manikus’ Dungeon Craft

I’ve finally uploaded my combat walls and wilderness graphics. There are 18 combat walls, many of which match the walls I’ve put on the Walls page, with one matching Dinonykos’ Basic Grey wall (available here)
There are also 3 combat wilderness graphics on the page. They are for an ocean setting. Now you can finally use those undersea icons available in their own page here on the site. I hope to get the undersea walls and backgrounds up soon, and maybe even a combat wall and cursor

If you have any requests for combat walls, let me know. I can do combat walls to match any normal wall, so if you need something specific for your design, let me know and I can hook you up.

I’ve just updated the icons section with 8 new icons. 5 of the icons are PCs that will be part of the Dungeon Craft download that correspond to 5 of the small pictures that are already part of the package. (Convenient how it works that way…)
2 more of the icons are on the same page, but at the end as they are NPC icons of a halfling cleric and a halfling rogue.
And finally number 8 cannot be found in the PC/NPC icon section at all, for he doesn’t like bright places. Instead to find him, look in the Deep Dwellers page, he’s the duergar hanging out with the molds and jellies right below the lovely drow ladies.
Just follow the navigation on the right hand of this page to the icons section to get started looking at this latest batch of icons.

I have been busy writing. I am very happy to post the fruit of my labors - two new tutorials covering some much talked about items for Dungeon Craft. The first tutorial presents a way to have a shop that opens at only a specific time determined by the designer. I give an example of a diner that is only open at lunch time. The second tutorial is a way to calculate and track the phases of the moon. In this tutorial, I use an Observatory to tell the player what the phase of the moon is.
On top of all of that, I have put up web versions of all of the previous tutorials, but, don’t worry, the pdf files are still available and linked at the bottom of the page.
Click on the “Tutorials” link on the right-hand side of this page.

Just a note - do not permalink to the 2 new tutorials, as there static web addresses will be changing, but their links on the tutorial page will be updated when that happens.

I’ve done a few goblin icons in the past. I haven’t been happy with them. The poses didn’t seem right, and one day it dawned on me that the limbs seemed too long and angular. Well, I’ve fixed the limb length issue a bit. It’s funny at this scale how much difference a pixel or two in length can matter.
For today’s offering, I present 9 icons of goblins - mostly fighters with a couple of rogues, a hero and  a shaman. I’ve also changed the skin coloring to mix it up a bit: there are now green-skinned, yellow-skinned and rust-red colored goblins to choose from. In my workflow for icons, everything is on a different layer, so it’s pretty much a snap to change skin color. So, if people request some more goblins of a particular color…no problem.
You can find these icons on the Goblins and Goblinoids page.

I thought that I would host my own forums, not to compete with Ironworks which I plan on still using, but to talk about my 2D and 3D graphics and my DC stuff (including the official stuff that I’m part of). In time, I will probably add some other subforums devoted to writing and popular culture themes.

http://forums.skybakcone.com/

edit: forwarding is temporarily down, please try this link~
http://www.skybakcone.com/forums/

(Also linked over in the sidebar –>)

I’m paying for a domain and hosting, so I might as well take advantage of it. I think of this as another tool to add to my site. Commenting on my posts has not been very dialogical, and I would hope that the forums would remedy that.

Following yesterday’s post, I set about figuring out the scripts needed to test if the party had an item, and to take the item away. Boy was I shocked to find in my own notes, and of course in the editor, that I didn’t need scripts, I just needed to select “Party has item” or “Party not have item” from a drop-down list and then select which item or items I was looking for. That was easy.

My second task was just as easy - there is a take item event. What was so hard about this? I guess it’s more a statement about the condition of the help documentation - that I couldn’t easily look at a list with a brief descriptioin of events and triggers (not because they don’t exist, but I don’t think that the help file is easy to navigate or figure out where stuff is).

Can someone say ‘food system’? With the previously published system of calculating and storing what day it is, we should be able to make a system that checks if the party is carrying “food” and act appropriately if it is or isn’t. The trick will be figuring out a way to check for a number of food items that is equal to the number of party members and/or also checking for one of a variety of possible items. So this will be part 2 of my new homework assignment and eventual tutorial.

Now, I will set about adding all of the non-weapon and non-armor/clothes items to the database.

As mentioned in another post, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Dungeon Craft and it’s various elements. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the databases as I try and get them in shape for the next release of Dungeon Craft.

The items database is a curious beast. It holds everything (well alsmot) that a PC or NPC can use, sell or trade. But, up until this point, it hasn’t been a very accurate representation of what the character’s world is like. Imagine if you went into your local market and all you could buy were bullets, handguns, a shotgun and choose from a variety of knives. It would be great if you were looking to protect your home or maybe go hunting, but if you wanted to paint the deck or change the oil in your car, you would be out of luck. Translate this into the gaming world and you can see all kinds of possibilities for items in DC.

Now, I’m not advocating that we all run out and fill our items databases with a bunch of meaningless (in game terms) items, but there are a lot of htings in the Player’s Handbook (first and second editions) that an adventurer may need but that do not directly effect armor class or damage done during combat. A couple of quick examples that come to mind are ropes and packs. In the pen and paper game, we would most likely all agree that at least one member of hte party ought to be carrying one or both of these. But, so far they haven’t been added into DC A clever designer can even make these items useful in game terms, such as requiring at least one character in the party to carry a ‘rope’ item, for example. The trick is using the proper GPDL scripts. You just use a script to look if the party has the item, and if the item were to be used up or lost, you would use another script to take it away. I will try and come up with an example of this and post it here, as well as making another tutorial to add to the site that will walk a designer through the process.

With all of the talk on the FRUA boards and even some on the DC boards about playing GoldBox games, I decided to take another look at some of the other Advanced Dungeons and Dragons PC games that I own.

In my opinion, on par with the GoldBox games, if not surpassing them, are the Infinity Engine games - Baldur’s Gate I and II, Planescapre: Torment and Icewind Dale I and II, plus all of the various add-ons. In particular, I enjoy the Icewind Dale setting and decided to re-install it and the Heart of Winter add-on. It’s still got that ol’ magic! I’ve put together a nice little adventuring party and sent them off into the frigid cold.

I decided to do some looking around the net, mostly to see if there was a more recent patch than what I already had. What I discovered was that the Infinity Engine is far from dead, in fact it’s gaining a kind of fan support that GoldBox games never received. There are lost of active groups tweaking and modding the IE games to create new content, even new games. There is also an effort called GemRB that allows porting the IE games to Linux and Mac. Being that I’m writing this post on my Linux-powered laptop, you can imagine that I was excited to see this project.

Also of interest is that Black Isle (the makers of the IE games) hasn’t done anything to stop this fan community from growing. And if I’m to believe some of the posts I’ve read, some of the modders, including a couple working on a total conversion of Baldur’s Gate, are Black Isle employees that worked on the original games. I’m happy to see that they’ve gone the route taht Bioware has for the NeverWinter Nights games. What is really surprising to me is that Wizards of the Coast, or more correctly it’s parent company, Hasbro, has not done anything to put a stop to this - the community for the Aurora Engine (NeverWinter Nights) is sanctioned by WotC and Hasbro as the AE is much like FRUA - but the IE community is getting away with some cool things, too. Maybe it’s because the IE uses second edition rules, well except for Icewind Dale II (which is the only one that I don’t own) as it uses third edition (3.0 not 3.5)

If you need a copy of Icewind Dale, or any of the others, I found you can get still get new copies through Amazon.com and of course you can find used ones on eBay.

If you already own them, but would like to check them out on your Linux or Mac, visit the <a href”http://linux.prinas.si/gemrb/doku.php”>GemRB Project.</a>

I would say that at least half the work I do with Dungeon Craft is with the Official stuff as a developer/project admin. I spend much of that time trying to figure out if what people say is broken is really broken and if so what the cause may be, so that the programmers have an easier time at eradicating bugs. Lately, I have come across a whole slew of game-stopper bugs that are not really bugs with the editor or engine as people first believed, but are really errors in the scripts used for spells.

This goes hand-in-hand with the DCQAC (Dungeon Craft Quality Assurance Committee) which is working to test all spells and make sure they function properly. Through this effort, Peter Deal and myself have worked through most of the clerical spells to find the errors and possible fixes and I’ve started implementing the fixes which are thus far 100% scripting issues. Sound familiar?

I offer in today’s post some of the fixes that I’ve made so that you can cut and paste them into your spells.txt file and import them into your design if you are using a non-default spells.txt, or you may simply import this file as is, with no need to cut and paste anything.
The spell fixes are for all of the “cure” spells: cure light wounds, cure serious wounds, cure critical wounds, cure light wounds | Druid, cure serious wounds | Druid, cure critical wound | Druid, cure blindness, cure disease and heal.

spells.txt

There are few creatures out of Greek mythology that did not make their way into the Dungeons & Dragons game. But many (maybe even most) have been tweaked to fit, not just in their capabilities but in their stories. Case in point is the medusa. In Greek mythology, Medusa (that was her name) was a gorgon. The goggons were three sisters who were sired by the sea god, Phorcys, and his sister, Keto. In older mythology, Medusa and her sisters were great monsters feared even by the other gods, but in later Greek mythology, the gorgons, save Medusa, were immortals and part of the court of the gods, while Medusa was cursed by Athena and turned from a fair maiden into the monster. Whichever tales you go by, they agree upon one thing, to look upon her directly would turn the viewer to stone. But, in Dungeons & Dragons, the medusa are a race of creatures (the males, introduced in 2e, are called maedar [MC3] and do not have snakes for hair). They do not turn a creature to stone by merely being gazed upon, but by making eye contact (1e) , but later (2e) the victim must be within 30 feet for the petrifying gaze to be in effect. They are immune to their own gaze and gaze of their own kind, but interestingly, in FRUA you can reflect their gaze back to petrify them.
I have posted two pictures of the medusa on the Bestiary page. I’m pretty sure the pictures can’t turn you stone, but just in case, don’t make eye contact.