Dungeon Master Forum

Hi.

Do you remember?



Some monsters like this screamer had a self-lighting on some colors. I think that this came from the menu that uses the same color entry, but it is pretty cool - like some fish, deep in the ocean have a self lighting too.

What do you think?
ciao, joerg.

Yeah, I liked that too !

Yeah, that was cool and a clever use of the limitations of the palette.

If the effect was purely because of the limitation, it could have been corrected in the Amiga and PC versions because there were more colour registers used for the 'darkening' effect -- so the screamerrs wouldn't have glowed. Maybe it was an oversight. Or FTL liked the effect even though it was unintentional.

Yes, I remember now this effect I noticed when I played the original version on my Atari ST.
I just checked RTC and CSBWin. As expected, this effect still exist on CSBWin, but not on RTC.
Screamers glowing in the dark, sure that was not intended, but I think it's pretty cool. It leaves you wondering about the true nature of these critters ( and we learned already strange things about screamers from the Silly and Massive Dungeon Master Christmas story thread).
I hope that George will give us back glow-in-the-dark screamers in the next version of RTC.

I hope that George will give us back glow-in-the-dark screamers in the next version of RTC.

Due to the way the darkening effect is made, this won't happen. RTC slaps a semi-transparent black box over the dungeon to simulate the fade. That's why it's not as elegant as the original DM which used a manually defined palette shift for the change.

It would be a 'nice-to-have', though it would become incredibly complex and I imagine it's beyond the scope of RTC. You'd need to be able to specify key colours in your creature that don't change and also somehow mask out those colours from the dungeon view.

As Gambit said, nice idea but very difficult to achieve for exactly the above reasons!

Changed the colouring a bit for V0.35. Still not perfect, but a lot closer!

Same comment as the other post -- did you implement some kind of procedural blend? If so, very cooooool!

Yep - the screamer doesn't look quite the same in RTC though. The dark green "head"(?) appears very dark and without the cyan bits lighting up. Instead, the yellow trunk looks is more striking in the dark.

Different, but much the same effect - pretty much most of the rest of RTC really!

I remember this funny effect now, I have never think that the limitation of the palette is the reason.

A the time when I play DM on my Amiga 500, I believe that the head of screamer act like a glow-worm.

If my memory is good, magenta worm had a self-lighting on some colors too.(Maybe somebody can confirm it ^_^ )