Dungeon Master Forum

1. What happens if a moveable wall activates on top of the party/a monster?
2. What happens if a monster generator in a confined area runs out of space to generate monsters?
3. Am I right in thinking that you can't yet use custom graphics for objects apart from the icon and the dungeon graphics (I can't seem to use graphics for flying versions of a new weapon)? Is there a syntax that RTC will accept for new objects that's currently not supported by the editor?
4. I've heard that if you swallow chewing gum, it sticks to your insides and you die. Is this true?
5. In contemporary dungeon layouts (for a DM-style game), is there any point whatsoever in putting shields in? VI altars? Does anyone use these things? (I've been agonising about the altars all day).
6. What happens if you toggle a relay? does it just send an activate on every second trigger activation?

1. Nothing, they exist in it - from outside
a party would see a wall, i believe as in PC DM. But the monster can still attack and be attacked as normal

2. Nothing : ) In PC DM it used to queue the activations up, in RTC i believe it rejects it and doesn't generate

3. I thought you could alter any weapon's graphics. Look at the examples in notepad, perhaps, to answer both your questions

4. Yes. On tuesdays only though

5. Some poeple like sheilds, and there is a defense increase for using them. Some people liek the look of them too. As for VI altars, definitely times when they are used. Always depends on a person's playing style, but especially in RTC where you jhave multiple saves, there is no reason not to slug it out with a reduced party to challenge yourself.

6. Hmm, i would think so, but can't answer for certain.

7. Yes. *psychic*

Thanks for the quick response.

Re #1. Can the party/monster move out of the wall, or are they stuck?

Re #3, I seem to be able to change the icon graphic no problem, and the basic dungeon graphic, BUT the flying graphics aren't taking hold. It'll happily go through the process in the editor but won't actually make any change/addition to the text file beyond BITMAP_ICON and BITMAP_DUNGEON to tell RTC which graphics to use. This means that my nice spears end up being thrown broadside (as a staff or basic object) in game, which isn't exactly the effect that I was after. The orange example doesn't help here because it only changes the icon and dungeon bitmaps (BITMAP_ICON_ORANGE, BITMAP_DUNGEON_ORANGE).

Re #5. Shields (held offhand) didn't do anything in the original DM. Has this been fixed in RTC? Do they actually contribute to your overall protection?

Re #7. Blimey. Really? Who'd've thought, eh?

More quick replies!

1. They can move out of the wall, as can you

5. Shields held in either hand increase you basic armour factor (the one you can't see as the engine never displays it) . Using the 'block' option increase this by a substancial amount, i believe. See the handbook on the encyclopaedia page, and also there is rain's DM/CSB edit tool on the tolls forums that shows these thigns. This is for original DM, not sure how RTC impliments it though, but think it's similar!

3. There is a way, so just a case of gettign the right syntax - like bitmap_sword_side or bitmap_sword_flying

7. I know! : )

#3: Dump the RTC.EXE into Notepad or Wordpad so that you can view all the visible ASCII text -- somewhere near the bototm you'll be able to read off all the parameters that RTC supports for cloning, etc...

#7: You're both wrong. It's a definite maybe.

Re Beowulf #5: Ah, okay. Going by the items list on the encyclopedia, it suggests that shields never get factored in when determining the armour value and were thus useless. I assumed that this was up there with rust monsters in the original DM.

Re Beowulf's slyly repositioned #3 and Gambit's #3: Okay, i think i've got this; looks like it's DUNGEON, FLYING_FROM, FLYING_SIDE and FLYING_TO. Cool - I'll try this presently.


edit: yep, this works. need to get a bit of tweaking done - my spears are now going blunt end first, which could easily take someone's eye out - but is theoretically working. thanks for the help, guys!

Thought of another one:

8. Tell me if I've got this right. If you use a trigger to operate a teleporter, the teleporter will teleport only anything that meets its parameters, right? (say it's operated by MONSTER but activated on the same square by PARTY, the party stepping on that square will turn the teleporter on, but the teleporter will still only teleport monsters. Is this right? Am I clever? Do I get a cookie?).

Re Gambit's #7: well, of course, you WOULD say that.

5. Shields were a mystery, but people are finding things out. I may be mis-remembering, but the threads should all be around somewhere : )

8. Yes, in all cases.

For the record, I think I agree with and can confirm as correct everything above (apart from 7, obviously).

For 5 - Shields are implemented in RTC. Everything has an intrinsic armour value which will protect you against attacks; shields have a relatively high one, which is increased further when doing a block move.

This is good to know (especially about the shields).

One problem that I've found with changing graphics is that it works fine, but then doesn't hold if you save from the editor (so the editor doesn't recognise it at all). I've added it to my list of "things to do before publishing" list, right in between "include adolescent male fantasy-orientated pictures, that frankly border on soft porn, for portraits" and "remove the pink dots/speckles/outlines from all the bitmaps because they're just not quite ff00ff" (never imagined i'd find myself using paint in preference to photoshop).

Once again, thanks to everyone for quick and authoritative replies.

Can you give me a specific example of where the editor saves the wrong data out for images and I'll fix it for V0.29...

No problem - just let me know if it happens again. In the meantime I'll look at the code in the editor that saves out the bitmap text on the off-chance I can spot an error there immediately.

while i'm here, couple of other things:

9. How does the base/fire strength of doors relate to how strong the relative attack is? do they have hit points, or is it a break/not break decision made on a case-by-case basis?

10. has anyone ever done any research into how far an object is thrown based on strength/weight? Is it a fairly linear relationship between the two? (I ask this for "how far can you throw?" puzzles like the one in DM on the wizard eye level). Does throw (the attack) throw things differently/further than simply throwing them?

9 - Doors don't have hit points - the attack is either strong enough to break it, or it isn't. The reason why doors sometimes take a few hits to destroy is purely down to random distribution of the strength of any given attack.

10 - Yes; lots and lots. I must have thrown hundreds, if not thousands of items in DM to work out roughly what the mechanics were so I could code them into RTC! To answer the specific question, choosing throw (or shoot) as an attack option, will project the item with a greater strength (and therefore go further and do more damage) than using the mouse in the dungeon view.

Re #9: but in terms of the numbers specifically - is there a rule of thumb whereby you can say "this door can be broken by an ee fireball but not an on one because it has fire:x"? (I'm happy to work it out myself if need be, I was just wondering if there was a simple rule to it).

Re #10: Again, is there a simple rule (1+strength/weight/20=distance thrown)? I'm happy to work it out for myself, but things like this suck up a lot of time, so if anyone already knows...i'm interested generally, but specifically ask the question because i'm considering the possibility of throwing a certain item down a corridor and getting an effect - treasure, monster spawn, fireball - depending on the distance it goes, with the more advantageous effects not necessarily being from the strongest characters.

9 - each individual door item (as opposed to a generic door object) has a strength property for fire and another one for bashing; this is the percentage resistance it has to breaking. For bash, it's a function of the minimum strength required by the character (e.g. a door with 50% bash strength can only be broken by a character with a strength of 128 of higher); for fire, it's a direct mapping to the %age strength of the fireball (this decreases with distance from the caster so it's difficult to map this onto a rune strength but you get the general idea).

10 - yes, but I can't remember what it is off hand! I'm sure there's a square root in there and it's dependent on a characters dex as well though.

Re #9: Fab, thanks a million. Just wanted to make sure I was using appropriate values for this stuff.

Re #10: Good enough for me; all I really need to do is a quick test with the max and min strength & dex values for my characters and then i can range all my triggers in between the two points. I hadn't considered dex, though; i'll be sure to factor it into my calculations.

and another one:

11. Is there a practical or coded limit to the number of items that you can put on one tile? I want to put multiple alcoves that are triggered by different objects in one place, and just want to check whether there are any limitations before I get started.

Once again, thank you for all the help.

11 - There's no coded limit (items are stored in a linked list), but there's bound to be a practical one due to performance drawing multiple alcoves on screen at once. No idea where that might be though, but I doubt it will be less than 100!

If performance is really an issue, then you could have clone the alcove and create a new one with no graphics. Then on the tile you have one real alcove (so it looks right) and all the other ones as the cloned one; that way the screen would be drawn very quickly indeed and the practical limit would more likely be in the 1000s...

Hmm. Cunning. I'm always interested in doing things in the most efficient way, whether there's an issue or not. I'll give it a go. Thanks.

12. Is there a (hidden) active/inactive state for triggers? Can I set a trigger to deactivate and expect it to not work?

13. Assuming the answer to #12 is yes/yes, do triggers (and more to the point, switches) become invisible when deactivated?

14. If you have a teleporter on top of a pit, will you always teleport before you fall, or does it depend on the order in which they appear on the tile?

15. If you have a trigger on top of a pit which is activated by PARTY ON only, do you activate it before you fall down the pit, or are you effectively only "over" it? Again, is this affected at all by the order in which these things appear on the tile?

16. Is there a luck statistic in RTC? If so, how is it generated for new characters, and can you set it yourself? If not, what does a rabbit's foot do?

17. Say you have a teleporter that's triggered to toggle on, toggle off, and it teleports an object to a square which also has a teleporter set to toggle on, toggle off by the same trigger, will the object be teleported twice? (I think the answer to this is yes, but I'm just trying to get a more accurate bead on how this stuff works).

18. (Just remembered this one, but it's been at the back of my mind and I haven't got around to testing it yet). Say you fall through a pit onto a teleporter. Do you take falling damage before you're teleported? If not, does your momentum get preserved (so you fall, teleport, and then take falling damage)?

19. Does falling effectively take just one action? What I'm asking is, say you fall through 5 levels, does anything else happen in the dungeon while you're falling?

12. No

13. No (and anyway, they have no graphics so you wouldn't be able to tell!

14. Depends on the order. Everything is processed strictly in the order they appear on the tile (bottom upwards), i.e. items that appear earlier in the text file will be actioned before those that appear later....

15. ...which means that such a trigger would never be activated as the party would have falled down the pit first.

16. Yes, Random, No. Increases it! (and cursed stuff decreases it)

17. Yes. Be careful with this though. If the second teleporter goes back to the first tile, you'll hit an infinite loop and blow the stack!

18. Yes (I think - you'll have to test it to be sure though!). It's not clever enough to remember momentum (but it does calculate it - you'll sustain much more damage if you fall through lots of pits carrying lots of items than you would going naked down 1 pit - don't think about it .

19. I think so. I'm pretty sure that this is just like the teleporter question and each fall is performed in series in a recursive set of function calls 0 in other words your fall will complete before anything else happens in the dungeon.

Phew.

I'm going to have to think of some harder questions

#13 also referred to switches (wall switches), which do have a physical appearance. what happens with those?

Thanks for all the responses, by the way. I do actually test an awful lot of stuff for myself, but sometimes I fancy a definitive answer. I was thinking about the theoretical circumstance, "what if you had a bunch of lined up pits with flashing teleporters on them?" as a means of teleporting the party in an unpredictable way (and potentially have the party end up going up rather than down - nyuk nyuk) - not something I'm planning to use, but it did get me thinking that I didn't know precisely how it'd work.

Anyway, the upshot appears to be that pits are categorised in exactly the same way as triggers and teleporters (in that the order is significant) - I thought that they might have been a special case. There are certainly things that I've done in the past that didn't work that may have been down to the triggers etc. being in the wrong order.

More questions:

20. Regarding the above questions and just for the sake of crystal clarity - does the situation change if there's a delay involved on the first trigger in the queue and none on the second, even though the first might activate a teleporter to whisk the party away or destroy the second trigger?

21. Can you, in theory, use animation for any bitmap? (say you wanted to animate an ICON or a DUNGEON bitmap, for example). I'm having a bit of difficulty with new graphics/objects at the moment anyway, so am interested to know if this might cause a particular problem.

22. Can you target anything for a DESTROY (for example, a pit - you should be able to, but a pit is a hole in the ground, and how do you destroy a hole? )? Can actual objects be targeted? If so, can you then destroy an object in a character's possession? Are there any general warnings that I should heed about using destroy?

13 - Not sure

20. Yes it does. The first trigger would be put on a queue to be handled at a future time, the second would then be actioned. For example, if you had a teleporter with a delay on it then a pit, I think the party would fall down the pit, then (after the delay), the teleporter would do it's business and nothing would happen (as the party were no longer on the tile).

I'm sure there's a whole bunch of bugs in there waiting to be discovered though

21. Absolutely. In practice too!

22. Can't remember, but I believe so. The target is the item itself and so it wouldn't matter where (or what) it was in the dungeon, it would just get deleted. Again, I can see lots of bugs being found here when an item is removed when it's in use so lots of general warnings; use with extreme caution. In principle though, it should work!

Thanks again for the quick replies. One more:

23. Is damage a function of weapon weight, fully or partially? Is there a difference between how thrown damage and melee damage is calculated with regard to the effect of weight? Would a zero weight weapon do any damage at all? Is there any reason why RTC might get a bit snippish about your changing the weight of cloned items?

[yes, I realise that this is effectively four questions]

23a. Can't remember exactly - it's certainly a factor though. All other things being equal (specifically and internal "sharpness" factor), a heavier weapon will do more damage than a lighter one. When doing "bash" type attacks (as opposed to "bladed" ones), weight is by far the dominant factor.

23b. Yes definitely otherwise a fully laden chest would do more damage than a poison dart - for thrown items, weight is certainly part of the equation, but it's a far less important one (than say the dex of the thrower and an internal aerodynamic factor),

23c. Again as for 23a, can't remember the exact equation off hand!

23d. No, it shouldn't - although if you find a bug - let me know