Dungeon Master Forum

This more a general question than a dsb request :

If I want to make the player feel like he is knee-deep in the water,
how should I do ?
I am experimenting with that idea, and the results are so far unconclusive...

Even with a water floor, it seems like the party is walking on it (it's really too religious), and items just "float" on it.

It would require to lower the roof and the viewport in order to make the situation more claustrophic, or raise the "water" floor level.
and items to be fully "invisible-tinted" (so you can't see them, but still can catch them when clicking on the right spot in the water)

Hmm. First of all you'd probably have to draw a sort of "water line" on the wallset, to line up with the level of water you drew into the floor.

Vertical doors would require something of a rewrite of the door code, to (at least, this is how I see it being done) dsb_qswap the "wet" door for a "dry" door when it starts to go up, and do the reverse once the door is completely shut.

Items would either have to be made partially or totally invisible. It seems like total invisibility would be sort of a pain for the player-- partial might work better. A hackish way is to qswap here too, and have special murky versions of every item that can be found in the water, but that's a lot of graphics. It might be better to have the engine do the tinting. I'd be willing to look into this provided people will actually use it of course.

Tell you what, if you can get over the graphical issues, I can help with some of the programming ones...

how about a partial viewport overlay?

I'm not sure if that would do what you want.

The water wouldn't really follow the contours of the wall that way....

What about a partial viewport overlay for water on the party tile and flooritems on every tile shifted to mask whatever is one tile further (from the viewpoint of the party)? It seems like a lot of trouble, and it is likely to graphically glitch around corners...

You might be able to fake dirty water by having an animated floorset and by teleporting every item dropped to an inaccessible copy of the level. When the water in the party's reach is clicked on with an empty mouse you could use the mouse pointer coordinates to figure out which subtile was actually clicked on, look if the copy-level has any items on that subtile and if so transfer the top item in the pile to the mouse pointer.

You can also associate a 'plouf' sound with the teleporters.