Backtoroots: Dungeon rooms with objects and monsters

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Dear all,

I’ve had even more time than planned and so was lucky to continue the progress of dungeon handling for BackToRoots. During the day, I’ve handled the fact that we can now move between dungeon rooms and the correct positions are given to the players depending of from where you enter the room, monsters are now loaded in, and so are objects.

Ladders are handled now and each character of the group must exit the same way for a dungeon room.

The monsters automatically attack players as you can see here:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHsMF9jMsq4&w=480&h=360]

Attack! Attack the hero!

Every element of course opens a number of new topics to be dealt with:

  • Daemons have magic that they do: summoning new daemons
  • Spells were availabe for the Ultima 4 port and must be brought into the Ultima 5 port
  • When a room is emptied, it shouldn’t be filled up again

But as always, this is the rules of the game,

I hope you enjoy the video,

Jc

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2 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:
    February 17, 2012 at 2:13 am

    Dude, you’re making me look bad. Your progress is god-like.

    If you wanted to dynamically create more precise combat maps in dungeons you could use the dungeon map files to create a 3×3, 5×5, 7×7, etc., visual grid (for one static screen) using pre-generated groups of tiles (4×4 tiles?) to represent each dungeon map tile. Each tile in a tile set would be composed of two bytes/values (32 bytes per tile set), one for image/texture number and one for interactivity (0 = nothing, 1 = solid, 2 = magic, 3 = locked door, burn player/enemies, etc.).

    The parent dataset, the dungeon data, would generate a collision mask and a textural mask for the combat field. You could also integrate ladders and stairs so players could escape from battle–up or down–while still on the combat screen (and land according to their exit via ladder). Maybe at some point parties could be split and you could toggle parties using a number key.

    The ultimate would be going outside the dungeon and it was still in the same perspective, with almost indistinguishable graphics. Might & Magic II style.

    In all seriousness though, insanely awesome work.

  2. fearyourself says:
    February 17, 2012 at 4:02 am

    Thanks a lot, I think I’m getting close to finishing dungeon support for U5 which is pretty cool I believe.

    Pretty much I think what was done is they separated the view in 4 parts and depending on position and what was there, they added certain tiles.

    Splitting parties was something that was entirely part of the Magic Candle series though baldur gate also did it if I remember correctly. It does add certain interesting things. If anybody likes horror survival game, an old game called Martian Gothic where you played three players at the same time. So you had to carefully hide two players while playing the third. It was pretty neat.

    Same perspective wouldn’t be too difficult to do but a lot of 3D graphics would be needed but a simplified version would be possible and would look like a minecraft system 😉

    Thanks again for the comments,
    Jc