I don't have
to like it, do I?

Item names could be read from a text file. I would envision
a standard file like this:

001 APPLE
002 SCREAMER SLICE
003 WORM ROUND

The program would use the internal names unless the
file were present, would complain loudly if the file was
formatted incorrectly. And you could modify it as
follows:

001 APPLE=ORANGE
002 SCREAMER SLICE=DOUGHNUT
003 WORM ROUND=TEA CUP

This seems a worthy suggestion. I rather like it.

Creating all things that don't crash CSBwin. Wait a minute!!!!
One thing at a time. I cannot answer "Why can't we do anything?"
I think the Pits and Stairs are already allowed in the Edit|Options.

[Zyx]

A suggestion for the "Item names could be read from a text file."
Dmextract already generates a txt file with the list of all the items.
If you could use such a file, anybody could extract it from the desired graphics.dat and would obtain the correct names.

[PaulH]

"You wait for ages then three come along at once..."
Sod's law.
I shall start new threads for each, but firstly do others agree with what I say? It is your programme, so what you change is down to you. But if only I like an idea then I can't see the point in you spending a few weeks changing something just for one person's benefit. Just ideas. And being a Brit I like to moan a lot.

[PicturesInTheDark]

Teleporters: I like it because it will be better to get a dungeon layout in one look, but I'm for keeping colours rather low - better to have few coloured bits to focus on but if it gets all varicoloured it would rather confuse than clarify.

Monsters/Objects: I agree, again with the constraint that colours should not be necessary here - simply different signs should be fine.

Doors: May be nice for some riddles, am neither in favour nor against it as long as the engine will stay stable.

Regards, PitD