Dungeon Master Forum

it's a drag to hear about the limit

I think there are plenty of ways around it. i'll certainly will look for those ways. wallsets can be cut from 70 or so down to around 18 parts, a lot can be done with food, especially if it is counted for uses rather than disappearing on first bite, sort of like the bogota except no graphic change. no regeneration of food. I think this will hurt the shop though, with the coins and exchanges, this might be shot down. but I guess the best solution is keep the dungeon small but difficult, more puzzles instead of shear size. I guess the correct question is, how many others experienced a problem building their dungeon? so far I have not heard of this problem up until now. it does seem trivial if nobody is having the issue, but then again having a dungeon as big as I think Saumuns is, is a problem. using different methods is the only solution. it does make one think harder on innovation techniques. my thoughts on this, waste not want not, and there seems to be plenty of fat to be cut. thanks for the investigational work, it helps future dungeon builders.

It happened in Adamski's Tower of Champions, as brought up by Igor in a previous post. I have not seen the text file to this and have not yet played it, so i don't know exactly what the reasons were for hitting the limit.

My own current dungeon is a bit of a one-off for me, in that it's unlikely i'll ever attempt one of this size again. It was never intended to be this big, but i just added and added... and got to a point where it felt too late or just wrong to change the layout (of course until a few days ago, i wasn't aware of the limit).

Concerning ToC, it has tons of relays/actions/triggers. I haven't tested what the number is now, but I think Adamski managed to very highly reduce the number of objects.
I tested the remaining number of objects in my own dungeon, it's about 5800, and I was thinking of adding several new levels, plus my light system which already counts 400+ objects. Also, there are tons of things generated in game, so I will definitely have to think about this all as well...
But I think it will be easy to highly reduce the number of objects in my dungeon: I have places that look like the outdoor level in DMII (level 7) as done by GG, which is a good example of what to modify when getting close to the objects limit (big level with each tile having several objects, all the same, and several alternative wallsets).

It is surprising just how many objects you get through without realising. As i mentioned earlier i deleted around 1100. I now have 575 to work with and haven't completed as much of the remaining dungeon as i expected.
There will certainly be more that i can delete though, as i haven't yet picked through the levels bit by bit. The 1100 was just a quick trawl, deleting the ones i could obviously do without.

I may have missed this, but when swapping out, does the new object take the place of the old object or does that get added on as another object? if it does I will have to rethink quite of few things, but if not, then swapping is the way around it. so further dungeon building will have to be more tight. i find with my old dungeon building that i had excess triggers most of the time, and relays were double of what is done now. it should not be a problem as long as we don't put a trigger on every tile and avoid respawning too much.

i agree Saumun about how much is done and we don't realize it. there were days where so much work and testing was done that I'd boot it up close to 500 times on the test. glad those days are over for the simple things. a character and its ai only take about 30 relays\triggers\actions on the average. it was at 50 to 80. i will have to try and make that even smaller.

Fortunately, swapping is fine as far as i can tell...
I tested this in the apple dungeon. Swapped apples for bread on the mouse, and then globally. The object count was right on the limit and it worked fine.
I walked through some of the dungeon after the global swap (not all of it), and as far as i could see it swapped every object (almost 20,000) in a split second. No slow down.

that's a relief, feel better now. i think the swapping takes care of some of the limit problem. oh man, i just tried something that has me really thinking Saumun. try and swap nothing to something and see what it does what the!!!!! , see what you made me do

it fills every spot there is, i used a flask, this is very weird. what can we do with this phenomena? funny how when ya type weird ideas pop in the head. so nothing means everything, what to do with this i don't know. i have to play with it more, it may help the object idea since i swapped out nothing for a flask and got a bunch of them

Haha... That's crazy!

I've been wearing some pretty odd stuff.

it is crazy! so are those new objects not included or are they limited? it only fills the empty spots, this includes the mouse and two that fall to the floor if hands full which they are. it shows that RTC does check the inventory for null, and is quite capable if tweaked to check for objects. where is that GG when we need him. I have things to play with, what about rusting a null, oh I have a bunch of ideas to check still with this. I tried a few other objects to swap to and had some strange results.

one way to deal with object limit is after time, monsters that have clubs, swords, daggers, any non important objects can be swapped to food or swapped out all together. does swapping out to nothing make space? if so then I don't see any problem.

I was wearing gold coins. there must be some way that this can be taken advantage of.

The main issue for my own dungeon was/is finding enough objects i can delete to finish building it. I hit the limit with the dungeon 85% complete. I didn't want to radically change anything, so started going through the levels to see what i could shed. Surprising what you find. I'm generally very liberal with my use of triggers and relays, and with a bit of thought could (and have) greatly simplified a great many sequences.

I'm not too concerned with the object count once the game is underway. So many things are destroyed as opposed to created that it should not matter. Just to be sure, i have cloned some of the monsters that appear at the start and taken out their weapons. So a monster killed (with nothing dropped) is one object wiped from the count.

i have not yet tested swapping to nothing when on the limit. Gonna try it though!

I hear ya, there is always fat to cut. if the swap to nothing makes room, that'd be a blessing.

Can infinite food generation be kept under control ?
In many games, at training champions spots, I piled up, near one hundred foods, from killing mushrooms, worms rats or dogs.
A neat way would be to time limit food dropped on the floor. As long as this time is consistent with the delay of the creature respawning, this would avoid piling up too much food.
Easy to say, but I have no idea how difficult and item consuming such a food time limit mecanism would be.
This would be a worthwhile feature, I think. Isn' it odd one can leave unattended, tons of food on the floor and find it weeks later, unstolen, fresh and edible ?

Hmmm... Ageing objects. Interesting idea.
I wonder if it can be done (or if it has been done in other custom dungeons).
It is hard to see how without everything having a specific name, but you never know.
Could there be a way of decrementing an individual object's charge through a timed relay sequence? Or swapping it for a clone with less nutritional value after a time.

it could have some great applications if it can be done... You could even have meat that poisons you once it has aged a certain amount.

On a side note (as Terkio tested this), Dark Reign 2 has 17,334 objects. Another few levels and i'd have run into the same trouble.

I think that is a yes on the aging meat turning poison. maybe can be done with expire or you'll need a clock, some relays reading the clock, swap out through time, but to be specific requires one counter, to know what piece of food it is. so each piece has a value. think this can be done but it's a bit of work. I was just playing with that stuff creating a heartbeat. the charges on items can definitely be done, needs to be manually setup and rigged to a counter, just tried that on an object and it recharges. it certainly is worth investigating. I hope you find an answer to this.

For the ageing food, it has been done in the dungeon I'm currently playing: http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... 39#p146847 . Try killing some wolves.
I guess the same can be done for swapping to NULL the not-very-interesting items dropped on the floor for too long.

I was thinking that if a system was set up where the charge of a food item was constantly dropping, you could get it to do whatever you want with conditional relays swapping objects at certain points...
For example... You could clone a dragon steak and set your own charge (say 20... but the number would be arbitrary since you would be controlling the speed), then say that if the charge drops below 15 it would lose nutritional value, then below 10 loses further value, below 5 becomes poisonous, and at zero turns to ashes (or disappears).

I hadn't been thinking too much about how it was achieved, but in this dungeon the meat dropped from monsters rots after a while, if not properly cooked. Apparently each piece of meat (which is generated in game) has its own duration, similarly to a torch. So yes, that might be thanks to the charge system. But instead of a torch, the ageing goes on wherever the item is, so even when the item is in the players inventory. So it's not just like a torch clone.
It might actually be the implementation of your idea, Saumun... I guess it would work pretty much the same.
This ageing stuff could be very useful for keeping the items number under control (well, at least, it would be useful in my dungeon). It also gives me several riddles ideas...

Indeed.... As terkio mentioned, if a dungeon had the equivalent to DM's screamer and rat rooms and a player was to build up a huge stock of food and then leave it behind, food that eventually disappeared would be a good solution if that dungeon was close to the limit on objects.

I have not tried decrementing item charges through relays myself, but CS mentions that it can be done... so such a system shouldn't be too difficult to set up.

it can be done Saumun, just as you were describing or i think a lifetime can be set with expire, expire to this, then to this than lastly nothing. that should work. just tested it, works no problems, but I am not sure if that adds more to the objects created, or was it swapped out?

did anyone test if swapping to none creates space? that is important to know, does it reduce the object count?

Chaos-Shaman wrote:......just tested it, works no problems, but I am not sure if that adds more to the objects created, or was it swapped out?

did anyone test if swapping to none creates space? that is important to know, does it reduce the object count?

Here is a dungeon with 19 939 apples http://twinfalls.free.fr/apple16320.txt. The limit is at 19 999.
Feel free to use it to build tests near the limit.
Beware: The editor includes the number of items in the clipboard. With 60 apples in the clipboard ( 19 939 + 60 ) you are at the 19 999 limit.

I have just tested swapping to nothing while on the object limit, and it works just the same as destroying something and definitely does remove objects from the count 'in-game'.

I took the object count up to the limit with 2 triggers, 2 actions, 4 bread, and the rest apples. The actions were 1) create apple in hand... 2) swap bread to nothing. I started the editor and went to the 'create apple in hand' trigger which crashed the game. I then restarted it, but swapped the 4 pieces of bread for nothing. This time when i went to the apple trigger, it allowed me to create 4 more before crashing.

So yes... swapping to nothing is as good as destroying.


There was also some very strange behaviour, where the party entrance/import tile (with the 4 small champions in green/yellow/red/blue) was created in the test players hand. I was then allowed to move it to the inventory, and subsequently created it 4 more times before it crashed. Weird!

hehe, I had the same problem with a relay, it created in my hands. there is some weird things that can be done that's for sure.

excellent about the swap to nothing, that solves any kind of limit problem, and I guess that expire swaps out or destroys in the same way. most of the ai dungeon was made with swapping, not much create new, but I will do the expire on food, and other things that are dropped by monsters that respawn. seems like you won't be cutting your dungeon down after all, that's good news.

Indeed... I reckon i have deleted enough objects to be able to finish building it, and now don't have to worry too much about 'in-game' crashing. I have already removed dropped weapons from a number of monsters, so the object count will have dropped nicely before anything gets created in the game.

I think i'll use expire a lot, it's a for sure way to take certain things out, even food can go from poisonous to nothing. if there is an item that you have to create every time you use it, the way out is to DELETE that item first, then create the same item. this removes last one and replaces it, so it is only one, i'll be using this a lot as well, so I see no limit anymore, unless there is a lot of graphics involved.

I don't think graphics are counted as objects and I don't think there is a limit for new graphics.
How exactly does that "expire" thing work? You talk about the one in the "convert" tab? I've looked into this but never found an item with it so I don't know how it works. Is there an already existing example in GG's dungeons?

when you want to put in a new object with different graphics, this is a new object, so more custom object with graphics does add to the object count, now if the object uses the same graphic it will not matter.

ah, how does expire work. clone an object, and set the object lifetime in OTHER tab. when the lifetime is up it will activate the expire function. so what ever you put in as a time for lifetime, if expire does a conversion, that's what it will convert to. then if you like you can make that new object have a lifetime set to expire into a new object once more. it is cool and easy to do. Igor, have a look at the ai test dungeon, you'll see a pile of things that are new, you'll see some things you may want to do, it will certainly show you some of the amazing things RTCeditor can do. just doing a revamp update, ai is improving as I improvise with new ideas. it's like connect the dots more than line code to me. all connected.

I too have never used 'expire', but if i'm understanding this correctly there would be no need for a relay setup (concerning food deterioration)... Right?
I'm assuming you could have each object convert to the next on expiry? So the original meat could convert to the less nutritional meat on expiry, which would in turn would convert to the even less nutritional meat... to the poisonous meat.... and eventually to nothing, simply by setting a lifetime and an object to convert to?

yeah, that's right Saumun. you can even use it to create an animation which is what I meant about being cool. no added mechanics.

Yeah... Just tried it with dragon steaks, and it works beautifully. Copied the dragon steak icon and made 3 more bitmaps with the red colour at different shades. The steak gets darker after each expiry and the food bonus drops.

This has solved a headache for me, because as it stands the only thing in this dungeon that can be repeatedly created is meat. Don't need to worry about that now, since i can control how frequently it is created along with how long the meat lasts.
Not sure what the lifetime numbers correspond to in terms of actual time (used 10 the first time, and the steak was gone in a matter of seconds). Tinkering with them at the moment.

If I recall correctly, a lifetime of 6 ~= 1 second.