Dungeon Master Forum

This program will take a wall bitmap and a floor bitmap, and create a wallset (and a scaled floor) that is suitable for RTC 0.38, and, with a bit of tweaking, CSBwin.

It's pretty minimalist, so don't expect frills like a GUI. It takes input files and gives output-- the README explains all, or at least, all that's worth knowing.

http://www.ojnk.net/dm/whack07.zip (New version, hooray!)

It doesn't use or require 3d hardware, so it may prove useful to some people in that regard. *cough*Adamo*cough*

Downloaded and have read the readme. haven't tried it yet, but I think the sizes are too small to make convincing hi-res images for RTC. I'd at least double these.

This and RTCWM are useful tools, but I'd still recommend that people then manually tweak their images after these tools have done the grunt work. The lighting is key and as it's not taken into account by these tools, the side walls in particular will look wrong.

Having said that, It's going to be very useful using this to get angles correct which can then be used as a base in Photoshop -- perspective skewing in Photoshop does some horrible distortion!

woot ! this tool is really fantastic, it took me less than a second to make a complete wallset !

Just gave this a try - worked just fine. I like simple

Gambit37 wrote:Downloaded and have read the readme. haven't tried it yet, but I think the sizes are too small to make convincing hi-res images for RTC. I'd at least double these.

Actually, it uses lo-res images by design, to mesh with the look of the default DM graphics.

I could always make a hi-res version, but since it's just a flat texture map slapped onto a surface (no fancy bump maps, normal maps, etc. here!) it might not look too much better.

But the default size of RTCs main central wall is 320x222 -- wouldn't it be better to key everything off that? You'd could then create a proper size for the high-res stuff people (me) are developing, and for anyone else you just sample down x2...

Maybe I'm rambling...

I dunno out anyone else, but I was able to create a really good low-res cave wallset off this. I really love it...

<3 Sophia

Wooeee! I tried it, and pretty impressive too!

There's a flaw in the current implementation: ws_side0_alt.bmp is a copy of ws_side0.bmp when it should infact have been flipped.

This is a really good tool for quick and dirty wallset generation. It could be greatly improved is you could make a version that takes a 320x222 bitmap for the walls and a single large tile for the floor but simply gives it the right perspective.

The wall generation would be better if you could use this larger wall image as the obvious tiling would be less pronounced and less often. Same reason for the floor. I guess the single floor tile would need to be significantly wider than the viewport for the skewing to work correctly, probably something like 640px wide by 256 high.

Possible?

Gambit37 wrote:There's a flaw in the current implementation: ws_side0_alt.bmp is a copy of ws_side0.bmp when it should infact have been flipped.

Oops. I fixed this.

Gambit37 wrote: This is a really good tool for quick and dirty wallset generation. It could be greatly improved is you could make a version that takes a 320x222 bitmap for the walls and a single large tile for the floor but simply gives it the right perspective.

Ok, what I did was increase the range of wall and floor sizes that it accepts.

A wall bitmap can now be 80x111, 160x111, 160x222, or 320x222. The second two will not be doubled in size, so you'll have a high-res look. floor.bmp now works similarly as well, and can be one of four sizes: 64x64, 256x128, 128x128, or 512x256-- so you can choose whether you want a tiled image or a single large one.

Cool! Thankyou -- I'll check this out later....

Been playing with this a bit and really like it! I was having a lot of trouble getting the perspective of my walls right and this has made it so much simpler!

I'm using the generated walls as a base for further manipulation in photoshop as some artifacting and roughness occurs plus I can then add highlights etc. So this is all pretty cool! Thanks!

A couple of suggestions:

1) Tiling large floors creates a noticeable near the feet of the party. Would it be possible to create this seam in the shaded part so it's less noticeable (ie, change the origin of the floor mapping to the bottom center of screen).

2) Could you add support for a colour bitmap for shading -- so that if you want to use white for a fog effect or something, whack can pick the colour from there?

Tis a cool programme, and will be very useful. Need to tweak a bit to get to work for CSb as the .bmp used are different. Here ia an example of the main .bmps for the walls:

http://hometown.aol.com/Supersonic525/w ... +CELLS.rar

You might have to copy and paste the link into your browser.

If you could make the prog output like that, I would be a very happy chappy!

Gambit:

1) Yes, I'll fix this.

2) I don't exactly understand, but let me throw this out there--

One thing that I thought might be useful would be to have a "mask" bitmap that would be applied more and more the further away you got. It'd be optional and by default it'd be solid black, but it could be anything. Is this something like what you wanted? You could make fog by making it solid white.

PaulH:

Spitting out walls in the CSB format should be doable, but I have a couple of questions:

When a side, a front, and a side are put together in one image for CSBwin, which one would be considered by RTC to be the "alt" image?

I have no way of dealing with CSBwin's limited palette. Does this make the whole venture a waste of time?

Yes, for (2) you explained exactly what I'm thinking. The mask need only be a 1 pixel square bitmap of any colour.

I decided to just dispense with the tiny bitmap and instead add an INI file which contained a few other (useful? maybe) configuration parameters.

You can specify a blend color as red, green, and blue values, from 0 to 255. The default is 0, 0, 0 and does what you'd expect, but anything works.

New version uploaded.

This one supports different bitmaps for doing the side and front view, just in case you like that sort of thing.

I can't download this latest version -- is it still available?

The download link is back online.

Cool! this latest version is great -- the fogging works really well.

Could you also get whack to generate ceilings?

0.5 is released. It can generate ceilings.

can the next version just take images from my head and automatically put them into the engine? that would be nice..

I really want to make new sets.. but.. time... gahhh.. time...

The Matrix has you! m00

It seems there are problems with the walls WHACK generates. They don't always look right with the DM perspective, if I understand correctly what Gambit and George are talking about in that other thread.

If someone would be so kind as to send me a bitmap of a wall that looks correct, I can match the perspective, shading, etc. in WHACK, and address this.

Thanks to linflas, for sending me the bitmap. I was able to fix WHACK to generate a bitmap that looks better in RTC-- let me know how it works out. There are a couple of tweaks in the INI file, too, in case I didn't get it quite right.

Cool1 Thank you. Initial tests look good. I'll experiment a little more and let you know if I think there should be any modifications.

Can you explain how the slope settings in the INI file work?

The "Slope" setting is simply the slope of the line that demarcates the top of the perspective graphics. The higher the number, the steeper the line.

I've released a new version that slightly changes some of the dimensions of the output walls to correspond to how things are in RTC 0.38, in addition, it now generates an rtc_out.txt file that you can paste into your dungeon that will add all the wallset bitmaps.

I'm tying to understand how WHACK works using only its skeletal manual, and I noticed an inconsistency in it, so I thought I'd share:

Floor - must be one of four sizes: 64x64, 256x128, 128x128, or 512x256

Ceiling - works like the floor in terms of dimensions. Optional.

The first three bitmaps will be doubled in size, to match the look of DM. Use one of the second three sets of dimensions for a high-resolution look. The square bitmaps will be tiled a lot. The 256x128 and 512x256 versions will be tiled a little, but it's hard to notice.

Emphasis mine.

It's been months since I've looked at this program, but I'm going to guess at some point I had a third valid floor/ceiling size, that I got rid of and forgot to update that line of documentation.

WHACK is not what one would call user-friendly software. Sorry about that, but I hate making GUI's and it does the job...

No need to apologize! I positively LOVE WHACK. It's just that it took me a long time on the first reading to understand that 'three' should have been 'two' in both instances. Once I got it it was actually obvious. It may be worth correcting for the benefit of the next novice to come along.

Also, I'm so lazy that I would like the output text file to write the definition of the new wallset for me so I can copy and paste that as well in the code (it only does the ADD lines for new graphics at the moment.) Could you keep it in mind for WHACK08 please?