Decorate your dungeons!

Post by **Gambit37** » Thu May 29, 2003 7:14 pm

Here's a word of advice for budding level designers: Decorate your dungeons!!!

I've played the two available RTC dungeons: Reactor and Chiefy, and I'm afraid to say that I got very bored. Not because they weere necessarily boring dungeons, but because they have virtually NO decoration which makes them incredibly dull to wander around.

You don't have to go overboard, but strategically placed grates, vents, rings, etc really do add a lot to the overall ambience and interest which in turn affects playability.

If you've taken any amount of time to build a new RTC dungeon, you owe it to yourself to make the dungeon as interesting as possible!

Post by **Ameena** » Thu May 29, 2003 7:15 pm

I'll do that when I've finished my dungeon and obliterated ALL those damned annoying bugs

TheMormegil · Post by **TheMormegil** » Fri May 30, 2003 12:34 pm

I'd also like to add that decoration makes a dungeon far better
to explore. If its all blank grey walls its very difficult to remember
the layout and where you are in it, which makes for tedious
exploration and going round in circles and stuff.

I'd have to disagree about Reactor being 'very boring' though.
I really liked this dungeon and only got bored for a while when
I ran out of iron keys and had to go searching through the flooritems
of previous levels to find one.

I had to abandon playing chiefy dungeon - got too many crashes
playing this for it to be worthwhile unfortunetly.

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri May 30, 2003 1:06 pm

To be fair, I haven't got far with Reactor, so I will give it another go!

PicturesInTheDark · Post by **PicturesInTheDark** » Fri May 30, 2003 3:30 pm

Agreed on Mormegil's opinion - Reactor was one of the best dungeons I played so far. And since the originals used the same graphics I cannot fully understand your desire - it might be a nice "goody" but is certainly not the main interest in a dungeon from my point of view.

In fact, I still think it is a major "reality" advantage of dungeon master in comparison with the over-decorated dungeons of, to name just one example, the "Eye of the Beholder" series. No sane person would ever create a dungeon like that in reality...

Regards, PitD

Post by **Lunever** » Fri May 30, 2003 5:20 pm

PitD: Well, actually SANE persons don't create real dungeons, do they? And who'd say Chaos was a sane person?

chiefy · Post by **chiefy** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 4:43 am

TheMormegil wrote: I had to abandon playing chiefy dungeon - got too many crashes
playing this for it to be worthwhile unfortunetly.

I can't understand why an RTC dungeon should crash at all.

George what is the possible cause for this and do I have the ability to iron out these crashes? There should not even be one crash surely? What's going on here?

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Mon Jun 02, 2003 9:46 am

I have to confess I havn'y had much timeto work with RTC (let alone play dungeons) for the last few months. The number of bugs are slowly coming down though. In gnereal there don't seem to be any major ones in DM / CSB and therefore the basic mechanics seem to be quite sound. I guess the problems are now coming from new interationcs between different object types as people push the engine; if you have any specific examples of crashes, please, please send me the diagnostic dump files and 'i will have a look at them!