Dungeon Master Forum

I've been having a bitmap problem of my own...I tried drawing a pic of a new monster (nothing particularly fantastic - it looks like a flying lump of pooh with arms and a face) and adding it into the RTC Editor in the "Add/Replace Bitmap" window thing. I added all the views of the monster and also made a shrunk version of the front view which I added as the Icon for it. When I came to actually creating the monster, however (ie, cloning an old monster and replacing its attributes), for some reason none of the pics were in the list of bitmaps for me to add, except the icon.
So for some reason, I could give it an icon but none of the view pics of the actual monster. After removing and re-adding the pics to the editor a few times I decided to just sod it, remove the pics one final time, and never mind trying to create my own mobs (not that I can draw very well anyway, especially with a mouse).
Oh and another thing...I also added in four character portraits I'd done, and created new characters and gave them the portraits. This seemed to work well enough. However, the next time I loaded the editor, and every other time after and also when I did a Verify Layout, it came up with errors saying it couldn't load the portraits 'cause it couldn't find 'em or they were the wrong size or something. Well, I hadn't moved them from the folder they were in, nor were they the wrong size - I specifically made sure they were exactly the same number of pixels as the portraits that already existed.
I think the editor just doesn't like me, but Beo said the portrait thing might be a bug, and since this thread seems to be about bitmap smegs I thought I might as well mention it. Just in case it's a bug.

Sounds like a bug.

Can you describe to me a minimal set of operations required to reproduce this? Is it:

1) Select New dungeon
2) Select Add Bitmap and add a bitmap (can you let me know the specifications of the bitmap so size number of scalings etc)
3) Select Clone object and clone a monster
4) Select Edit Object to edit the new monster
5) Select to change one of the dungeon bitmaps
6) Your new bitmap is not available for selection

Yep that's right. I dunno if I made the image the wrong size or whatever, but I'm sure it was smaller than some of those already in existence. Let me check...

Icon - 32 x 32 but this one works fine
Front - 208 x 110
Back - 207 x 130
Side - 164 x 111
Attack - 214 x 121

I also tried shrinking the Front image and saving it (and then adding it) but it still didn't come up, since I'd thought it might have been too big. The icon image was, at first, but that was fine after I shrunk it. There's no way to get hold of monster pictures the same way as character portraits since they're not specifically saved as image files, so I just did a Print Screen with a monster image open in the editor (think it was a Purple Worm), then cut it out and pasted it into a new file. Then I rubbed out the worm and drew my own...thing.
And what about the problem with character portraits? Any ideas? I had to restart my dungeon since it wouldn't stop giving me bugs even after I removed the bitmaps - it still seemed to think they were there (though they weren't)...They showed in the .txt file so I tried deleting them there but if I opened it again they'd reappeared.
It would be nice to be able to have my own monsters (if I could think of enough pics for 'em and make 'em look the least bit convincingly scary...which I can't, lol), but I can always just use the pics of the old monsters and change the stats. /shrug

Hmm - the size shouldn't be a problem. How about the scalings?

It's probably the scalings -- if they're not specified correctly for the item you're trying to edit (monsters require 6 for example), then they won't show up in the replace bitmaps panel.

Oh. I didn't get what the scalings meant...I figured it was something to do with how big the preview image is or something...so if I add the bitmaps in with a scaling of six, that should work?
Will probably try it in a new dungeon file in case it fooks it up, though it wasn't the monster pics that did it last time.

That sounds like the problem then. The number of scalings is the number of different sized bitmaps RTC will internally need to display your image. For an icon this will be just one. For a wall item it's 3 (in the dungeon it can be seen 1, 2 or 3 tiles away from you so will be shown with 3 different sizes). For a monster you need 6 scalings (3 as for wall items, but monsters can either appear at the front or back of a tile, so you need 6 sized bitmaps in total).

My guess is that you've specified a number of scalings for your bitmap that isn't 6 which is why it's not appearing on the list of bitmaps available for monsters...

Not sure if this is the same problem as you're seeing with portraits too. If not, please let me know.

I don't think the portrait problem was related to the monster one - I had no problems selecting my portrait from the list as the portrait of one my new characters. It would just give me a bug report thing saying it couldn't load the pics and continue to do so even after I'd removed them. Must be something wrong there but fortunately I hadn't done much on my dungeon so I just restarted it and saved it over the smegged one.
I'll try setting the scaling thing to six for the monster thing, but I'm at college atm so I can't, and I couldn't be arsed last time I was on the comp at home 'cause it was a bit late at night. Will let you know if it works when I've tried it, though I don't expect I'll be using a great deal of self-created monsters - somehow I imagine it'd kind of break up the spooky atmosphere if you studdenly get charged by something doodled in Paintbrush .

Woohoo, it works! . Well, I got the monster into the game...but it has black lines over it and for some reason it's at the bottom of the screen when it's meant to be flying. I dunno why, seeing as a Giant Wasp has an even smaller picture than mine, yet it flies high.
Two more questions that are just bugging me - First, I'm sure this was mentioned before about two years ago, but what's the difference in damage (or anything else) in the "ATTACK_METHOD_MONSTER_X" attacks? And second, in the stats page for cloned mobs, what does "Soft Body" mean? They take more damage from cutting weps or something?

Soft body:
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=24163

Ahh cool thanks...I remember that thread now hehe.

The altitude of a bitmap in the dungeon (i.e. to give the appearance of flying) is given by the y offset value. Take a look at the bitmap for the wasp and you'll see that it has a very large value compared to a bitmap used for a monster who's "feet" are on the ground.

The monster attack methods are all basically the same but larger numbers do more damage than smaller numbers. I can't remember exactly but I think it goes roughly as the square of the number (i.e. attack 5 will do about 25 times more damage than attack 1).

Ahh cool, thanks . Will sort out that Y-axis thing when I get home. Any idea why my mob had, like, black vertical lines over him?

I'm afraid not. What format was the bitmap saved in (16 colour, 256 colour, 16 bit or 24/32 bit)?

I dunno...I just saved it normally in Paintbrush. I'll check as soon as I've copied my files across from CD since we had to do YET ANOTHER system restore today after my sister's boyfriend managed to visit some site that DLd a shitload of spyware. Again.