Dungeon Master Forum

Soaponarope wrote:Ah I see, just various ways of doing things.
I haven't figured out how to put a teleporter in an alcove without warning though. As such, I can't keep my dungeon warning free despite by best efforts. Any luck with this?

I had this problem placing trees inside walls. Had hundreds and hundreds of errors, one for every tree. It all worked, but you feel your dungeon is broken. Fixed it with a fake wall, then place the tree in it. This might work as well with the alcove with teleporter. Hope it works.

Why do you want to place trees inside walls? If you're trying to do clever mechanics, there are probably better, cleaner, more efficient ways.

Gambit37 wrote:Why do you want to place trees inside walls? If you're trying to do clever mechanics, there are probably better, cleaner, more efficient ways.

I do not think you can do what I'm doing in any other way. If you've had a look at EoC, you'll see that there is no other way. If there is, please help me out. Actually, I'll be updating EoC soon. Had to take out a lot of bugs causing crashes, so please, do have a look then. I could use some help.

Again, I'm asking why you need a fake wall with all your trees? Why don't you use cloned pillars?

I'm not sure what you mean Gambit. To test the trees I first just stuck them in the wall to see what it looked like, payed no mind to errors. It'd be great if there was no report of items in walls to begin with. Treat them like a relay. I'll be redoing some forests, desert scenes, I'll check out the pillar. I have tried cracks, barrels, puddles, grates, but not a pillar.
@Sophia, it is test and observe, but it's fun finding out the secrets.

I'm simply asking why you need to put trees in walls? What are you trying to achieve?

ohhh, the goal is a forest. it has a realistic look. there are three different wallsets in EoC that use different techniques, one of them is placing trees in moveable walls, because if you put them in a regular wall, you get errors. In a windowed view, it looks very real. i just purchased some sounds, finally can add some sounds. i do not have enough time to find them on my own, so i bought some. cheap, but something is better than nothng.
finding sounds that are small in size is hard to do. i want to make my own, and have, but even reduced in size, useing ogg, it's still TOO BIG, if you factor in the already large pngs involved in the dungeon. well, still need to go thorugh a lot of stuff with RTC. also, i'm interested in a program for landscaping, has loads and loads of bricks and trees, polygoned or not. has lots of things that can be used for RTC. it's the next step in learning for me, so i'll use it on DM. OK, so now you know Gambit. a real wish of mine is to pull in new players to DM. i believe the only way to do that is to improve the graphics. they must see something that catches their eye, hence using feminine in EoC, since most players are male, BAR Sophia, and anyone else i may have missed. the older graphics my children just laugh at, if you know what i mean. they are in their 20s. using artists photos may help in the future, when you show them what you did with their work. so handing out some credit is the idea

same as Gambit : i can't understand why you need walls for a forest wallset ! Make a wallset with NULL bitmaps for WALL_* and use cloned pillars for trees.

+1 for Linflas' suggestion.

i have not tried it yet. i wasn't sure if you could add items to pillars, is a pillar a tile? I'll have a look. i use the tile, sometimes. i tried all the walls out, didn't try a pillar.

hmm, i dunno, both had the same options, had to do the same thing. you can't stick a pillar in a wall without a tile. well, no matter, i did solve soaponaropes problem.

Um, what? You don't put pillars in walls, you place them on an open floor tile...

i still do not know what your on about, could you tell me why i need the pillar? i'm a bit lost with why. please explain. there is already a wallset, but in the wallset i placed trees, the wallset represents the bushes, the trees are placed inside the wallset. this wallset here is nothing like zeds for the forest view, although there is another wallset just like that. i tried three types. i'll try and finish up repairing my demo dungeon, you'll see what i mean then, nobody has tried it yet that i know so i have no comparison to give you. there is a lot not finish up on. just fooling around with RTC possibilities, it's endless
so again i ask, why do i need a pillar?, cause i need to know what i'm missing here. if it makes my life easier, i want to know.

You clone a pillar and give it images that make it look like a tree. Then you place the pillar on an empty tile. If you create a border around your map of three levels of pillars, you don't even need a tree wallset because you'll never see it -- the pillars stop you from getting anywhere near the walls. It looks more realistic than doing a wallset.

You shouldn't be putting things inside walls that don't need to be there, you're just making things difficult for yourself.

For example, these trees are pillars. The sky is the ceiling. There is no wallset.



In this next example, the near by trees are pillars. The further trees are the ceiling image. Again, no wallset is used. As you walk towards the distance, pillar trees will appear to block your view/progress.

i see what your doing there. the wallset i'm using is bushes, not trees. i've done the above, i know what you're saying. you'll see what i mean soon, still fixin it, almost done. there is no depth in that scene while moving.
i'll grab a screen shot

So you say there's no depth in my dungeon while moving, despite not having tried it out? Right, whatever....

i think your wallset looks fantastic gambit. looks real good. you made it with pillars, that's looking good to me. please don't take it to heart. your dungeon is not under inspection, it's the method being used in some of these shots below. have a good look at them, cause it's hard to tell what is a wall and what isn't. if you look at the big picture, that tree is in a wall of bushes, that has to sit on a tile. there are 5 trees visible, treated as a floor object, then there are another set of trees behind that are the roof. the last shot shows the pillar method, but i used a moveable wall instead, it has the same options, but it's a floor mechanic, and a pillar is a floor object, but they both work the same. using the wall as bushes i do not need a pillar, just have a look please.

Hmm.. to be honest I have no idea what you're doing. It looks crazy bonkers and not at all convincing. The lighting is all wrong. Everything seems to be floating in space. Sorry, but that's what I see. Perhaps it works fine, I can't really tell until I play it.

the walls are not matched up yet, like grass along the edges. so i'm glad we got it figured out. that last screen has no depth, just like the ones you showed me. i guess it looks ok. i was not happy with that, so i tried something new. sorry you don't like it. do you have a demo of yours i can check out gambit? i need to feel your dungeon out, gotz to play it, i'm eager to look at it.

Looks like the bushes ARE the walls and those far trees (i'd put a little fog effect on them to give a distance feel) ARE the roof/sky bitmap.
Weird colors remind me of Tower of Chaos or the screens from Adamski's future projects. You must have coherence between your wallset elements and flooritems or it will look all wrong.

@Shaman: I'm not sure you understand the depth problem in your first screens. The two images I posted do have depth, because I've carefully considered lighting and fading of distance objects. Your screenshots, except your last one, don't have any depth because all your bushes and trees have the same lighting, so we can't really tell what's near and what's far. Also, they don't blend into the grass and the blue in the background (sky?) is not right, so it makes it look like everything is floating all at the same level.

I'm not trying to be awkward, just stating a fact that your lighting is wrong and needs to be fixed if you want to make this look convincing. Try applying some shading in your graphics package on top of your far trees to make them darker (or as Linflas suggested use a lighter colour to make them look foggy). And fix the problems with your wall graphics being too dark compared to your trees: you don't want those side images fading to black quite so much.

Linflas is right too: if you want things to look good, you have to match your world graphics with your item graphics. Your last screenshot has better world graphics than your other screens, because the trees have some distance shading and perspective, which looks good. But placing DM items over the top, with different styles and lighting, just breaks the illusion completely. This is why those of us who've been doing full graphics replacements for our dungeons have not released anything yet, because it takes a lot longer to create all the replacement consistent imagery.

linflas wrote:Looks like the bushes ARE the walls and those far trees (i'd put a little fog effect on them to give a distance feel) ARE the roof/sky bitmap.
Weird colors remind me of Tower of Chaos or the screens from Adamski's future projects. You must have coherence between your wallset elements and flooritems or it will look all wrong.

yes, it needs some shading, and fog if wished. what is good about it is the lighting is natural, it has a nice realism feel. have to complete the shading for the trees, match the walls with the trees. much to do with how to integrate everything smoothly. hope you're not referring to the last screen shot, that was done with moveable walls, same as pillars, and it looks a bit cheesy, like a kids picture book, and that's why i tried something new. glad you can see the walls as bushes linflas. what i really like with RTC is that you can use any wall part as 448x272, and that leaves an amazing amount of options, i've just begun to explore how to make use of it.
hope that adamski is forging ahead with his projects. sure can whip up a smart dungeon quickly, but have not had much communication with the fella in some time.
thanks for your thoughts linflas, hell, thanks for all the effort and help.

@gambit... it'll look far better when done gambit. there was a comment used by a long time member that suggests the graphics were aesthecally pleasing. it's a shame you have nothing to try, i was just so eager to try your dungeon out. when will it be ready you think? sure does take a long time to build those pillar dungeons.
i hope you have it ready this summer, i can't wait to see it. while you're still in the construction, have a look at everyone elses that are not complete for excitement.
can't wait to see yours gambit!!!!

the method i was using is out of the box and definitely interesting. a complete and different approach, actually easier in some ways when it comes to graphic designs. i think there is 4 different ways you can make a wallset, three of them being called a hack. there has been improvements since then.

Oh, you want a hack?

I wanted to put outdoor trees into Dark Portal, but this was before RTC suported auto-scaling flooritems (like DM2 style pillars) so I had to make them with doors instead. It was fine except a door is only visible from one direction, so I had to make two crossed doors. You can't actually set the direction of a door in RTC (or at least you couldn't then) and doors just floating in space without enclosing walls always appeared facing north/south-- but you could get the facing via the positioning if you swapped from something else. So all the "pillars" are made of two doors, the east/west portion of which starting out as objects on the floor that got swapped to doors as the game started.

Now that's a hack.

yup, that i'd call a hack. nothing wrong with that.

Old thread I know, but I never managed to get the sky effect working in rtc. Ie, where there is no ceiling, just a fixed 'background' bitmap of a sky. Can anyone who still remembers how to do this enlighten me? Thanks

i am not sure what you mean eb, it really depends on the method you want to use. floor overides roof at 448x272. did you want to change the roof or the floor?

Sorry, what I meant was, how do I make a dungeon without a ceiling, so that I can see the sky? Ie like you guys have done with your tree levels.

You need a bitmap assigned to the ceiling that looks like sky. Then you simply don't make any walls

In real terms, your level will always have an outer wall, so you'd need to make sure the player can never see it. Set blocking items or teleporters three tiles away from your outer wall - that way the player can never get close enough to see the walls.

That's how I did the trees / horizon in the sample shown above:
http://dungeon-master.com/forum/viewtop ... 45#p122200