Dungeon Master Forum

I've been messing about a little with the code of DSB, but have yet to start a dungeon or anything. Just playing with the mechanics is *fun* enough.

Can I ask how you build your dungeon, Parallax? If you use this tool, or manually build it with an image or text ("1", the world's smallest dungeon) or a bit of both. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. From what little I've done, I think I'd use this tool to create one basic level at a time, then copy/paste it into the main dungeon.lua that I'd work on.

I'm still open on how I'm going to do it in the end. The image reading never did it for me, I have an irrational aversion to it. I know I'm just being stubborn, but it's just not the same as a GUI editor to me...

At first I was thinking of doing the layout with DDM and the mechanics by hand in Notepad, but as I learn about how to work it, DDM may grow on me. I would like to use it the same way I used RTCEditor, to do everything, but I don't know enough about how it works yet.

I have only built basic structures so far. Hallways, doors, doors with buttons (trickier than it sounds, in DDM the doorframe and optional button are 'part' of the door), a few triggers with messages. Tonight I'll try door locks activated by keys, and door locks activated by specific items, maybe.

Not being able to save the dungeon as a .lua file is my biggest pet peeve right now, especially since the keyboard shortcuts for select all and copy do not work in the code window, but I think Remy said that future versions of DDM would write lua to a file.

I have not yet checked how easy it is to create custom items, or incorporte custom graphics (not that I have any custom graphics to incorporate), or to generate scripts for actions. If it's easy to do in DDM I might end up staying in the editor for as long as possible. Ultimately, I would want to.

Sorry about the double post. Having used DDM a bit more, I must say it's great for doing basic stuff like drawing the layout and making simple mechanics. It doesn't seem to have any way of handling custom items, or to change the properties of items. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even know about the standard DM and CSB items in any detail.

So I guess I'll have to switch to Notepad at some point. Remy doesn't seem to be around anymore, and Joramun seems to have found a job and/or a girlfriend and disappeared. Is there anybody around here trying to make a custom dungeon for DSB, or even just playing around with like Ian?

Parallax wrote:Sorry about the double post. Having used DDM a bit more, I must say it's great for doing basic stuff like drawing the layout and making simple mechanics. It doesn't seem to have any way of handling custom items, or to change the properties of items. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even know about the standard DM and CSB items in any detail.

You can modify the xml files with the notepad to incorporate custom items, but it's a bit tedious if you don't have an exhaustive list...

So I guess I'll have to switch to Notepad at some point. Remy doesn't seem to be around anymore, and Joramun seems to have found a job and/or a girlfriend and disappeared. Is there anybody around here trying to make a custom dungeon for DSB, or even just playing around with like Ian?

I found a job, but the main thing is that I still don't have a computer at home right now, so I can't really roam in here often.

I'm still pondering on the issue of the random dungeon, and a couple of functionalities to incorporate in a dungeon.

Honestly, I'm really impressed by DDM, but since I mostly have been making custom scripts, I've not used it much yet. But it seems it's a precious tool to map (well, more than RTCEd + RTSB since I've not checked the last updates in RTC text files syntax)