Dungeon Master Forum

Heyho,

I'm not sure where to post this since it is more or less a comparison of all the engines.

I played (at least for a while):
Conflux (CSBwin)
quite a few RTC dungeons
and pretty sure I tried out DSB at some time, too

What always surprises me is this: how much processing resource RTC uses. (And how much dungeons are still built using it considering it hasn'tbeen supported for quite some time now - I guess the editor is the easiest to use?) Conflux III is a huge dungeon after all, but playing that, my laptop doesn't even get warmer, while as soon as starting RTC - even with the tiny test sets - all my four cores go from about 30°C to at least 60°C and the graphics core gets even hotter.

Has anyone else observed this (probably)? Maybe it has already been discussed before? If not, does anyone have an idea how such a seamingly lean program can be that voracious? Since there is no more support, of course there's nothing to be done about it, but if I ever get to dungeon designing, I know I'll try one of the other editors first (probably ESB, since Sophia seems to do a thorough job of keeping it up to date).

You'll be raking up some old arguments with this thread, that's for sure! Rather than go down that route, I'll comment on the engines and what I think of them.

As someone who has built things in all three clones I would personally recommend DSB over the other options, but it does depend on what's important to you as a designer/builder.

As you've noticed, RTC can be resource intensive and it has some long term bugs that will never be fixed. Those issues aside, it does have a very user friendly interface for creating new dungeons, which is why it's been used the most as the learning curve is much shallower than other options.

DSB is far less resource heavy than RTC, is supported and still maintained. Bugs still get fixed. (RTC was abandoned 12 years ago). Building dungeons in ESB is quite easy, and adding custom assets is relatively straightforward using basic Lua code, but if you're a programmer, you can bend it into shapes that other clones won't ever be capable of -- and that requires a different mindset than RTCs visual interface and more development time.

CSB Win is essentially the original engine, so it's much leaner and faster than either RTC or DSB, but it does take a lot more tinkering to get custom content into it, using a plethora of tools and techniques. If you want to build "pure" old school style dungeons exactly as they would have been back in the day, then that's the engine to use. CSB Win also has its own customisation language, DSAs, which allow you to do incredible things like Conflux but I never understood those and so I can't comment on how easy/hard DSA development work might be.

If you just want to build dungeons using "out of the box" DM/CSB assets, then CSBWin or DSB would be your best bet these days, but I'd go towards DSB given how flexible it is. I wouldn't personally use RTC if performance is important to you: it's a hog and testing is a nightmare because the start up times are very slow. By comparison, DSB can start almost instantly (if you don't have any custom assets) which makes it much more attractive when it comes to the development workflow of build/test/repeat. In fact, the latest version has added a new mode where you can edit a dungeon in real time in ESB and see the updates in DSB in another window at the same time. Pretty awesome!

Hi Gambit,

thanks for your insights, which are especially precious because you tried all editors. It is a very good comparison of the pros and cons: easy to understand and getting all the important facts inside of a few sentences.

I don't know when (or if) I'll ever get around to editing myself, I tend to have either too small or way too big ideas (tried programming in C/C++ and even unity, so I went down that road before ). But as a player, I'm always a bit afraid of using RTC for longer periods of time because of that heat generation. I believe I killed two laptops with Oblivion which has similar problems (and even "likes" to produce those bluescreens that have grown quite rare nowadays). And with another one, I suspect Sacred 2 to have at least a hand in hurrying on its demise... Well, on the other hand, as much as they have grown, most laptops are not really fit to use as gaming engines, I do realize that.

PS: All the best wishes for your growing family.