Dungeon Master Forum

Hi,

just a couple of observations i thought maybe usefull to share... Played using the latest version of DSB (0.46)

1. Water Elementals
I found these a lot harder than in previous versions... not sure why but it took a lot, and i mean a lot! of Harm Non Material Being spells to eventually kill the few i came across. Is there something different in DSB vs. PC/CSBwin/RTC versions? Do they only take damage when attacking?

2. Materialisers
Another difference along the water elementals, although they were not too tough they seemed to avoid any damage when attacking them against a wall in 'see through' state. In other versions i have noticed that as long as they are against a wall the harm non material spell takes effect - not in DSB... unless they were solid it didn't count.

3. Dragon
wow.... I really had some work to do here, not sure how difference in HP this dragon is vs. CSBwin/PC versions but i had to hit with an allful lot of fire power and blade!

Faulst
just a couple of faults as raised on the board and not show-stoppers! all in all an enjoyable addition to the family!

You're correct that Materializers don't take damage from des ew except when they're in their "solid" state, even an explosion against a wall. This is straight out of the DM/CSB code, if I remember right. So, I think the problem may be that RTC got it wrong.

As for the tougher monsters, I think this is an issue of DSB using DM/CSB formulas, but the dungeon itself being a port of the RTC version of DM, which has different damage formulas. RTC was designed by "feel" and is probably balanced for its own internal mechanics, but hp totals tend to be higher in RTC. For example, you had such a difficult time with the dragon because it has 2700 hp, copied straight from the RTC version, but a dragon spawned on that level with default hp (using the true DM formula for determining hp) has nearly 1000 hp less!

One fix to try might be to comment out all mon_hp calls in DM's dungeon.lua and see if that makes the game seem to play more accurately, though I'm not sure if any monsters in the basic DM dungeon have custom hp values that we'd need to concern ourselves with...

If you open the original DM dungeon in CSBuild or DMute, there are plenty of monsters placed directly in the dungeon with pre-assigned HP. The Dragon has 2700 HP in DM, for example, so RTC clearly copies the values as is.

one other observation i forgot to raise as I just took it for granted at the time...

when on the clockwise level - at the end where it says "enlarge my view"... I didn't pickup the magnifier as i was looking to exploit the old "use anything" bug to open the secret passage however I was still able to just run to the alcove and pickup the ruby key. I had speed boots on so perhaps that's why but it was as if the teleporters didn't react quick enough?