Mattcrampy
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This is a message from 2004.

Run for your lives! The bugs ogh dear god the bufhsalks;ls.



Heh, just kidding. I love the New Year's Apocalypse joke, although no-one else does.

Within three hours of the clock ticking over to 2004, I made the long-awaited update. It certainly feels longer than it actually was (two months). Walk with me here, as there's a lot that's new.

The Eighth Pinned Down is the long-awaited Eighth article. I had to rewrite it twice to get it to work, but in there is (nearly) all the information we know about the Eighth, and it will update and grow as more information is added. Of course, there's all the information I know about the Eighth, but that's a secret between Erik and I.

Neil merely disappears, never to be seen again. I didn't think it was appropriate to have him killed after all. Also, Mafinot Budkin makes an appearance, hooray! Claythro will probaly never appear, as I see him out on the flatlands cackling in his tower, wondering why no-one comes to visit (reason: it's the flatlands).

Beethro Hears The Universal Song is the third chapter of Beethro the Delver, and has some interesting detail as well as a music file. Have a read!

The Help Section is part of the result of the site shuffle I spent so long doing. In there goes everything we have designed to help people, marked with spoilers if necessary.


The Architect's Toolkit is a regular feature based around helping people come up with neat room ideas, building them, and putting it into practice. I won't write much on this section of the site - it's all written you guys. Feel free to write one, or I'll come after you and get one off you. DiMono kicks it off with a checklist of things every budding architect should do.


Dungeon Elements I'm proud of this. Here I'm putting all the requests there have been positive noises to, although I want to emphasise that they're not confirmed. I've even made little sprites showing what they'd look like if they went in DROD today, which although it gives the impression of being done and in also makes it a bit clearer what it does. Plus it looks cool. Nothing here is confirmed, and most will change. But it means you don't have to go to SourceForge. You'll see another few come up as time goes on.

Plus about 75% of the site has been tweaked and rewritten, Erik's art has been cleared up by StuartK and looks really swell, and those niggling transparency issues are finally over.

The reason for the delay was because of those transparency issues - I couldn't and still can't get Gimp to draw transparancies. I ended up raiding the old site images and stuck new words over the top then re-encoded (while I was at it, I learned all about PNGs, including that they restrict their pallet, so you have to use pngrewrite to correct that). I had already ripped the guts out of the site, and couldn't put them back in without fixing the problem.

All that, and I've still got heaps of things still to add! It's gunna be neat, and I'm not going to be so slow next time. Let us never speak of this delay again.

Matt

[Edited by Mattcrampy on 12-31-2003 at 04:34 PM GMT]

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krammer
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Oh well, good to know the new year will be as awful as this.

What's it like living in a different year from the rest of us?

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+++ Divide by Cucumber Error +++ Please Reinstall Universe and Reboot +++

"Oook!"

Mattcrampy
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Not too bad, actually.

Of course, this will be an edited post within the next few hours, as I have a surprise for you all.

Matt

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

Mattcrampy
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Thought you might care what's on my plate: I'm trying to work out where all the pieces are on the Forum Download page, and also how Perl works. DiMono sent me a Perl script for the Legendary Smitemasters, but Perl is scary.

Matt

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

Schik
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Mattcrampy wrote:
Thought you might care what's on my plate: I'm trying to work out where all the pieces are on the Forum Download page, and also how Perl works. DiMono sent me a Perl script for the Legendary Smitemasters, but Perl is scary.

If PHP is less scary to you, I can certainly code up the same thing in PHP, as well as a form for managing the list of names. It might be nice even if it's not less scary, just so we can keep all the site code in one language, and IMHO PHP is easier to deal with than perl.
I'll even throw in sorting like you wanted for free.


____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Mattcrampy
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If you want, but I'm learning Perl anyway.

Matt

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

zex20913
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I think you need to change the description of the Green Snake (Adder). I had to go to sourceforge to remember what exactly it was that it was supposed to do. I think, instead of reading how it does, you should say "will grow" instead of "will not shrink". Then, maybe a "In other words, the tail will stay in the same spot until the head is trapped." Your description just doesn't work right now.

Oh, and I love the people ref.s in the Eighth. Sorry, I lost the letter, but I'll try to find it in my mess

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agaricus5
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zex20913 wrote:
Oh, and I love the people ref.s in the Eighth. Sorry, I lost the letter, but I'll try to find it in my mess

My reference was subtle and obvious.
It was interesting, but what was I actually doing in the story?

____________________________
Resident Medic/Mycologist

Mattcrampy
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I thought it would be fun, basically. I wanted some DROD enthusiasts to provide a focus for the article/story, and whatever names came to mind got used. Originally Mike smelled funny, so don't be concerned that the first thing that came to mind was 'Wesley smelled funny'.

Adder comments noted. How's this?

Matt

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ErikH2000
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Wesley, what was that Eighth name we came up with for you? Was it "Wozzles"? Unfortunately, I lost a bunch of old e-mails and can't find the one with your name in it.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Schik
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In "Beethro Hears The Universal Song", the forward and backward quotes don't look like quotes in my browser - i get a bunch of goofy characters that don't make sense. I don't know if they'll work in the forum, but this is what I see:

couldn’t

“Yes?” asked

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

The_Red_Hawk
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I have a couple of questions for the Dungeon Monsters.

1. These aren't *all* the new things, I hope?

2. I don't really understand the explanation for Adders.

3. Can a rattlesnake stop whenever it wants, or only when it's trapped?

4. Are beam eyes deadly to monsters too?

5. If fuses are just pieces of rope, is Beethro allowed to move them? and are they considered obstacles?

That's it for now.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

Oneiromancer
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In the Specific Rooms help I saw this gem for 23 1N:

Finally, if you're using both goblins, make sure go you first after completing the trapdoors. It saves time.

I like it!

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

The_Red_Hawk
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Schik wrote:
In "Beethro Hears The Universal Song", the forward and backward quotes don't look like quotes in my browser - i get a bunch of goofy characters that don't make sense. I don't know if they'll work in the forum, but this is what I see:

couldn’t

“Yes?” asked

You were writing this as I was writing mine, so I'll make this a new post. I would just like to say that it's the same for me.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

The_Red_Hawk
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And now Oneiro's put another one in as I was writing that previous one.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

DiMono
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The cuase of the special characters is probably something to do with the text using smart-quotes instead of regular ones. You know, quotes that make it painfully obvious whether they're opening or closing quotes.

`foo' as opposed to 'foo'

This is one of the reasons it's such a pain transfering from any MS document format to anything else.

____________________________
Deploy the... I think it's a yellow button... it's usually flashing... it makes the engines go... WHOOSH!

agaricus5
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Wesley, what was that Eighth name we came up with for you? Was it "Wozzles"? Unfortunately, I lost a bunch of old e-mails and can't find the one with your name in it.

-Erik

Wozley Budkin, Delver In The Background.

____________________________
Resident Medic/Mycologist

Mattcrampy
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This is one of the reasons it's such a pain transfering from any MS document format to anything else.

You have no idea.

I had ta go through by hand and remove all the formatting, and I must have missed the dumb quotes.

What's worse, CityDesk has an option that removes MS's odd formatting, which I only found out about afterwards.

I've made some more chances - tell me what you think.

Matt

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Mattcrampy
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The_Red_Hawk wrote:
I have a couple of questions for the Dungeon Monsters.

1. These aren't *all* the new things, I hope?

These aren't new things at all. They're just some suggestions. But no, there are plenty more suggestions. In fact, I'm slipping in some fake ones to keep you on your toes. These are primarily so people can feel all important that someone's listening to them, not so everyone knows what's going into 1.7.

2. I don't really understand the explanation for Adders.

Old or new? Basically either the adder grows or it shrinks.

3. Can a rattlesnake stop whenever it wants, or only when it's trapped?

Only when it's trapped. I've reworded it to make it clearer.

4. Are beam eyes deadly to monsters too?

Who knows? Probably not, though.

5. If fuses are just pieces of rope, is Beethro allowed to move them? and are they considered obstacles?

The idea is that it lights when you step on it. The flame travels both ways if you step on it in the middle. I should add a new picture showing a cut fuse.

Right, I've done some replacing, and Chapter 3 and New Elements should be a bit more readable (and, even better, internally consistant, so let's hope you've got it cached so you can see what it was before).

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DiMono
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In my usual obsessive-compulsive way, I've gone through the new site content and proofread it. As usual, I started at the bottom and worked my way up, without going to the specific monster pages, and found the following (note that this was before the most recent update five minutes ago):


The main frame: the body tag should always have styling "background-attachment: fixed;" to prevent it from scrolling with the rest of the page


New Features:

"So the adders will keep get longer and longer until you trap them." That get should be a getting.

"Of course, we are better prepared, or at least you'd better be, yes, I'm talking to you," I think this should read "Of course, we are better prepared than mere monsters, or at least you'd better be. Yes, I'm talking to you."

"Architects are certainly not, well probably not, installing them," I think should read "Architects are certanly not... well, probably not installing them,"


Upcoming:

Broken link: The link to the DROD 1.7 Music Samples is broken, trying to go to "http://www.drod.net/Upcoming/www.funkbunny.com/caravel"


Architects Corner:

"finally, those sneaky ideas that you had of hiding" the you should be a you've


Downloads:

I think the link to the holds forum should go directly to the Holds forum, not the forum main page


Extras:

"Some of these files will only work with Webfoot DROD, so don't got downloading them" the got should be a go

"If you've got Beethro's ugly visage in sixteen colours and orbs on the title screen, you've got Webfoot." Just to be funny, could we add ", or maybe even webbed feet." to the end of this?


Help:

"DROD was created in 1991, on paper, computers having been banned in the Great Cybernetic War" I think that should be "with computer having banned..."


What is DROD?:

"and the roach mothers the root of these problems, yourself." If you don't mean that you are the source of your own problems, then the yourself should be changed to a themselves.

"Serpents are interesting - they're the only monsters in King Dugan's Dungeon that he can't hurt." That who can't hurt? This should be changed to "that can't be harmed by mortal man's puny weapons." or some such

"The other one are the goblins" the are should be an is

"and try to get round the back." A simple "and try to get behind him." would do so much better here


Monsters:

Evil Eyes: " Despite having no discenable mouth," stick an r in that baby

"The Living Tar is a weird substance akin to a something" drop the a from the end

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The_Red_Hawk
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Three more questions.

1. How long to the beams from beam eyes last? Can they go through walls?

2. Wouldn't the adder look better if it had something on its tail that makes it look like the tail is stuck to the ground? This could come out when the adder gets trapped and reappear if it is freed.

3. No offence, but I think the rattle on the rattlesnake looks rather "short and fat". On real rattlesnakes, they are thinner and longer. I think the width would be okay, but another square could be added to the rattle, (and it could only be shortened on the end square), or make it a lot thinner.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

agaricus5
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I'm sorry, but since you've gone on a proofreading session, I spotted a little error in your proofread:

DiMono wrote:
"Architects are certainly not, well probably not, installing them," I think should read "Architects are certanly not... well, probably not installing them,"

Of course making sure there is an "i" in certainly...

"DROD was created in 1991, on paper, computers having been banned in the Great Cybernetic War" I think that should be "with computer having banned..."

That makes no sense, DiMono. If anything, it should be "with computers having banned", but that changes the meaning entirely, as you've changed the passive to an active verb. I haven't looked at the page, so I don't know the context the phrase is in.

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The_Red_Hawk
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Oh - and there are those little red arrows on the force arrow plates. Does this also act like a normal arrow, or is it just symbolic?

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

ErikH2000
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The_Red_Hawk wrote:
Three more questions.

Red, the stuff you are asking about is really likely to change over the course of development. Nailing down particulars from Matt probably isn't going to be that useful.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Mattcrampy
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Witness what happens when you're so keen to finally get your release up that you don't bother to proofread and test. Amongst the changes, Odor To Joy should work now. Of course, if you know the name it spoils the joke.

I agree with most of DiMono's points, any comments are below:

DiMono wrote:

The main frame: the body tag should always have styling "background-attachment: fixed;" to prevent it from scrolling with the rest of the page

Aah, so that's how it's done now. No wonder IE liked it and Firebird doesn't - Firebird is really fussy about standards. Shame it scrolls worse now in Firebird.

I'm planning a site redesign which won't use a static background image, but it won't be for a while. I'm timing it to the Journey release, if I haven't gone down in a blaze of glory James Dean-style.

"Of course, we are better prepared, or at least you'd better be, yes, I'm talking to you," I think this should read "Of course, we are better prepared than mere monsters, or at least you'd better be. Yes, I'm talking to you."

I went with brackets.

Broken link: The link to the DROD 1.7 Music Samples is broken, trying to go to "http://www.drod.net/Upcoming/www.funkbunny.com/caravel"

CityDesk trying to be helpful. Thanks, CityDesk.

Although it does this really cool thing with the build link dialog where if I copy a link to the clipboard it will assume that I want to paste it in the dialog and does it for me. That's what I call good UI.

I think the link to the holds forum should go directly to the Holds forum, not the forum main page

I had a better idea: Why don't we link to the upload form and the holds forum, as well as the new account page?

"If you've got Beethro's ugly visage in sixteen colours and orbs on the title screen, you've got Webfoot." Just to be funny, could we add ", or maybe even webbed feet." to the end of this?

I one-upped you, I reckon.

"DROD was created in 1991, on paper, computers having been banned in the Great Cybernetic War" I think that should be "with computer having banned..."

That spoils the timing. I've tried, but probably failed, to preserve the timing and make it clear.

"and the roach mothers the root of these problems, yourself." If you don't mean that you are the source of your own problems, then the yourself should be changed to a themselves.

I am indeed saying that. Made it clearer. Note it's a bit tongue in cheek here, though it should really be more.

1. How long to the beams from beam eyes last? Can they go through walls?

The SourceForge suggestion mentions it can't go through walls, but there's no set limit. I'm tempted to have it flip-flop back and forth every few days to emphasise a bit that this stuff ain't final.

2. Wouldn't the adder look better if it had something on its tail that makes it look like the tail is stuck to the ground? This could come out when the adder gets trapped and reappear if it is freed.

Now there's a thought. Maybe dungeon adders have little spikes on their tails and they raise them up in surprise when they start to shrink.

3. No offence, but I think the rattle on the rattlesnake looks rather "short and fat". On real rattlesnakes, they are thinner and longer. I think the width would be okay, but another square could be added to the rattle, (and it could only be shortened on the end square), or make it a lot thinner.

Yeah. It's partly intention - I wanted to make it look swollen, and hence vulnerable. I might shrink it, but I still want it to look like it's going to pop.

Of course, it doesn't matter because I did those graphics up in Paint and we're not keeping them. Call it artistic license.

FYI, I planned to put stripes and zig-zags on the two snakes to match their real-world equivalents (hence the triangle adder head and the longer rattler head), but I couldn't get it to look even in DROD.

Matt

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Mattcrampy
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Wow, you know people care when they start asking questions!

Oh - and there are those little red arrows on the force arrow plates. Does this also act like a normal arrow, or is it just symbolic?

Artistic license - as Erik said, that's going to change.

To be honest, I thought what I'd try for is a scrawled arrow on the floor. Maybe it needs to be smaller, or possibly I could put it in a circle.

It's purely symbolic. It's got no texture.

But don't worry, because you won't see that in a dungeon.

Red, the stuff you are asking about is really likely to change over the course of development. Nailing down particulars from Matt probably isn't going to be that useful.

-Erik

You told me this was going to happen, but like a fool I didn't listen... I'm tempted to take the page back down again until we've got something firm.

Matt

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The_Red_Hawk
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Mattcrampy wrote:
You told me this was going to happen, but like a fool I didn't listen... I'm tempted to take the page back down again until we've got something firm.

I much prefer it up, even though it isn't fixed.

ErikH2000 wrote:
Red, the stuff you are asking about is really likely to change over the course of development. Nailing down particulars from Matt probably isn't going to be that useful.

I know that, but I really like to know, that's all.


____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

DiMono
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Hawk, the point is that you're asking things that don't really matter, not that the page isn't complete. Just move on.

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Mattcrampy
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Not so much.

The point is that Red is asking things that I just made up to provide pictures to go with the words. In all likelihood, nothing on that page is accurate - as we playtest and work out how the new monsters fit into the Eighth, these things will change.

Three of Red's concerns were about me basically taking the suggestions and running with them with no regard as to what they might end up being, and the other one was based around a gameplay element that we haven't tested or finalised.

Once we decide what's going in, and we start playtesting, that will be the time to bring up monster concerns. Not now.

Matt

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

The_Red_Hawk
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I just wanted to know what the information *might* be *if* the monsters were implemented. If the details haven't been worked out, that's fine.

____________________________
Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....