I'm playing about with the RTC editor - I'm no programmer and to be quite honest all the other utilities on offer for various things baffle the heck out of me. Basically I'm just looking to rustle up some fun little custom dungeons for myself using the default RTC resources.
My problem is an immediate one - I can't for the life of me figure out how to make a character appear in a mirror for resurrection/reincarnation., or even provide a ready-made starting party Adding an item to a mirror only gives the option of 'NULL' or 'CHARACTER_TEST', and I get this error when I try to compile it:
Warning : Character CHARACTER_TEST has not been used. Expecting them to be included in the starting party or held in a mirror.
I'd love to be able to open up Photoshop, draw up some bitmap graphics and import them into RTC, giving them simple monster behaviours and stats or indeed just cloning the behaviours of existing monsters. Is that possible without delving into other utilities and getting in a confusion about placements, relative sizes and co-ordinates?
First you have to add a character...now I can't be arsed to open the Editor myself and look atm, which may be something to do with the fact that it's 4:30am and I want to go to bed, so apologies if this is a bit vague.
In one of the menus at the top there wil be an option something like "Add character", this brings up a window that will only have "CHARACTER_TEST" in it, who is an auto-character that's always there when you create a new dungeon. There should be an "Add" button in this window to add more characters. I think. Or is that were you add characters you've already created. Hmm, oh bugger this *opens the bloody editor anyway*
Right got it...at the top of the screen, go to "Resources" and select "Create New Characters". This brings up a window. Click on "Add" to create a new character. Hmm this is very different from the last time I used the editor, back somewhere around v0.32 or so...before it got all poncified and uber with a shitload of new stuff added. Anyway if you wanna put a char in a mirror, assuming that still works the same, do the following...
-Right-click on the wall square on which you want to place the mirror.
-Select "Edit". This brings up a window.
-Select "Add" and find WALLITEM_MIRROR, then select this.
-This adds it to the list of things on that particular wall tile. Double-click on it to bring up a big editing window for the mirror.
-In the top right corner of this window, where it says "Holds", click there and select the character you want it to hold.
If you want to make your own monsters, by all means draw your own pics (you need four - front, side, back, and attack), then add them in with the "Add New Bitmap" thingy. Then choose to clone a monster and give it the bitmaps of your monster, change the name, stats, drops, etc to suit and bingo, you have a new monster.
If this all seems a little garbled, waffly, rambling, and weird, heh well stuff from me tends to come out like that anyway but at least blame some of it on the fact that it's now twenty to five and NOW I'm going to bed!
Well...after I check the QI forum for new posts as well...
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Ameena, self-declared Wordweaver, Beastmaker, Thoughtbringer, and great smegger of dungeon editing!
As ameena said - saying 'i'd love to draw simple graphics, and give them simple monsgter behaviours' is where you asre aflling down - you can't do anything from scracth. Then again, if you had to then it wouldn't be simple. INstead, it's as simple as choosing the closest monster, cloning it, and swapping the bitmaps (with your added ones)
Look at an equivalent monster's bitmaps first to know the size and offset you need for your new graphic, but otherwise that's about it
Thanks Ameena - I've got as far as putting a guy in a mirror now. For some reason I just thought that there would be ready-made characters to pick from - the original DM crew as it were. I didn't think about the fact that with a new dungeon everyone would have to be defined in terms of names and attributes.
beowulf - that's what I was meaning, to take a monster close to the proportions of what I'd want to create, swap out it's graphics and tweak the stats. All the graphics are held in .dat files though... is there any way to convert those into something I could load into a graphics package in order to 'draw over' them (which would be the simplest way for me to keep things in scale).
One other question though... the little icon of the party graphic - is that just a representation of where the player will start as a floating hand when the game loads up (or as a character/characters if I add characters to the party instead of to a mirror)?
I'm having some trouble with the compiling at the moment anyway, because it's crashing out of RTC when I start it up, yet reporting no errors. I'll continue to play with it.
You can't load in the graphics that are using the editor (bitmaps of monsters etc), however I get around that by bringing up the pic in the editor, pressing Control + Print Screen, opening Paintbrush, pasting it in (Control + V), then cutting out the pic I want and pasting it into a new file.
The icon of the party graphic - yes, as you say, it's where you start as a "floating hand" at the beginning of the game. Or as the party if you have given party members at the start. When I was looking in the editor last night I noticed that the Test Character is automatically in the starting party - you can just remove him. In fact, I always just delete him altogether because he has Zed's picture which is annoying and I like to make my own .
As to compiling, just in case you're doing something wrong...assuming you are saving your dungeons straight into the Modules folder, if you want to compile it you open the Config file, and type the following line...
COMPILE Modules\Dungeonname.txt
Where the big space after the word "Compile" is a Tab, and obviously replace "dungeonname" with your dungeon name . As long as this line remains in the Config file, every time you load up RTC it will attempt to compile the file and give you a list of errors and warnings (if there are any). If there are no errors, a .rtc version of your file will be created. You can then send this to people if you want them to play your dungeon .
I think I'm making more sense now that I've just got up at about 1:30pm .
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Ameena, self-declared Wordweaver, Beastmaker, Thoughtbringer, and great smegger of dungeon editing!
Sabreman wrote:
I'd love to be able to open up Photoshop, draw up some bitmap graphics and import them into RTC, giving them simple monster behaviours and stats or indeed just cloning the behaviours of existing monsters. Is that possible without delving into other utilities and getting in a confusion about placements, relative sizes and co-ordinates?
The existing bitmaps give you that information anyway - screen capture, cut it flush to the monster, and the existing, say, knight bitmap info placement should tell you where to put a new one
I greated pillars aping monsters using this method to no ill effect (no messing around with placement)
Sabreman wrote:
I'd love to be able to open up Photoshop, draw up some bitmap graphics and import them into RTC, giving them simple monster behaviours and stats or indeed just cloning the behaviours of existing monsters. Is that possible without delving into other utilities and getting in a confusion about placements, relative sizes and co-ordinates?
No.
Yes.
beowuuf wrote:The existing bitmaps give you that information anyway - screen capture, cut it flush to the monster, and the existing, say, knight bitmap info placement should tell you where to put a new one
First of all, doing a screen capture and a cut involves other utilities.
Secondly, unless your monster is to be exactly the same size and position on the tile as another monster, you will have to deal with placements, relative sizes, and coordinates, as well, which could potentially cause confusion.
I reiterate: No.
This is not to say it's terribly challenging, or can't be done, or anything. However, it does require other utilities and it can cause confusion. It's not "instant" or anything.
Ooooh, that made me think of a neat feature to add to the editor: Import a bitmap from the clipboard rather than a file -- it should be possible to automatically detect the graphics format and size on the clipboard and modify the image properties in the editor automatically...
Hmmm - thats one step down a long and slippery slope to including full image editing in the editor (which has been discussed lots of times before and each time have come to the conclusion that things like the default "MS Paint", let alone anything more complex, would be easier and more flexible to use).
It's only going to take a few more mouse clicks for you to open paint, paste, save and then import into the RTC editor as a file.
And would it be possible to put an web interface
into the editor? So I can automatically grab images
from all those great websites and crop/size/position
them properly with only a couple of clicks?
You will notice that George and I are quite adamant
on this point. Graphics should come ready-made.
CSBwin insisted on the same thing. Only Microsoft
can ?successfully? package an email/graphics/database/
spreadsheet/wordprocessor/messaging/browser/
synthesizer application.
I completely agree that RTC doesn't need any kind of graphics or sound editor built in. There are plenty of free programs that anyone can get access to for that sort of thing - Gimp and GraphicsGale to name but two that are very useful for creating bitmaps. beowuuf told me what I needed to know on that score anyway
Being able to paste from the clipboard is hardly the same as including a full image editor, however, since the editor outputs a simple .txt, I don't think it'd be very practical to be able to paste-- a file would still have to be created for the compiler.
Adding an item to a mirror only gives the option of 'NULL' or 'CHARACTER_TEST', and I get this error when I try to compile it:
.
