Dungeon Master Forum

Download it here :
http://linflasdm.blogspot.com/2008/02/r ... maker.html



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Hey guys, here's the first screenshot of the tool i'm working on ! It should be able to extract/save masked bitmaps with pink from a 3D scene that looks like DM perspective. At the same time, it should generate a correct RTC text file code for each bitmap... WM means "Wallset Maker" but it should be able to generate stairs, pits and probably alcoves and more wallitems.
It's written in Blitz 3D, which means old 3D rendering but quite enough to generate small bitmaps imho, and i'm definitely not a coder at all ! and I learn Blitz3D at the same time...

What it can do actually is quite limited :
- move/scale default objects i defined (walls, floors, ramps, stairs and door frames)
- load and assign a texture for an object, scale and position it
- pick a mask from a "masks" directory and position it on the screen, but no grabbing feature yet
- change fog distance

Here's a screenshot from Sukumvit's Labyrinth with a new complete wallset : i did several captures from RTCWM and used original RTC bitmaps for masks. There's some small additional photoshop work on them (noise and contrast).

I need some feedback on this, to know if i'm going wrong or not ! All comments welcome

Brilliant! I had been hoping someone would make something like this. It's quite tiresome getting things in the right position in RTc: Try a position, test, repeat ad infinitum...

Does your tool generate lighting on bump mapped surfaces or is it simply taking flat pre-drawn textures and putting them into the right planes?

The latter is cool, but to be really useful, lighting would the next feature to add.

Keep it up, very interesting indeed.

thanks for support
there's no bump mapping at all but i found some people who made it in Blitz3D : http://perso.numericable.fr/jourmik1/DemoBump.rar
unfortunately, this guy says that it kills the framerate and my tool is already a bit slow... so we'll see this later.
actually, the biggest work for me is in photoshop and notepad : i must create all masks for bitmaps, and make a config file with default offset values for each bmp ! quite long and boring...

great work, Linfas !!!!
could you also make CSBwin wallsets on your stuff (as far as I know, it has some other perspectives & angles)?

Didn't George say he had altered it to be CSB (and so CSBwin) dimeniosn for 0.35?

He did indeed

Very nice work linflas - it's nice to finally see your tool in action Sukumvit's Labyrinth looks wicked!

Thta's a very good point. yes, RTC 0.35 now uses a different perspective from before -- things have moved around abit....

thanks guys !

My perspective is based on CSB, but as you can see in Sukumvit screenshot, i managed to reproduce DM perspective with a few photoshop deformations.
The RTC code generated by RTCWM will have its *own* POSITION values and i really hope RTC 0.35 will accept them.

@adamo : all you will probably have to do is making masks for your bitmaps : then resize them half and convert them to some 16 colors palette... i'm afraid this will look quite ugly but you can try it anyway.

Linflas, check your PMs - I've sent you details of the new wallset perspectives for V0.35 so you can build them into your program from the start.

Great work by the way - looks fantasticly useful already!

excellent George ! this will make me gain a lot of time !
i'm going to use the new names you set up for bitmap variables i.e. BITMAP_<prefix>_WALL_FRONT1, BITMAP_<prefix>_WALL_SIDE0, etc.

EDIT : oh, i forgot to mention why i gain some time : i've just seen new RTC 0.35 perspective and it definitely *is* CSB ! and it seems i don't need to use my own positions values

Some news !
The layout has been changed because i needed more room for scrollbars in the Objects window.
So here's the way it looks now.



I've added some new features :
- point light at player position instead of global ambient light, this brings more a torch lightening feel.
- a glow effect can be added to the scene. It slows engine but gives nice results when you have darker textures, and mouse pointer has a cool ghost movement
- alternate bitmaps are obtained with a button that flips and moves the active mask symetrically.
- grab images and save them in bmp format.



Coming next :
- new models for side view of stairs and ramps : you can't *turn* in the editor because tiles are not squares.
- modeling floor pads, some wallitems (keylocks, mirrors) and maybe alcoves : front and side views.
- changing background/fog color (i would like to implement a color picker)
- generate RTC code (nothing done yet)

This is all good linflas, but I have just one question...

<.<
>.>

where did this forum come from? I never noticed it before!

Sorry to go OT....but, you know...it's what I do

Seriously, cool work though!

Very nice indeed! Excellent stuff Linflas.

wow Linfas, I`m really impressed !!!
That could be a milestone in designing wallsets to RTC/CSBwin, wchich I spend much of my time with. I allready did 7 brand new wallsets for CSBwin, but there are some minor bugs I did. I posted how I did it in GIMP in my posts "making wallsets for dummies" thread in "Creative endavours" forum. But it seems your tool would safe a lot of time... I wonder how would they look like when done by your tool.
BTW, I was sure that Kentaro is making similar tool (for making new wallsets) - you could PM him and change with your experiences and cooperate with him. There`s no need for making two different tools for the same thing IMO but to release one, but better.

beowuuf wrote:where did this forum come from? I never noticed it before!

Sorry to go OT....but, you know...it's what I do

That was me.

I had a bit of a tidy up of the forums and it didn't really make much sense having 3 different forums containing suggestions for my editor (suggestions / editing and editor development). Given that this new utility now exists, it felt right that it along with RTCED had their own place to flourish without being swamped by anything else.

Shout if you think of a better way of arranging stuff though.

No, it's good...just glad I'm not going mad!

...

-er

@adamo : didn't know about kentaro's program ! I found this on his website : http://members.at.infoseek.co.jp/danmas ... Set/ss.htm

It seems that his tool and mine are complementary. RTCWM converts 3D to 2D and generates RTC text and in Kentaro's, you can place bitmaps on viewport and then it will probably generate a graphics.dat file for CSBwin.
I don't think we need to work together actually, we don't have the same goal

hi
this is something i could have posted in "RTC editing" : the middle bitmaps (front2, left2 and left2_alt bitmaps in 0.35 or 11, 10 and 10_alt in 0.34) are always displayed flipped in RTC, relatively to front/left1 (13,12,12alt) and front/left3 (9,8,8alt,7,7alt).
So, when using a non symetrical texture for walls, you must flip the front2 bitmap and swap names between left2 and left2_alt to get something normal in RTC.
i could have said this to GG in pm but i guess some of designers here would be interested by the info and i don't consider this as a bug..

Yeah, I've noticed this before and think it's pretty weird...

i need some feedback/suggestions so i've just put an alpha release on my website : http://www.freewebs.com/linflas
i think it's useable at this state, but you won't be able to save an entire project yet, so be careful !
please report anything that can be considered as a bug, but remember that i can do nothing for people with graphics card not supported by blitz3D engine...

Had a very quick play -- mouse control is completely unresponsive! I can just about click on stuff but it seems random whether or not anything get's selected.... keyboard controls seem to work responsively.

that's what i was afraid of... as long as i add more options to the program it gets slower and slower, but it still runs fine on my machine. i suggest longer clicks for now and patience, maybe i'll find a way to optimize the interface.

Sorry, but it's unusable in this state!

My machine is four years old, an AMD Athlon XP 1900 -- with 512MB RAM and a Geforce 4600. It plays Half Life 2 reasonably well at 800x600x24.

I really can't believe my computer can't handle a small Blitz 3D app?

Maybe it's not optimized. It might be trying to redraw the 3D display way too often, and not handling mouse clicks outside of the rendering loop, or some such things.

If none of this is relevant, ignore me. I don't know anything about Blitz 3D programming.

It seems to work ok on my computer, though, it did lose a couple of mouse clicks.

Oh, linflas, one question I had-- what does it do about the "missing bricks" situation? In regular DM, there are less bricks on the side walls than there are when you look at them from the front. The walls look kind of squished if you don't do it this way, to tell the truth. At least that's how it looks to me.

Yeah, I was wondering about that too....

sophia is right about optimization, 3D render and 2D interface render are in the same big loop, and i don't how to make it work better at the moment.. maybe i should try to call 3D render only if there has been a modification, i'll check that today.
about the "missing bricks", can you put a screenshot ? i don't see the point, and remember that perspective has changed in 0.35.

ok the problem comes from the GUI render function : without FPS>1000, with FPS = 20 !
i must find another GUI lib or code my own..

Wow, and here I thought it was the 3d rendering. It can't possibly take that many cycles to draw the GUI in itself, the function probably has some kind of misguided attempt at timing built into it.

Anyway, I can't take a screenshot at the moment, but I will explain the "missing bricks" anomaly more clearly-- If you look at a wall section from the front, there is a certain number of bricks. However, if you view it from the side, there are less bricks. Just rotating a texture doesn't do this, obviously.

For my own little hack of a wallset program, I made it reduplicate half of the image on each side (thus doubling its size) to make the front bitmaps, and use the bitmap as-is for the sides. That obviously doesn't work with images that aren't so periodic.

ok, i've seen the "missing bricks" thing but i won't reproduce this "feature" (if we can call it this way).. that looks weird now that you showed it to me

about the GUI, i remade entirely RTCWM with a lighter one : it's quite better, something like 50 to 100 fps on my P4 2.8Ghz (it was about 30/40 before).

Same download location.
Now i have problems with stairs -side- masks, because one single bitmap is used for two differents views !

For what it's worth, the stairs are a right royal pain in the wotsit for the RTC (and presumably DM / CSB) engines - I'm not surprised you're having problems too!

The key point is that the engines are not designed to show objects differently depending on what angle you see them from. For example, a statue will look exactly the same when viewed from the north, south, east or west. DM / CSB got around this by not having any objects in them that looked different from different angles (everything has four-fold symmetry, like the pits / grates etc, or is too small for anyone to really notice, like puddles / cracks).

Stairs however *are* different depending on what direction you view them (side on is different from front on) and so the dual bitmaps trick the engine into working. If you have a long hard think about it, you should be able to see how it works - it only does so because walls are *always* surrounded by walls on 3 sides!

Really, the engine should handle this properly and be able to display different bitmaps for objects depending on which direction your party is viewing them from. That way you won't have to splice bitmaps together and can specify them separately. You'll then also be able to have "proper" asymmetrical objects in the dungeon - one for RTC V0.36 methinks...