[CocoaSpud]

( I originally posted this to the DC mailing list last Monday, and decided to post it here too )

An update on what I've been doing lately with DC...

First, the magic. I wrote lots of magic handling code early in DC
development, including many support functions for managing spells and spell books. The problem is that I had only AD&D rule emulation in mind when I did it. This means that fighters can never memorize spells, and rangers can only memorize up to third level cleric spells, and so on. This also means there is lots of hard-coded methods that assume these rules are being followed. It has been getting increasingly difficult to continue using this code, so I've been re-writing the older code in a more generic manner and using table driven rules that will more easily allow user customizations in the future. The new magic code written in the last several months will stay as is, so it's not like I'm starting from scratch. There were some problems reported about the current magic code not setting the correct spell limits at higher character levels. It was while fixing this that I decided to give up on the crappy old code.

(update: I have finished this part and re-tested spell limits for all character levels. The limit calculations are working much better now)

Sigrid was kind enough to provide a collection of the UA wall/door/overlay images in DC format. I took those and renamed them all using the default naming convention so that DC will auto load them into wall slots for you. There are 80 different wall slots, and DC only handles 48, so I bumped up the max wall slots in DC to 96 in order to load them all. You can also configure the number of slots to auto-load in the config.txt file. The more you load, the longer it takes to start the editor. I put this collection of renamed files on the DC download page. You won't be able to load more than 20 or so until you get the next release (ver 0.780).

One user had a problem with DC recently where both the engine and editor were failing to run properly. I tracked it down to the Bass sound DLL having a dependency on a certain version of the WinInet.dll. If you have installed IE version 4.0 or higher, you already have the right WinInet.dll. If you have IE 3 or less (Win95 users), DC will fail when it loads the Bass dll. If this describes your situation, you can get around this temporarily by renaming all instances of the Bass.dll file to something else. You won't get any sound in DC, but it will otherwise work fine. You can also install a newer version of IE. There may be other Microsoft programs which also provide a newer WinInet.dll file, but I don't know what they are. I have contacted the Bass author and he has agreed to try removing this dependency on IE in the next release of Bass. That might not happen for a month or more.