New monsters (CSBwin)

[Zyx]

I was wondering how hard it would be to put alternative graphics for monsters.
For example, I put some giant rats in a dungeon, check the option "aternative graphics" for this special group of monsters, and enter the Id of the one, two, three or four graphics stored in the CSBgraphics.dat.
In this case I would put the 4 graphics of the hellhounds.

This would allow to put giant rats and hellhounds at the same time on the same level.

[Paul Stevens]

Right now it would be very hard. I think we have
enough changes already and need to back off a
bit and work on stability. I have spent the last
two days trying to get record/playback working,
for example. It works under 99% of the cases but
I am having great difficulty. And all of this Custom
Graphics business is going to be causing problems
because there is no debug help nor parameter
checking. And, if history teaches anything, it is that
unexpected problems are going to arise when we change
this much code.

Let us stick to the necessities and forego the "it would
be nices".

[rain`]

You should be able to use ADGE to modify an unused monster to become a "pain rat" and even give it alternate stats than the hellhound, like poisoned attacks. Check out ADGE v0.3b, which should be posted soon. I don't think there is anything hard coded about most of the monsters that cannot be recreated in ADGE. It would probably be alot easier to do in ADGE then it would in CSBuild anyway. If you run into any problems with it I'm willing to help figure out if its a compatability issue with CSBWin or a problem with ADGE.

-rain`

[Zyx]

OK, Paul.

Rain, what do you mean by unused monster? Not one of the 27 existing mosnters, I hope.
Are you telling me that is would be possible to ADD new bmp to the graphics.dat, not just replacing? That would be great!

[rain`]

Rain, what do you mean by unused monster? Not one of the 27 existing mosnters, I hope.
Are you telling me that is would be possible to ADD new bmp to the graphics.dat, not just replacing? That would be great!

Yes, i did mean one of the 27 existing monsters. Unfortunately you only get 27 monsters to work with =[ and due to this fact, there can only subsequently be 27 DIFFERENT UNIQUE monsters in any game. What I mean is by, for instance, replacing the worm's graphics with the pain rat's graphics, then modifying all the values of the worm (all the flags, speeds, characterestics, everything that is in the monster editor) and matching them with the hellhounds.

Is it possible to add more graphics to the graphics.dat file? Yes and no. I can test this if you wish. Each monster has a variable that holds the number of the graphic that it uses for its stand-still image and uses up to 3 more addionally. It is an offset from graphic number 446. All monsters use some number between 0 and 86 (86 being graphic #532, the last 'graphic' which is designated for creature graphics). If you were to set this to 117, it would attempt to read graphic #563, which doesnt exist at the moment, but if it DID exist, you could theoretically add more graphics to the graphics.dat file. Unfortunately there may be some hard coded feature inside CSB/DM to not allow any graphic.dat files with more items in it, but I do not know. I know that Paul Stevens could theoretically remove this cap but I don't want to break backwards compatability with the actual Atari version of CSB/DM. Again though, you would be limited by the fact that there are merely only 27 available monster structures.

-rain`

[Zyx]

In this case, the result would not be worth effort put into adding graphics.
I use the 27 kinds of monsters, so I was only interested into adding more mosnters. Thank you, however!

[Paul Stevens]

unexpected problems are going to arise when we change
this much code.

Well, I found ONE of the playback problems. It was an
uninitialized parameter to the DSA Party Attack Filter that
only showed up when a recording included a Death/Restart.
Evidence of the truth of the quote. And these errors are
hard to produce and even harder to find/correct.

[rain`]

I did a test with a custom sized graphics file. I added 4 new graphics at the very end, IMG1 format. Then set the monsters graphic offset to use these new graphics and it crashed the game when the monster became viewable. The good part is you can add additional graphics to a graphics.dat file and it will still load the file, but the bad part is it won't load the graphics because it doesnt know it should.

EDIT: On a side note, I can modify missile graphics to use any graphic I want and it will load those graphics no matter where they are (beyond the limit of 562), then set the monsters' graphic to use the same set of graphics and the monster will display with custom graphics ^^. Using the missile as a tool to load the graphic allows for new graphics to be used but then the missile itself (such as an arrow or throwing star) is no longer usable since it will look like you are tossing monsters. =]

[beowuuf]

Don't say that, I remember someone many years ago saying how cool it would be to throw a dragon from an object thrower...

So did I miss out on the explaination, or are you are saying that you can have additional monsters as long as you are willing to sacrifice a missile graphic? So a poison blob for zyx's pain rat/hellhound addition?

[rain`]

At runtime, when you load a level, the game loads up a bunch of graphics, depending on what you need (such as wall decorations etc). In this list includes graphics to display items in the dungeon while in midair. This list is the only list that reads graphics from a variable offset as per what is needed. It will read monsters, but instead of looking through the graphics.dat file to see what monsters it needs, it simply loads every single one.

That being said, a Poison blob is only one graphic, therefor it will load only one custom graphic into memory. A pain rat/hellhound addition requires 4 graphics (front, side, back, attack images), and will still crash upon viewing the unloaded graphics. You would have to sacrifice a poison blob AND an arrow (the arrow convieniently has 3 graphics, front, side, and back), and blob can be used to load the final attack graphic). Now that these items essentially point to hellhound graphics, you may see hellhounds flying instead of arrows and poison blobs.

=]

You are still very limited, and you still only get the standard 27 different unique monsters.

-rain`

[zoom]

I thought you could get 4 times the items and 4 times the monsters in a 64 level dungeon...